Managing flow

If you have water coming out of a source in the ground it'll just puddle around and spread. Quite organically and very disorderly in a typical environment. If you make a container around it, it will quite quickly start to behave in a more structured fashion and move upwards. The tighter the container the quicker. The greater the flow the quicker it builds up. If you constrain the flow by tightening the constraint further you build up great speed but also pressure. Pressure has all sorts of interesting properties.

I am probably not neuro-typical. The medical jury is still out. I have it on pretty good grounds that I fit fairly well with an ADHD diagnosis. We'll see. Doesn't matter formally to me. My life largely works but I am decidedly a particular kind of person. Both to great effect and an annoying degree.

What I have is a continuous flow of ideas and desire to execute. When unconstrained it flows in all directions. It is both fun and frustrating. There is no direction and there is rarely any real progress. Constraint, containment is what gives me direction. Thankfully I am very capable of focusing on an interesting thing if my life lets me and that is one way in which I build containment around the flow and give it direction and some level of velocity.

Another way in which I direct it is through work. Clients have desires, requirements, deadlines and expectations. All of which are quite real, compared to the ones I would ignore in school. Real expectations are a wonderfully effective way of constraining my bubbling brain towards a goal.

As constraint increases and the flow remains high the pressure goes up. This puts strain on the whole system. It is fine up to a point. I've gone beyond that point in the past. I think I burst a gasket somewhere near the source at that point beause the flow stopped for a bit. Consequently velocity went to zero. To be very clear, I am not operating anywhere near those pressures right now.

An interesting aspect of this is that I am interested in a great many things. But what I let myself explore is constrained by where I can get the right motivations. Real expectation and financial rewards are readily available in the work context. So work dictates a fair bit of where I direct my attention. Currently I have a client that is very much digging into data-related stuff, so the creative flow of my brain is directed at data. That's why you'll see data and related topics from me currently.

Some people have a hard time with ideas. So do I, but in the opposite way of how it is commonly meant.

Any ideas? How are you with idea generation? Do you practice it at all? You can reply to this email or poke me on the fedi @lawik@fosstodon.org, I enjoy hearing your thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your attention.