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Three Modes of Productivity
Learning, making and promoting
Do you ever find there are periods of time when you produce a flood of work, like being moved by an internal muse? You have ideas that flow in an organized sequences of thoughts and can put pen to paper without overthinking it. Whatever your medium: writing, visual arts, music, math, engineering, you just see the pieces coming together.
Other times you might go through several books without a pause, or feel compelled to seek-out and discover new thinkers and publications and artists, and generally absorb information like a sponge.
These two modes aren’t usually activated at the same time. And it can be hard to conjure one when we’re in the thick of the other.
This looks like a feedback loop (I like the example below to illustrate this), where input gets processed and eventually translated into our output. The interesting thing about the internalization of everything we see and take in, is that our output then becomes personalized. Even in a scientific approach, there is a point of view that is expressed or a style, which might come through in the application more than the expression of the medium itself.
