As a writer, web designer and CEO, I have a serious need for creativity.  It is intrinsic to everything I do.  My business will not survive if I am not constantly innovating and creating new things from:

• websites
• graphic design
• artwork, buttons, banners, flash presentations
• mindmaps
• databases (yes designing a database requires a great deal of creativity)
• coding
• designing processes
• business plans
• stories,
• articles
• how to guides
• videos

Those are all activities that I will hit in a given month, sometimes a week and sometimes a day.  That doesn’t even include the marketing work that I do!

Now trying to stay fresh and creative when you are creating so much, so fast, so often is not easy.

To keep my creative juices flowing during so much production these are some of the things that I do to stay fresh and keep my soul from fading.

1. I read incessantly.  Mostly for time reasons, I listen to audio books from Audible on my Treo.
2. I watch a lot of movies and TV while I’m doing all of the activities above.
3. I read and watch a lot of news.
4. Traveling helps a great deal also.  New landscapes, sites and new people are very important.
5. I talk to people as much as possible.  Working in a home office, its easy to fall out of touch with people.  Fortunately technology comes to the rescue in the form of discussion boards, Skype, twitter, other blogs, calling people the old fashioned way, email and more.
6. Sleep!  This is very very important, and the thing that is my biggest weakness.  I do not get enough sleep.
7. Exercise, especially exercise in natural surroundings.  I can’t get much from a gym, the cold surroundings bore me to death and I leave feeling like crap.  Put me outside, jogging, hiking or doing sit-ups hanging from a tree and I’m happy.  Add in some swimming or kayaking and its pure serenity.
8. Don’t get into any routines.  For some people this does not work, but for me if I avoid routines and keep myself out of a comfort zone that challenges my thinking and forces me to continually re-evaluate and continually improve.  (Nice trick I learned at working for the Postal Service during the 90’s. )
9. Try new things all the time.  Food, hobbies, software, technology, etc.  The important thing here is to look for new insights from the new perspective that new things give you.  If you just go bungee jump off a cliff, you’ll get a nice adrenalin rush, but if you learn nothing from the experience you have missed some of the potential.
10. Learning new things all the time, follows that last one very closely.  I am a habitual student, which is partly why I have a couple hundred credit hours of education.  Its also why I have a resume that never ends and leaps from discipline to discipline.  Plus, its why I constantly by lots of training DVD’s and take lots of non-credit technical courses all the time.  I also am becoming a connoisseur of free courses.  The internet provides a lot of good knowledge for free.  The trick is that you have to typically create your own syllabus, then do the research to fill it in with good content!
11. Lastly, accepting your vices until you can beat them.  I am a coke zero junkie, never been much for coffee nor espresso machines, although I have rotated in and out of various teas.  At the end of the day its water with chemicals in it.  It could be worse, unfortunately its not better, but I do not stress over it.  Stressing over your vices is sometimes worse than the vices themselves.  Someday I’ll kick my vices or replace them with something better, but until then I accept the reality that they are there and that I could be even more flawed.

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Women can be big geeks just like men, but the world of marketing and engineering is just starting to catch up with a woman’s inner geek.  I have two daughters and I see the geeked out toys that young girls are raised with today, but I don’t see the geeked out gizmo’s showing up for women in their late twenties or beyond.

Maybe that is because the majority of women are under thirty, or so they say . . .

Case in Point

Women that wear makeup use Makeup Mirrors so that they can make little touch ups hear and there when ever a ladies room mirror isn’t available.

However, the technology has been around for sometime to create a Pocket Mirror with a built in Projector, its just been incorporated in a device from a male perspective.  With a little adaptation a woman could point their ‘pocket mirror camera’ at their face and have a resulting image projected onto a wall, they could even store their made up face as a photo and have it display side by side their live face as they attempt to get made up again.  That would even be useful in movie production where continuity is king.

You can bet that if nerdy men wore makeup (more) that this type of device would have been a hit at Fry’s a long time ago, but alas the lasses are still limited in their geeky shopping choices.

It’s way past time for an equality betweent the geekier sexes.

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I came across an excellent resource providing information on 100 different online resources and tools for freelancers.

I wanted to internalize the information in a way that I could rapidly work with in multiple settings in the future if I ever needed to find the right tool for the job. So of course I mindmapped out the tools listed, plus I added in the tools suggested in the comments and I added a bunch of my own.

Now I have a great starting point for the future whenever I need to build up the list or find something I need quickly. I linked back to the original article from my MindMap Central topic and I created sub maps for each of the categories identified. This kept each category of items viewable at a single glance.

I’ve provided snapshots of these maps below. For more details about each of the tools I suggest a quick visit over to the site yourself as it really does have a great deal of information.

In the meantime, I did this experiment in part to internalize the info as I mentioned, but also in part to find a more rapid way of mindmapping this type of information from primary sources on the web. I hope to find more efficient ways to achieve this goal in the future.

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We engage in a great deal of market research at Softduit and at Maven Mapper’s Information.  We are constantly looking for new partners, new sources, and new tools to help us better research industries, trends companies and more.

It’s the heart of a maven’s goal or mission to find things to help them learn and gather intelligence information.  It’s intrinsic to the definition of a maven.  I’ve received a number of e-mails this week from companies offering tools and solutions to help in this area, both in the research gathering and in the research management.

We tend at maven mapper’s information to focus on the management, however the two areas are beginning to combine.  And some of the tools and some of the sources and some of the partners are beginning to emerge the gathering with the management.

Maybe in knowledge he would be something that we can describe and software.  You might have a software program that runs on your local computer and from your hard drive, or you could have a server based solution that runs software for you.  In one you gather the software and you manage it.  In another a different company gathers the software, and they manage most if not all of it and you go there for the results.

Mind mapping and other tools of its ilk are starting to move online.  They’ve been trending that way for several years it’s not a new thing.  They are primarily a management tool and the online areas have mostly been focused on managing that information in an online forum.  There’s been one slight exception or standout example in this arena focusing on the mindmanager accelerator that worked with salesforce.com.  It’s one of the better accelerators that I’ve seen from mindjet or for many company for that matter.

Even then however the two companies didn’t focus on gathering the information for the user, instead they require the user to upload a database or input data one thing at a time.  Then later the useful management tools could be applied to manage that information.  The useful maven tools of the future will both gather the information and manage it and provide a means for the user to navigate their way through the managed information without losing any important details or any details at all for that matter to a subjective process.

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Years ago when I was working away to college, I had a job doing data entry for the Postal Service.  I would go school all-day, and head to the to the Postal Service to type all night.  I do my homework in between breaks, and I listen to audio books all night long.  I learned how to perform mundane repetitive physical tasks while letting my mind engage in higher-level activities.

After he got out of school and went to work in the corporate world I rapidly put on about 20 pounds as I sat behind a desk and drove a keyboard full time (8 hours of meetings per day didn’t help either).  All that physical inactivity got me after a while and decreased by ability to enjoy the higher-level work was doing in the office.

Now I’m wondering if there might be some way to allow people to get the physical gratification of a little repetitive physical labor while they multitask at higher-level items.  Our brains are capable of quite a bit and so our bodies and the tech revolution in some ways has not allowed our bodies to keep up with what our brains are performing every day.  The evolution of the Wii gaming device takes a baby step in the direction of giving our bodies a little more action.

  But maybe our bodies don’t have to be engaged in the actual higher-level work.  I was watching a crazy video on YouTube the other day that gave me a peculiar thought. 

The video was of a news reporter performing an interview with a lady that stomps grapes for a living.  You can picture Lucille Ball in a famous episode where she’s stomping on grapes to make wine or something like that.  This YouTube videos is actuallyl famous because the news reporter gives it a try herself.  She tries to give the interview while she’s in a bucket of grapes stomping on them barefooted.

Unfortunately she has a little trouble multitasking and ends up stumbling out of the bucket of grapes and crashes several feet to the ground where from the noise of the YouTube video it appears that she is seriously injured possibly mortally wounded.

She wasn’t able to multitask an interview while grape stomping,  however, I suspect that a person working on the computer raised up to a counter top level could possibly drum out a few e-mails while they were stomping grapes. 

Now I suspect that there’s not a great deal of need for grape stompers throughout the world, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that people need a little bit more physical engagement while they’re working.  A simple solution might be to just dump everybody onto an elliptical machine or a treadmill or some sort of stationary bicycle device, however that’s not exactly improving productivity. 

So maybe those devices can be hooked up to some sort of electricity generating machine that helps the environment, or maybe they could even be tied to some form of production whether it’s creating wine or shucking corn or something.

Physically it needs to be something that doesn’t require a lot of brain power(like writing this blog doesn’t), and it can not be too dangerous either.  You wouldn’t want to break an ankle or cut off a finger or something like that while you’re typing an e-mail.  However if we can find someway to allow our bodies to catch up to our brains and at the same time increase productivity, our economy would be better, our worker satisfaction might increase along with possibly of our salaries.  Plus our physical well-being and overall sense of balance would likely benefit as well. 

Who knows, maybe I could move to Italy and rent me one of those spectacular Villas in Italy and set up shop as a web designing, blog writing, grape stomper!

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