Do you ever get that feeling of something slipping away, even as you experience it? August was like that for me. I was traveling a lot, working with clients a ton, spending time with design teams and reading as much as I could.
What I didn't do during August was make time for conscious distillation. I was doing some quick synthesis on the fly in conversations with design teams and with clients, but much of my focus was on execution.
Twitter helped me, but it also might have hurt me. I could throw little intuitive thoughts into the void and, at times, dip my head under the faucet for some rapid inspiration. But when I did that, I was also giving myself a free pass from doing some deeper thinking and connection-making.
While in the midst of this period, it felt as if I was alternating between floating in and treading water. But looking back I don't think anything was really lost. I was laying a nice foundation of inspiration and charging my batteries a bit for a busy Fall. In the meantime I stretched my feet out below me, realized I was only in four feet of water, and I've walked onto the shore.
As a jumpstart, I've started giving myself constrained challenges to share some long-simmering thinking. Regardless of where I am at the end of the day or week, I have to share what I have with an interested party (or sometimes disinterested!). I'm also trying to share some of the inspiration I gleaned over the Summer, an important creative act for me because I like to give my point of view on what I read.
Reflecting on August, I've been reminded that anyone, regardless of where they work and their role, has to balance execution with exploration, reflection with creation, inspiration with action and consumption with creation. The trick seems to be to notice when it's time for a change and then do something about it.
(Really cool map and graphic design idea courtesy of LeSmou Imperator and Flickr.)
