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Updated November 3, 2022Youβre reading an excerpt of Creative Doing, by Herbert Lui. 75 practical techniques to unlock creative potential in your work, hobby, or next career. Purchase now for instant, lifetime access to the book.
The two most common dimensions weβre constrained by are space and time. If setting a time limit is timeboxing, then perhaps the space-analogous exercise can be called sizeboxing. You pick a limited size for your work and work within that.
One popular format Iβve seen is an essay that fits in a screenshot on your phone. When working on articles, I write my notes to fit a 4-by-6-inch index card; any longer and it has to be a new note. This keeps me concise.
If youβre recording music, scale down by committing to recording a song with only two instruments if you usually use more; or if you want to produce a lot of ideas, commit to writing thirty-second melodies for one week.
If youβre working with paint, choose a surface with dimensions no more than four inches by four inches.
If youβre programming, restrict yourself to a set number of lines of code or a specific memory size. (Sizecoding might be an inspiration.)
Another version of this is filling out three pages of writing in a notebook. (If you do this without stopping, thatβs what teacher, artist, and author Julia Cameron calls the morning pages.)
The less time you have, the smaller a sizeβor the fewer the elementsβthat you may want to go with.
While most of the prompts in this book involve getting ideas out of your head and into the world by taking action, and creating ideas through action, this prompt is about working on an idea in your head and leaving your studio, laptop, or gear bag behind. Steve Jobs said, βCreativity is just connecting things.β
These connections come from many sources, including what you see and experience. Photographer Ivan Chow leaves the house without his camera to practice his observation skills. He says, βBy taking away the need to make photos, youβre relieving yourself of that pressure to deliver. This will allow your mind to focus solely on spotting moments that are worthy of capturing. Youβll get less caught up with whatβs directly in front of you and youβll start looking a bit further to spot potential subjects and points of interest. Being a good street photographer is all about being good at observing, and that means that you already have a very good head start.β
If your chosen creative operation is photography, you might choose to take a moment out of each day to observe a location or scene that would make for an interesting photograph. What makes it stand out to you? How can you return and recreate the moment, or would it be worth capturing in different lighting conditions? If itβs music, take a long walk and play with a melody in your headβwhen you take away the option of recording an idea right away, youβre forced to work with the raw materials in real time, which can lead to many surprising developments.