Audit Your Environment

“Like an investor checking his portfolio, every three months Bezos sits down with his assistant Kim Christenson to examine and analyze his calendar for the quarter just past. He wants to know, among other things, how much time he has devoted to each of the dozen or so categories to which Christenson has assigned every meeting, phone call, or trip.”

Reading WIRED’s fantastic biographical sketch, The Inner Jeff Bezos from 1999, I was struck both by how much has changed in the world of innovation in the last 23 years, and how much hasn’t. No matter how much the times change, the habits of mind and disciplines of being to which creative geniuses adhere set them apart from their similarly-intelligent and capable peers.

Bezos’s quarterly ritual of analyzing his calendar illuminates two key lessons for anyone who wants to evaluate their own creative practice:

First, as Annie Dillard said, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” For the vast majority of professionals, the calendar — specifically, how FULL the calendar is — is the greatest hindrance to doing creative work. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to design a schedule that enhances your creative practice, rather than eviscerate it. And that starts by being brutally honest with yourself about how you spend your time: how much time do you devote to exploratory thinking. The WIRED piece notes that “Bezos spends hours at a time thinking about the future…” which we dismiss as a luxury of the elite to our own detriment.

Audit your calendar for the last quarter, or even the last week, and you’ll discern the priority you place on innovation.

Second, Bezos has defined categories for his activities, which of course calls to mind the notion of a portfolio. If you’re only working on one thing, you’re not experimenting broadly enough. Far from being a distraction, a side hustle, side project, or even a good old fashioned hobby, can provide invaluable insights and afford you the distance you need to get fresh perspective on your main thing.

This isn’t just something that folks with time to spare do. It’s something Nobel Prize winners, corporate intrapraneurs, and generation-defining entrepreneurs do routinely.

Audit your project portfolio to examine whether there are enough inputs to make your mind a connection-friendly environment.

Lots of links today — hope they inform a fruitful innovation audit.

Related: Write Yourself A Love Note
Related: Hack A Creative Calendar
Related: Create A Portfolio
Related: Try More Than One
Related: Experiment Broadly
Related: Hustle On The Side
Related: Pick Up A Side Project
Related: Dirty Your Hands With A Hobby
Related: Redefine What’s Work

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