Silver Clipboard

Use White Noise to Help You Work

Noise comes in colors: pink grey and brown are just a few examples. Each of these colors signifies a precise, scientific definition known only to acoustic specialists but one color, white, has entered the general lexicon. White noise has come to mean constant background sounds that the listener eventually becomes unaware of. The sound of rain or the hum of an air conditioner is white noise.

There are many benefits to working with white noise in the background:

1. White noise blocks out distracting peripheral noises. For the ADD among us, white noise helps minimize sharp, distracting noises by smoothing them out. For example, if you are in a cafe playing music that you don’t like, listening to white noise on your headphones helps blend the noise into the background much more than trying to drown it out with loud music would. There is even a field of design, called architectural acoustics, which works to reduce distracting noises by intentionally adding white noise to the environment.
2. White noise encourages thought and creativity. Where is it easier to work: in a silent library where every page-turn and pencil drop is sudden and distracting, or in a room filled with computer keys clicking away? Think of the test halls you sat in as a child, where teachers enforced silence — it’s hard to focus in situations like that. White noise encourages creativity, which is the topic of a book called ‘Noise’.
3. White noise stops you from futzing with your background music. Instead of getting distracted by hearing a song your sick of, then hitting ‘next’ for two minutes until you find the perfect song, white noise is uniform. It will never pull you out of your thoughts.

Now that you’re sold on the benefits of white noise, how can you get it? These are a few sources of white noise:

• White noise machines. White noise machines are sold primarily to help people sleep. They usually generate uniform sounds such as static or waterfalls.
• White noise CDs. There are many recordings of white noise generally available. Some of the ones that seem strange but work well are recordings of a fan, an air conditioner or a washing machine.
• Podcasts. Framework is a podcast dedicated to a weekly hour of background noise. (Credit to Boing Boing for alerting me to them)
• Nature sounds CDs. While not exactly white noise, I often listen to these. They block out background noise without tiring my brain, as pure white noise can do. Also, they can set the mood for the type of work I want to do: a scary thunderstorm for working at night or beach sounds for early morning. However, good nature CDs are hard to find — most want to play dirty hippy, new age music in the background. Awful.
• Real Life Machines. In my previous office, I had a very large window fan that I used to turn on and place in the middle of the room as a source of white noise.

Next time you’re working, give white noise a try and see if it helps you focus.

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Header photograph by greg westfall

Free E-book: Time Management for Creative People

‘Time Management for Creative People’ by Mark McGuinness, is a useful little e-book with the subtitle ‘manage the mundane — create the extraordinary’. It appealed to me for several reasons. First, it doesn’t treat creative work as though it is divinely inspired — it’s getting your butt in a chair and working. Secondly, the book doesn’t present the reader with list of vague nonsense like ‘maximize your energy’ or ‘eliminate negative feelings’. Instead, it give some simple, instantly implementable ideas to help manage your work and create more. Lastly, the author generously credits the sources for his ideas and directs you where to go for more information.

It’s a worthwhile document to look through. I picked up a few tips and added more books to my reading list.

[Click here to download ‘Time Management for Creative People]

[Click here for Mark McGuinness’s blog]

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Photograph Ali Edwards

How Ubiquitous Capture is Vital for Creative Work

Scheduling creativity is a fool’s task. You can’t sit at a computer and decide ‘now is the time I will be creative’. However you can force yourself to work on existing projects.

Ideas appear when the neurons firing in your brain make a new connection. Creativity is random. The good news is you don’t have to do anything to make it happen. The bad news is that you can’t force it to happen.

In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King describes the creative process as it happened to him while working as a handyman at his old high school.

One day [Harry, a coworker] and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room… There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls.. I asked what was in them. “Pussy plugs,” Harry said. “For them certain days of the month.”

I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. You could actually shower in privacy.

…I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the others girls — grossed out, horrified, amused — start pelting her with sanitary napkins… The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death. She reacts, fights back, but how?

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena… There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first— Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescence cruelty and telekinesis, came together and I had an idea.

That idea eventually grew in to his first novel, Carrie and started his prolific career. But Stephen King wasn’t trying to come up with an idea for a book. It just happened because creativity is random.

The fleeting, random nature of thoughts is what makes ubiquitous capture is so important. When an idea pops into your head, no matter how important or trivial, or how good or poor, write it down immediately. You should keep a pad of paper on you at all times to capture ideas.

Even though creativity is beyond your control, if you practice ubiquitous capture you will always have a stock of ideas to draw from when you sit down to work. Once you get into the habit of capture, you will discover that it is a self-feeding process. The more you capture your ideas, the more aware you become of your own thoughts and the more you have to capture. Get a notepad and get to work.

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Photograph by Chris Metcalf