Quiet: The unsung hero of creativity - Fine Point Communications

One of the things I love about schools is their raucous nature. With the exclamations of understanding, the thunder of children in the hallways and the yawps and shrieks of outside play, the default within a school is noise.

I feed off this, as if the electricity sparking among students travels across rooms and through floors to zap me and give me a burst. I never feel so energetic in a calendar year as when school is in session.

At the same time, though, the responsibilities of communications work require not just energy but also creativity. And this is where things can get problematic.

Creativity calls for calm, not hubbub. When it comes time for thinking, I find the noise of the school often intrudes. I’ve been known to escape to the library or a quiet spot on the school grounds whenever I need to brainstorm or turn my interview notes into a first draft.

Remaining in my office is rarely the right call. In the office, there are phone calls, emails, instant messages, drop-in visits from colleagues — each one with an urgent question that pulls me away from simply musing. And then I may not be able to return to my place.

It took me a while to appreciate, and then to respect, this need for quietude in my creative process. After all, for much of my professional life, I worked in noisy newsrooms where the idea of a quiet place to think would have provoked rude laughter. I know that I can create in the midst of chaos.

But I am more pleased with the work that results from still reflection, when I am able to leisurely fit together the puzzle pieces of an assignment.

One of the tip-offs to this dynamic was looking at my summer production, when I rarely feel excited at work yet accomplish much more significant work.

Since this realization, I’ve become more purposeful about blocking distractions and retreating from places where I’m bound to be interrupted until the creative work is done.

Logging out of Twitter

One distraction that I’ve just eliminated is Twitter. I hinted a couple of months ago that I was considering whether, after 13 years and 5,400 tweets, it was time for me to leave the channel. Then Twitter decided to leave me.

On Jan. 12, Twitter unplugged third-party applications, cutting off their access to the service. Users who never logged directly into Twitter now had no alternative if they wished to maintain their accounts.

This was a deal-breaker for me: The Twitter website and app algorithmically decide what to put into my feed (as happens with Facebook and Instagram, too), while the third-party app I used (Tweetbot) stuck to showing me only the accounts I chose to follow. I hesitate to use the word “value” for a social media service, but Twitter was far more valuable to me through Tweetbot than through its own app.

In the days that followed, I was not pleased to find my thumb repeatedly reaching for the Tweetbot app or to learn how much I relied on reading tweets to obtain information or discover novelty. I started going to major news outlets’ apps and found how little in a given day rises to the level of true news (as opposed to Twitter-level news).

A couple of weeks later, I find that my thoughts are quieter without Twitter in my life. A hit of dopamine on demand is now harder to access, and my attention is not pulled in a thousand different directions. This has created more space for creativity, a very good thing in a month that has been filled with writing assignments.

But I feel less connected to some of the niche communities I had curated on Twitter, including our little group of school communicators. For example, as I write, the CASE-NAIS conference is taking place in New York, and I’m unaware of anything about this year’s gathering. That stings.

I have considered transferring to a new service such as Post.News (where I have an account) or Mastodon, but a social media channel needs to have the people you want to hear from, and right now, those people are scattered.

LinkedIn is as close to such an online community as I have. But that network doesn’t quite seem to draw the same mix of irreverence, insight and information.

What’s new at Fine Point Communications

Writing assignments are often an invitation to discover a new world.

Last summer, the Potomac School invited me to profile its alumnus Joe Osha, who works for an investment bank, analyzing the prospects of emerging companies that focus on sustainability, or “green energy,” enterprises. As I started the assignment, I knew very little about any of these things.

But what I found in pre-interview research was fascinating, and Joe was a generous interviewee. He not only shared his insights but also grounded his observations in a way that made the subject very approachable. I’m proud of the resulting story, which Potomac ran in its latest issue.

Also just released are the results of this year’s Brilliance Awards, which I helped judge once again for InspirED School Marketers. My category was Magazine Writing, where several judges considered entries from 15 schools. I heartily recommend checking out the gold and silver winners, whose work was just extraordinary; from the page linked above, click on each image to read the article.