Kill Your Darlings: The Ugly Other Half of Creativity

Creativity happens in two stages: first, unbounded imagination; then — more importantly — ruthless editing.

Loads of great advice in this post from Jason on the part of “ideas” that tends to get less attention: editing.

One of the ones that jumped out to me was his note about the importance of underutilizing people’s time:

On top of that, a healthy team is intentionally underutilized. This creates free time for chasing shiny things with low risk. A roadmap with this kind of slack built-in supports exploratory tinkering by defining a clear plan with clear boundaries: I know I need to complete these 5 tasks this week to keep us on track; I finish them by lunchtime Thursday; I now have a day and a half to do whatever I find exciting without hurting the overall strategic goals or slowing things down.

What a healthy (and wise!) counter from the way most organizations tend to operate.a