In the book, The Artist’s Way, one of the two criteria Julia Cameron suggests for releasing your creativity is “The Artist’s Date”.
The Artist’s Date is a date with yourself. It allows you to get out in the world and see things outside of your normal world to release your creative energy.
Examples might include a writer wandering around a museum, or a painter taking a ukulele class, or a photographer trying their hand at haiku.
I have modified this for myself. I call it my “Innovation Date”.
Here’s what I do. I spend several hours a week either attending a lecture, workshop or course slightly outside of my normal frame of reference, usually locally and at very low cost.
For example, today I am attending an Edward Tufte course on Data Visualization, in which I will get roughly 6 hours of lectures (and 4 killer books!) all about unique and insightful ways to engage data.
Next week I am going to attend one of three statewide “Workshops” to discuss the preliminary draft of Washington State’s regulatory approach to medication disposal.
Here, I may have a chance to speak to a large group, and I hope to take some of my ideas regarding innovation ecosystems to these folks .
The week after? Who knows. I have a few Python courses under my belt, and a deep interest in machine learning and deep learning – perhaps I will finally attend a Python meetup with my eye to connect with some hard core developers!
Anyway, in medicine and healthcare it’s easy to become so focused on our own narrow field that we become hobbled in our own innovation capacity.
Taking simple, local, and weekly Innovation Dates is one way to design your time architecture to counteract this.