time's a wastin'

I know that the plague of wasted minutes affects most folks in your average modern workplace. What that means is that you never get enough time to do the one thing that we're all being told we have to do: think.

Crises, planning meetings, resourcing, presentations, admin, general people management, travel time to and from clients, all get in the way. And while we are all encouraged to send each other links to cool links and articles and shit, and all want to show off great stuff we've found, I don't know about you, but these days I'm bombarded by these kinds of things. I don't have time to look at half of them, let alone digest them and think about how these new, cool things can impact my work for my client.

There's just no time for kicking back and letting your imagination roam, which is the only ways new ideas happen.

(David Mamet has a great line, somewhere in Writing in Restaurants, to the effect of:

People ask me where I get my ideas.

I tell them, I think of them.

You can hear his frustration in the emphasis of his response. How the hell else do you get an idea? Only these days, he'd add an additional frustrated, "Which I don't get enough goddamned time to do.")

My basic time control tool is booking myself for large blocks of hours. Anyone trying to book me into a meeting at such a time has to ask me if I can manage it; I feel free to ignore anyone who doesn't check my availability.

I'm also getting pickier about the presentations I need to be in. My overpowering need for time to think has begun to win the arm wrastlin' contest with my basic urge to be a control freak. Not the best reason, but a good outcome for everyone involved.

As indispensable as those two techniques are, they aren't enough. In today's combustible business environment, despite the vast forests of advice from time management gurus, there's always another fire to put out.

when an idea is birthed twice

This Globe article about similar ad campaigns for different clients is interesting not because it offers insight into how two agencies can come up with the same idea, but because it can't. Short of defaulting to nasty accusations that would be difficult to prove and would likely be untrue anyway,* how the hell do you explain it?

The interviewees in the article conclude, "Hey, some ideas are just in the air" and the writer of the article doesn't seem to have much of an opinion about it either way.

Now, such a thing has never happened to me, and I can only imagine that the creatives involved are honestly mortified. My personal bias is that these "in the air" ideas tend to be okay ideas that have great or powerful executions – witness putting a "baby on board" sign on a hearse. Chances are, it's work that hasn't really been challenged as thoroughly as it could be, because it's work that could serve equally well for another client in the same category. And to me, a good ad is specific; it says something about that client that no one else can say. Can you imagine Microsoft doing Think Different or Labatt doing The Rant?

Even when it's cool and award-winning, a generalized statement that anyone can say (in other words, a cliché) is still, well...

Which makes me think that, in each case, more work could have been done.

*While individuals can be dumb enough to rip off work to make their portfolios artificially better, no agency or creative director I've ever met would think of doing such a thing, let alone allow it. It would end careers and drive away clients. No one campaign idea is worth that. No single idea is that good.