Distraction is not all bad

Sometimes, as a free lance web designer, I have so much on my punch list that I put on blinders, put my nose to the grindstone and don’t feel I can look up from my computer. People are counting on me to get their work done, and it would be irresponsible to let myself be distracted by twitter posts, or emails from friends, right?

I have found, though, that often, the time I take being sidetracked to an interesting website, or looking at something fun that a friend or colleague has sent me, has a great benefit to my productivity and work. Why? Because creativity, like fire, needs oxygen from the surrounding environment. The stimulation and things that we discover by looking up and around can add to the quality of our work.

Here is an example: I just reprogrammed an artist’s website, Beldan K. Radcliffe (beldankradcliffe.com). We were keeping the graphic design pretty much the same as her original site, but programming it with SEO friendly code, and adding a shopping cart and tile section. The last thing on my “to do” list for Beldan was to figure out how to create a page where shoppers could “play” with her tiles and arrange them to figure out which ones they want to purchase. She sells a set of four tiles at a discounted rate, and she commented that at her artisan shows, people spend hours picking out tiles and arranging them together to decide which they want to purchase. I had absolutely no idea how I would program that for her. So this final task stuck in the back of my brain as something I needed to get done, but wasn’t sure how to tackle.

One day soon after I was busy working on numerous things, and my friend and colleague, Kathleen Forsythe, shot me an email with a link to a website that she thought was inspired.  The subject of the email was “how cool is this..” and the link was to this page: http://www.curiousgenerationgroup.com/

I went to the link, and finding it inspiring, I looked at the source code to see if I could figure out how it was created. I noticed that one of the scripts that they use was located in a folder named scriptaculous, and doing a google search on that, I found this site: http://wiki.github.com/madrobby/scriptaculous/. The site explains that  script.aculo.us is a set of JavaScript libraries to enhance the user interface of web sites. (TRANSLATION:  free javascript code that, once installed on your server, lets you do all sorts of cool things)  AND one of those very cool functions was the ability to drag and drop items on a page. Suddenly I had a solution to my tile task for Beldan, and with the scriptaculous files, was able to get her new page up in under 1/2 hour.

I was rewarded for my exploration. Exploring is a way to self educate, to stimulate our creativity.

Not all distraction is bad. If I hadn’t taken 10 minutes to open that email, click on the link and look at the source code, I would still be stumped on how to create a page where customers can re-arrange items, and that unfinished task would still be rattling in the back of my brain.

Have you had similar experiences? Let me know by commenting below.

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