TINT, TILT, TIMER, and Repeat; A simple framework to measure your creativity
While you are able, keep track of:
TINT — Things I Noticed Today
TILT — Things I Learnt Today
TIMER — Things I Must Ensure to Review
Learning is a constant activity in a human’s life. From birth to death, step to step, learning is always there as a shadow in the light. But, how to be creative in learning? Is there a framework for it?
This article is an attempt to share a few insights from my own life. I adopted a new technique a few months ago, and was able to reap benefits at work and in personal life.
The technique is called “TINT and TILT every day.” The framework is simple: Take notes about things you notice and learn. The note can be either a digital or a physical resource.
But before jumping into more detail, let’s see what settled me on that framework.
Recently, I read a book written by Rick Rubin called “The creative act: A way of being”, to get out of monotonous thinking and boost creativity.
Surprisingly, the book just worked, and I am churning out more creative work than I ever did in my entire life. I think there are two main reasons for that:
- Be utterly open-minded to all forms of knowledge (colors, forms, norms, philosophies, and ideas)
- Sharpen awareness to detect the tiniest of changes
These two steps are crucial for nurturing creativity. How? You receive signals only by being open-minded and inspecting those signals by being completely aware.
Let’s see how to be open-minded.
Be utterly Open-minded
Being open-minded means tuning the mind to overcome existing beliefs and biases to grasp the information as it is. Some examples of this phenomenon are:
- Listen to a speaker to understand their perspective. Not to hear what you want.
- Always question your beliefs to refine them further down. No knowledge is absolute.
- Knowledge can arrive in multiple ways: people, things, or experiences. Do not ignore any of them. Every way is a chance to receive and learn.
From my recent experiences, I say creativity is inversely proportional to closed-mindedness. The more you retract, the more creativity locks itself away.
Creativity is easily measured with TINT (Things I Noticed Today) metric. Keep a list of unique, tiny things you notice while commuting, working, eating, or watching something.
This list ideally will have 1–10 items as bullet points.
Try to make a TINT note multiple times a week. Seven notes/week is the best, and zero is the worst.
If you see you are making fewer TINTs, it is time to be more open-minded.
Why “n” is lowercase and all other (“O”, “R”, “I”, “D”, “A”) are upper case ? I detected this while my train stopped for a minute at Orinda BART station.
Sharpen the awareness
Sharpening your awareness needs being in the present. There are two major obstacles to any kind of activity in life:
- You look but don’t see it
- You hear but don’t understand it
A sharpened awareness can cut through the information’s onion-like layers and capture the core of it. In that process, it also takes note of all transcended layers and their order. Therefore a sharp awareness is vital in the learning process.
How to fix gaps in awareness? There are a few methods for improving awareness, like:
- If multiple senses are working in parallel, the awareness is distributed. So, try to shield a few senses, and awareness shifts to others.
- Ex: Drink a coffee in a quiet place with closed eyes. You can increasingly enjoy the flavor of coffee beans and sugar.
- Meditate with closed eyes and a straight posture. Do not focus on breathing or thoughts. Channel that awareness to observe various sounds around you. This kind of meditation will improve your hearing capability.
Keep a separate note called TILT (Things I Learnt Today) to capture things you learned from awareness. TILTs are reusable knowledge whereas TINTs are random detections.
Remember, a TILT can originate from a TINT. That is where creativity begins.
TIMER
Collecting TINTs and TILTs daily is easy at the beginning and hard to make a habit. We need another metric called TIMER (Things I Must Ensure to Review) to review the previous two metrics weekly.
TINT and TILT should be reviewed weekly with a TIMER, to see if we are noticing and learning enough. If the assessment is not satisfactory, one has to put conscious efforts next week to keenly observe the surroundings and their own life to generate a good sample size of TINTs and TILTs.
You can add any other trackable metrics to TIMER.
Conclusion
Measuring creativity is a rugged venture, but with the help of TINT, TILT, and TIMER, one can easily measure it with tools like Apple Notes.
In a nutshell, you should try to be transparent and aware to detect and learn new things. And this framework provides you with metrics to keep track of it. Thanks for reading this article, and see you next time.
