How Spark Files Help Harness Creativity

Where there’s a spark, there’s fire.

But, you need the right tools to start the fire. That’s especially true when it comes to capturing your most creative and ingenious moments.

Creativity is everywhere. Scientists have spent decades trying to understand the impact and source of creativity. Their research has been the fodder for content ranging from listicles, newsworthy articles, and research papers. Yet, most of the focus has been on the process and tangible output of creative endeavors. But there is so much more to the study of creativity than the final result. At Evernote, we value ideas — seizing on moments of brilliance and building a platform for your biggest accomplishments.

That’s where Evernote fits into the puzzle of understanding human creativity — our products are built to help capture concepts, ideas, and thoughts and quickly curate them into your forever place.

Take a look at the spark file and Evernote. It’s one of the best methods we’ve seen for curating and managing ideas.

Spark before fire

A great idea starts with a spark.

Steven Johnson is an expert on ideas. As the author of Where Good Ideas Come From, he has spent his career researching and investigating the subject of where ideas come from and how we can make the most them. Johnson has examined how environment and patterns help our ideas evolve into innovation and action.

We have a romantic notion that ideas come to us as a cataclysmic bolt of lightning. We’ve even given them famous labels: Aha moments, apples falling from trees, eureka and lightbulb moments, bolts of lightning, and epiphanies. No matter what poetic language we can ascribe to these moments of ingenuity, we have been conditioned to think that ideas are the fruits of our solo neurological adventures.

Perhaps we should think of ideas as part of a more extensive network.

“We take ideas from other people,” Johnson said in a 2010 TED Talk. “(We take them) from people we’ve learned from, from people we run into the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That’s really where innovation happens.”

Connecting the dots

Coming together with a shared passion is probably an effort to solve the problem of how challenging it is for us to report our own ideas. This concept puts a massive dent in the image of the ‘lone’ researcher toiling away in a laboratory until they strike upon a brilliant moment or an epiphany. But, it also makes sense. If we can barely remember our great ideas, how would we recall when and where they came to us?

An excellent example of this is Charles Darwin, the geologist and naturalist who led the Beagle on its famous scientific expedition to the Galapagos.

Contrary to his own epiphany, Darwin did not suddenly come to discover his famous theory of natural selection in a moment of sheer genius. Turns out, he had developed it over time through his incredibly detailed notebooks.

In 1974, Howard Gruber, a cognitive psychologist, published Darwin on Man, which showed that cumulatively, Darwin’s research, thoughts, and writings displayed an evolutionary creative process, which pieced together, formed the nucleus of all of his work leading to his theory of natural selection.

Ideas fade into oblivion. The challenge is building the best framework to prevent that from happening.

Network patterns

Today, you can create a digital system to remind you of ideas, inspirations, and insights. If creativity is built on our spontaneous connections to seemingly unrelated things — then Evernote and a spark file can serve as a tool to help you remember earlier ideas as you take on new creative challenges.

Steven Johnson wrote the primer on implementing a spark file, where he suggests that keeping ideas and thoughts in one place, over the course of months and years, is the perfect way to capture brilliance and review material. “There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy–just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them,” Johnson wrote.

Review, review, and review some more

How often you choose to review the spark file is up to you. Mike Vardy, the Productivityist, dives into his spark file multiple times each week.

“My usual frequency is to review the notebook’s contents every Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday since Sunday is my day to plan and Monday and Tuesday are my themed days for writing,” Vardy said. “Generally, I will grab enough ideas from the spark file over those days to carry me through until the following Sunday.”

Steven Johnson reviews his spark file every three months. He outlined his process for diving into the ideas he documented in an article published on Medium where he made the interesting connection that ideas he captured years ago often had great potential much later in his process.

“The idea I had in 2008 that made almost no sense in 2008, but that turns out to be incredibly useful in 2012, because something has changed in the external world, or because some other idea has supplied the missing piece that turns the hunch into something actionable. And it’s always encouraging to see the hunches that turned into fully-realized projects or even entire books,” Johnson says.

The benefit is that this review cadence allows him to visualize the evolution of how ideas have coalesced over time. The spark file essentially becomes the blueprints that lead from idea to accomplishment.

A spark is ideal for everyone

Anyone can use a spark file, and it has limitless potential. Using it to capture ideas can help you solve challenges, help navigate work and responsibilities, and tie ideas together even if they come years apart. The file is meant to be the “spark” of an idea that can come to fruition now or later.

Here are a few ways having a spark file can help people from all walks of life:

Writers:

• Develop characters — both already created and the ones yet to be invented.
• Create plot narrative and story development.
• Keep track of title ideas.
• Capture ideas for future books and writing projects.
• Retain notes of ideas from reading other books.

Students:

• School is a marathon, not a sprint. Track your progress for any project, big or small.
• For research papers or writing assignments, manage every detail and idea from start to finish.
• Add feedback from teachers or fellow students whether you’re in a lecture, group discussion, or visiting a professor during office hours.
• Capture the best and brightest ideas that emerge from class discussions that can be easily retrieved later.
• If you see inspiring work from another student or teacher, save it to your spark file.
• Save meaningful and important educational material, quotes, or books you want to read.
• Success in academics is all about progress, and spark files allow you to review where you started and how you finished. Review each monthly and weekly, or even dive back into previous semesters.

Designers:

• Collaborate on ideas for projects with colleagues and clients.
• Collect thoughts and photos of other inspiring designers’ work.
• Manage a mood board.
• Present work that inspires to a team.

Entrepreneurs:

• Manage a record of your favorite innovative changes.
• Input considerations for legal, intellectual property, or patents.
• Flesh out business ideas.
• Compose a dossier of people you’d like to meet.
• Note competitive intelligence that could impact your business.

Written by Taylor Pipes on June 8, 2016. Originally published on the Evernote blog. This post is part of our ongoing Evernote Blog series, “Taking Note,” outlining the storied history and styles of note-taking. In this series, we explore how taking notes can improve your creativity and all the work you set out to accomplish.