You're not lacking creativity, you're overwhelmed

These posts pop up every now and then. Too much rationalism in this approach for sense. But I get it, it's difficult to sell letters when you're warning people against reading letters.

As a lay student of Buddhism, there's a much more simple and effective route.

Meditate.

A clean, crisp, quiet break into your own internal fortress of solitude. Curating as a means of establishing a creative sandbox makes sense to me, when the creative process opens. But concentration and focus is a skill and it can be developed. Trying to develop it through consumption is very difficult and counter-intuitive.

Your own internal world can surpass any notebook. Have you heard of the Method of Loci? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci It's applied meditational creative construction, it's been used by Grand Master memory champions, and it's all inside. Even if you do not apply the projector in your mind to such purposes, simply meditating can make much of this process subconscious. You do less, think less and yet remember and "receive" more.

I think the content of the article is totally orthogonal to the problem the title supposedly addresses. I was immediately excited to read this but then found no relation to what the article talks about. Content curation? Really? We're not overwhelmed with content, we're overwhelmed with noise.

The long hour days stuff is just corporations/institutions forcing thinkers to work like factory workers.

> First and foremost, creators are curators.

That seems like an overstatement. Foremost? Johnson said that a writer may turn over half a library to make one book, but this article doesn't talk about doing anything with your collection after you've curated it. The creative act referred to in this article seems to be the curating itself. That's fine as far as it goes; curation is a form of creativity. But I'd say creators, broadly, are first and foremost people who make stuff, not people who curate other stuff. If you're too overwhelmed by stuff to make anything yourself, you've probably seen plenty already. Maybe shut off the firehose and try working on something before deciding lack of curation is the problem you face. This feels a bit like the impulse that tells you the reason you can't get any writing done is because you need to clean your office first.

Do you remember what the research was?

I keep having this argument about multitasking not being a real thing but I'd love some concrete research to back it up. I get the sense that people just feel more productive when "multitasking" Rather than recognizing the true cost of constant context switching.