Inspired by Distraction
Inspired by Distraction is a journal article by Benjamin Baird, Jonathan Smallwood, Michael D. Mrazek, Julia W. Y. Kam, Michael S. Franklin, Jonathan W. Schooler (2012), published in Psychological Science. IX Coach's practice library cites it in 10 practices across 7 concepts; each one is listed below, so you can see exactly where this journal article is put to use.
Where to find it
Practices on IX Coach that cite Inspired by Distraction
- Reserve unscheduled time to discern what matters
Block undirected time for reading, thinking, and exploring — without an output requirement.
Essentialism: The Art of Eliminating the Non-Essential
- Fill the break with mild mind-wandering
Do something undemanding — a walk, a shower, dishes — that lets the mind wander.
Incubation: Why Stepping Away Solves Problems
- Use a routine physical task to incubate a creative problem
Assign your stuck creative problem to your mind, then do a boring manual task and let the problem run in the background.
Boredom and Creativity: Why Your Best Ideas Need Idle Time
- Create collision conditions: change context deliberately
Put yourself in a physically or mentally different environment to force new associations.
Combinatorial Creativity, Made Practical
- Work at a dramatically different speed
Do the stuck task ten times faster or ten times slower — the speed change changes the output.
Oblique Strategies, Made Practical
- Abandon the work for a defined period and return fresh
Structured incubation — not avoidance — is an active creative tool.
- Cultivate awareness as your primary creative tool
Pay unusually close attention to what you notice, what you feel, and what catches you — these are the raw material.
The Creative Act: Rick Rubin’s Approach to Making
- Protect solitude and silence as creative inputs
Schedule regular time alone, away from stimulation — this is not a luxury but the condition for original thought.
- Load the problem then deliberately step away
Immerse yourself in the problem first, then drop it — incubation requires prior loading.
The Three Bs of Creativity: Bed, Bath, and Bus
- Schedule unstructured mind-wandering time
Block protected time with no agenda and no screen — let the mind go where it wants.
How this page was checked
- The citation was matched to its Crossref record, and the title, authors and year above are taken from that record — not written by us.
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