I’ve spent a fair percentage of the last couple of weeks preparing sessions for ThoughtWorks University and one thing Frankie has been trying to encourage is only preparing one at a time i.e. limited work in progress

Normally I’d be completely in favour of that approach but it doesn’t seem to work at all for me with this type of work.

There seem to be a few parts to creating a session, including:

The first can pretty much be stream lined so that you’re doing one of them at a time but I find the latter to be a much more creative process and I don’t do that work in a linear way at all.

I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that I prepare presentations in a very stop/start way. I really struggle to create them in one go. I’ll create a rough outline and then add to it randomly after that.

It seems to work reasonably well and I’ll come up with ideas that improve the presentation at random different times when I’m not even working on the presentation.

Presumably this is because I’m thinking about the presentation subconsciously which is one way of being creative (to a degree).

I’m curious as to whether I could get a similar effect by stimulating creativity by using time as a constraint.

Something to try out at least…​