In my line of work as a writer, there’s a near endless stream of new applications coming out that touch different stages in my workflow: e-book readers, notetaking apps, tools for managing PDFs, word processors, bibliographic databases. The problem is that it’s very tricky to switch horses midstream with these kinds of tools, which means you have a natural tendency to get locked into a particular configuration, potentially missing out on better approaches.

I quickly found myself in the ironic situation of spending so much time building a tool to help with my schoolwork that I stopped actually doing my schoolwork.

It occurs to me that keeping a “wish-list” of intellectual/creative challenges, even if you’re not exactly sure yet what the exact subject matter will be for those challenges, would be a productive routine to have, for writers and non-writers alike.

The innovation theorist Steven Johnson calls these “multiples” - like the simultaneous but separate discovery of sun-spots, oxygen, electrical batteries, the steam engine and telephone. In each case, the discovery rests on prior fundamental ideas that have already crossed borders. To isolate oxygen specifically, for example, there must be a general idea that air is made from gases. The specific innovation finds an “adjacent possible” - a possibility space opened up by the general body of thinking. That’s why these ideas can happen, in synchrony, even though far apart in geography.

And the added bonus here is that Devonthink has a wonderful feature where you can take the entire contents of a folder and condense it down into a single text document. So that's how I launch myself into the actual writing of the book. I grab the first chapter folder and export it as a single text document, open it up in my word processor, and start writing. Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I'm looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes.

He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

(dig into his process at his personal site

Johnson’s book (lively and well sourced –  highly recommended) transcends the cliche of the individual innovator  and shows the ways in which innovation depends on a form of social  capital — the networks of people and ideas that innovators learn from  and build upon.