TerrieMiller.com

Confessions of a Chart Maker

When I need to figure something out, I want to push words and images around so I can think about them and, more importantly, see and play with the connections and relationships between them. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about putting my thoughts onto paper in a non-linear way. If I can physically move them around, so much the better.

I was startled to realize recently that not everyone does this kind of thing.

I find that I’ve been creating lots of these charts and graphs over the past few months; they’re evidence of an active inner life of feelings and thinking; of changes. Sometimes they’re a misguided attempt to put a rational framework around something in my life that isn’t rational.

Here’s a couple from several months ago. They’re dry, rigid table charts:

The printout is from an excel file; I was grappling with setting priorities about things I wanted to do. This is evidence of a real struggle going on in myself…I had to create two columns, one for “practical priority”, and one for “happiness”. I wasn’t able to give things that simply made me happy a high priority, so I had to create another column to express that. It wasn’t until someone else questioned why being happy couldn’t be a high priority all on it’s own that I was able to see how imposing this rational structure wasn’t really working.

The other “chart” in the photo is just a list of different classes I was interested in taking, and an attempt to categorize them by subject area. After I dumped everything out onto the page, I numbered the categories in order of which they went onto the page (it doesn’t happen top-to-bottom, left-to-right). You can see the same sort of struggle here, because I started starring the things that sounded more fun or exciting. There’s some things on here that are less interesting, but seemed more like things I “should” do.

It’s worth pointing out that these charts are never “done”. I always think of things later to add to them, but rarely go back and do that. I’m off making a new chart.

Here’s a couple from a little later…

What’s not to like about a Venn diagram?! The big circle collage was an attempt to figure out how I could make the different interests and pieces of my life coalesce into something better. I thought that if I could see where the intersections occurred, I might find a unique set of interests that would point to a new career path. It’s another attempt to impose rational structure. There’s so many things wrong about this representation that I don’t even know where to start. If I keep these scrawlings to look back on later, I can see how they’re a representation of my mind at just one given point in time. There’s a big vulnerability in even showing them to other people, because sometimes they become less about what I am and more about what I am not. And sometimes they are a way of trying on another “self”.

The other one here is sort of a plan for a location, a drawing of a place I envisioned, with scrawling notes in random places on it. It’s not terribly satisfying, because the vision is so much more rich than a line drawing. But getting it out of my head and onto paper in some form makes it easier for me to even think of expressing it more fully. I’ve made a few of these; lots go into the trash.

It’s been almost two weeks since I left my job, and my brain has been full of ideas and possiblities. That’s lead to the next exercise, the index cards:

This is a 43Folders geek’s delight…color-coded index cards held in a nice little recycled tin. It draws heavily on GTD and the Hipster PDA (I carry some cards with me to capture ideas as they come up). It ranges from random thoughts about mundane tasks I should get done (white cards) to bigger projects and goals. I don’t really know where this is going, but it’s supremely satisfying to spread them out on the table and move them around and think about them. I’m hoping that eventually I’ll feel “done” with the idea collection aspect of it and be able to use them to make some decisions. Already I’m seeing the cracks in this particular project, again the imposition of a rational system on a non-rational life. Still, it’s quite useful in that it clears my brain…I don’t have to worry about keeping track of all these ideas once I’ve got them written down to refer to later, and it creates space in my head for new ideas to come up.

You can see how the nature of the visualizations has been changing over time. From a the black-and-white straight lines and borders of the excel charts, to hand-drawn scribbles and freeing of the words to move around without borders. As that happens, I see it starting to intersect with other projects that I tend to think more as leaning towards “art”:

The large collage is a an assignment from a class I took, Introduction to Career Development. The assignment was to create a collage of “the things you’d like to invite into your life in the next 5-10 years”. It was an interesting excercise in itself…I don’t want to write too much about it here because I’d like to encourage Steve to do his own and then we can get all verbal about it. But suffice to say that almost item on the collage is symbolic of multiple things (and of course there are things left off). It’s a good exercise; try it and you’ll find that there is much more than meets the eye.

Most of the collages in class were rectangular, on a sheet of posterboard, but I chose to do mine within a circular shape because of my emerging interest in mandalas as self expression. You can see my first attempt at a mandala behind the collage there. I’m not sure I want to just put the full thing out there…I’m not ready to write that confessional yet!

These expressions of what goes on in my head are intensely personal. I’ll probably think about deleting this post and the photos a zillion times after they go live. I feel that they’re almost repulsive to others, as if they’re looking at pornography. And at times I’ve often been frustrated by trying to really understand others…I want to thrust a marker and a piece of paper into their hands…just show me, please! Make a chart!

When I look at this propensity for chart and graph making, I see how it’s threaded through my life time after time. My favorite part of science fairs in high school was creating the display of the information I was trying to convey. Later, as a bar manager, I was charting beer sales against the academic and sports calendar at Ohio State, trying to dial in the perfect inventory to have on hand for any given week. At WordStar I made excel capable of drawing beautiful detailed schedules for tech support phone coverage (schedules that never worked in the realm of the real world and real people who weren’t automatons!) The bliss of sitting in an Edward Tufte class. And I’m sure at O’Reilly people often mystified by the white board scrawlings I’d insist on making, sometimes unable to verbally communicate anything without that crutch or at least the chance to slink away to my desk to think things through on a sloppy deskpad with indecipherable collections of almost random words.

But what does it all mean for my future? I have no idea!

I’d imagine that other people do other things…some more verbally inclined might need to talk. Others might write, without making visual pictures with the words. Yet others might use pictures alone. I’m sure there are habits and preferences that I can’t even imagine. So tell me in the comments….what techniques do you have have for thinking about big ideas and questions about your life? And tell me, are those preferences and techniques reflected in the kind of work that you do?

Previously in this category: Cue “Pomp and Circumstance”