The Gestalt's Garden

Thinking over time produces good ideas

| 3 min (734 words)
#creativity #productivity #thinking-deeply

Hello again! :-)

November has been a really busy month for me. So much so that I couldn’t find the time—for the sake of my mental health—to write a post for the Gestalt’s Garden.

Now a new period of order is beginning in my life and my intention is to take advantage of it to write here more frequently.

However, even though I have not been writing posts, I have been implementing many improvements in:

The new notes section

I don’t often advertise it, but the Gestalt’s Garden has a website of its own. I imagine that, if you are subscribed to my Substack, you will rarely visit the website: except when you occasionally click on one of the links to previous posts (they always redirect to the website).

Since I launched the site (a year and a half ago) I have been adding small improvements, aesthetic and functional, constantly throughout the months.

This November, I’ve added a new functional improvement: the notes section.

Notes are short texts with «half-thought ideas». My intention is to show you what I’m working on and thinking about in my day-to-day life. So it’s not about elaborate writing: I leave that for the posts (like the one you are reading right now).

At the end of this post, you have a list of the notes I’ve written so far so you can see what I mean :-)

I am passionate to see how, little by little, the space of the Gestalt’s Garden is becoming more refined. Now I feel I’m much closer to where I’d like to be, but it’s really a process without end: there will always be the possibility to make one more small improvement.

The calendar of Dos Punts

Finally, before I end this post, I want to recommend something to you.

My partner, Anna, runs a design and illustration studio, Dos Punts, together with a friend. Since they started working at Dos Punts, they design a new calendar every year. From my privileged perspective, I can see how, over the years, they have accumulated improvements both in the calendar itself and in the creative process to create it.

This year’s calendar reflects just that: a process of conscious and constant improvement over time. Or, in other words, this year’s calendar is really close to materialising Dos Punts’s personal and aesthetic vision of what a calendar should be.

Dos Punts’s calendar for 2024

My recommendation is that you take a look at Dos Punts’s Instagram to see how this creative project has evolved over time. And, if you like what you see, consider buying it! Because the calendar is a limited edition and there are really few left :-)

Conclusion: Think over time

Both the Gestalt’s Garden website and the Dos Punts calendar have something in common: they are creative projects, developed over time, to find the best solution to a specific problem.

More and more I see the same pattern repeating itself: “Great ideas are often the result of thinking about the same problem over time”.

So the real challenge is how to achieve that «thinking over time», because the time needed can be really big: months, years, decades,…. a lifetime.

And you, what specific problem are you thinking about throughout your life?

You can answer me in the comments or directly to this email. In both cases, I’ll get back to you :-)

List of notes:

Here’s a list of the notes I’ve written so far. If you follow me on Twitter/X or Substack, you’ve probably already come across some of them.

Posts that reference to this post:

Follow me on Substack

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