I've fallen off the journaling wagon lately though, but inspired by former Lifehacker editor D. Keith Robinson's tweet tonight, I'm getting back on using Buster Benson's 750 Words webapp. The concept of 750 Words is simple: every day, you type 750 words--the equivalent of three pages--of stream of conscious, whatever you want, free writing. You earn points and badges for every day you type any number of words. Your entries, which are private by default (despite the somewhat alarming Facebook Connect login), can be exported at any point. Buster's one of the kings of personal data visualization (just look at the guy's homepage), so it makes sense that when you're done writing you get all these interesting analytics and charts about your piece, like how long it took you, what words you used the most, and what you talked about. Explore the public stats page to get a taste. Here's a screenshot of the data I got after writing my first entry tonight, a literal braindump of the most random thoughts I had about today.

Despite just completing a 39,000 word book manuscript and spending four years blogging daily, writing those 750 free-think words tonight wasn't easy. Still, I signed up for the 750 Words March challenge, promising myself a mint chocolate chip shake if I file 750 a day in March. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, thanks to Buster for creating such a quirky-cool webapp. Looking forward to spending time in it this month.

750 Words

By most measures, we spend about a third of our time daydreaming, yet our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments. Left to its own devices, our brain activates several areas associated with complex problem solving, which researchers had previously assumed were dormant during daydreams. Moreover, it appears to be the only time these areas work in unison.

Of course, just sitting around doing nothing doesn't mean you'll solve the world's problems. In fact, the exact ingredients of the "Eureka moment" are not yet known, but just as luck favors the prepared, so does insight--and it's not just expertise that matters. Your attitude factors in as well.

Even before we are presented with a problem, our state of mind can affect whether or not we will likely resort to insightful thinking. People in a positive mood were more likely to experience an insight, researchers at Drexel and Northwestern found.

Over the last few weeks I've been waist-high in a new programming project, and after a few hours of intense PHP-wrangling I find it super-helpful to gaze out the window or at the ceiling and daydream about nothing in particular with a notebook and pen nearby. That's the time I'm most likely to come up with that bugfix, data structure design, or logic flow that wasn't clear in the heat of the work.

A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight [The Wall Street Journal]