Resilient creative processes
Sometimes when I have a dozen tabs open (which is far too many compared to my normal amount of 2-3) and a bunch of stuff lined up to read, I wonder: if I miss these ideas that are open before me this time around — like, if I forget about what I read, forget to read them, or misunderstand them — would I encounter these ideas again? If I don't cross paths with these ideas and the ideas they will lead to now, will those ideas cross paths with me again in the future?
Obviously, this varies on the type of information and topic, but I think it's an interesting idea to entertain, that I'm calling the resilience of a creative process.
In a resilient creative process, similar ideas emerge in dense, connected forests over and over again, so missing any single idea once doesn't influence the general path I take through my idea maze.
In a brittle creative process, connections between ideas are sparse, but ideas could cover a wider ground together. The cost of this breadth is that missing an idea somewhere might mean you don't hit upon that one insight that you need to complete the next step in your work.
Recognizing this spectrum, it might be interesting to intentionally try to make a creative process more resilient or more sparse, depending on the subject matter.