While much creative insight happens while your mind wanders, the key is being able to interrupt your daydreams in time to notice, scientists say. News site Boston.com tells the story of how Arthur Fry dreamed up the multi-million dollar idea of Post-It Notes while daydreaming in church.

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Do-it-yourselfer Chris Connors says that one of the best ways to finish a complex project is to solve the first quick, simple problem—then move onto the next one. While his piece focuses on hardware projects, the concept is applicable to any undertaking. Connors writes:

Quick Simple Problems may seem too easy, and may seem like they don't get you to your destination. What they will do, however is to get you moving. If the problems are truly quick and simple, you will have rapid successes on your project. You won't be sitting there wondering if it will work, you will know whether it works or not, and what the conditions that cause success are. One of the greatest asset you can create for yourself on a project is to feel good about the likelihood of the outcome. If you feel good about it, and feel like you are moving forward, you will have more ambition to try new experiments, which will also move the project toward success.

What's the next quick simple problem you're going to solve today? Tell us about it in the comments.

Aussie expat author Clive James has a regular radio slot on the BBC, and this week he turns his attention to two core Lifehacker topics: office clutter and creative thinking. The whole thing is well worth reading; one of James' most interesting contentions is that a cluttered office can inspire a tolerant attitude:

The best equipped pontificator is the one who is aware of his own propensities towards chaos. Unable to organise his own breakfast, he will be less ready to condemn officials who can't organise an efficient system for sending out student grants, or collecting private information onto a CD-ROM that won't be left on a train.

You can download an audio copy of James' thoughts here, or read the transcript on the link below.

Merlin Mann doesn't crank out posts on software, focus, time-savers, and the other realms of "productivity pr0n" anymore, but he's still got a razor-sharp focus on the kinds of thinking that move things forward. He writes at 43 Folders about trying to get better at his personal photographs, and fighting off the mental nags that try to pull him off-path:

... Even if a given shot is sh*t -- and, most certainly, the vast majority of all my photos are varying degrees of sh*t -- you still learn from the bad ones and no damage is done. Truth is, at the level I'm playing, there's no real cost associated with failure. Unless, you count the damage of working with unrealistic expectations or the paralysing joylessness of the conventional wisdom that only some are "Blessed with Creativity..." [insert Tinkerbell glissando]

The full post gives a tight, clear view on what it takes to learn, and learn honestly, from mistakes and making improvement a real goal. Similar in topic to Ira Glass' advice on working past the awful, and pretty funny, to boot. Photo by craigmdennis.

Neuroscientist William Fishbein says that deep, "slow-wave" sleep can help us commit information to memory, learn new skills, and extrapolate information. Science news site Physorg reports that Fishbein and a graduate student studied English-speaking students' ability to remember Chinese characters they were taught just before a nap (and some without a nap):

Upon awakening, they took a multiple-choice test of Chinese words they'd never seen before. The nappers did much better at automatically learning that the first of the two-pair characters in the words they'd memorized earlier always meant the same thing—female, for example. So they also were more likely than non-nappers to choose that a new word containing that character meant "princess" and not "ape."

Add this latest study fuel to the fire of our unabashed pro-nap agenda; and while you're here see our top 10 ways to sleep smarter and better. Photo by Tina Keller.

Choreographer (and author of The Creative Habit) Twyla Tharp briefly discusses the roles of failure and money in creativity in a short video interview below. There are several good tidbits here, but in the instant-publishing internet age where everyone seems to be competing for the most YouTube views or highest web site traffic, I especially love the bits about how being creative for the sake of admiration and recognition is different than being creative simply because you want to make something. Here's the three-minute, 22-second clip.

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The Oblique Strategies deck of cards by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt offers advice to help you solve a dilemma or push through a creative block, and now the strategies are available on your iPhone for free. Download Oblique Strategies from the iTunes Store for your iPhone or iPod touch, and tap to choose a random card to get you through that deadlock situation today. [via]

A Harvard sleep researcher finds that if you sleep on new ideas and information you're 33% more likely to make connections between distantly related points. Not getting enough shut-eye? Check our top 10 ways to sleep smarter.

It's one thing to come up with a revolutionary idea that could change the world, but it's another thing to protect it so that it doesn't get ripped off by the unscrupulous. The Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys of Australia is offering free half-hour consultations to inventive types to help them understand the different legal options (such as patenting and trademarking) available to protect an idea. Even if you've got a freeware/creative commons mindset, legal protection (or at least half a clue) can be important: do you really want some guy named Steve taking all the credit for your genius?

The closing keynote at Cisco's video-chat heavy Networkers Conference was given by innovation expert Charles Leadbeater. Along with covering how innovation and collaboration need to work hand in hand -- the theme of his recent book We Think -- Leadbeater also made an interesting point regarding how Japanese business, often regarded as particularly convention-driven, ensures a productive workplace environment:

I went to Japan in the early 1990s to discover how Japanese companies collaborate and I met a guy who told me: 'Once every three months we got away to a hot springs hotel, we get completely naked and we get completely drunk. If we didn't go away get naked and get drunk, we'd never come up with any ideas.'

Lest you think that's a wildly unprofessional concept, Leadbetter pointed out that extreme ideas are often the only way to implement radical change: "If people don't think you're completely bonkers, then actually you're not challenging the status quo." In Australia, heading off to a hot spring is probably a tad unlikely, but the Friday-night post-work drink is well-established. Do you find that helps in keeping the office humming, or does it just lead to needing a Bloody Mary the next morning? Share your thoughts in the comments.