How to generate ideas: The Office Casual way (video)

Folks have asked me how I come up with my ideas for these videos. Hence, a video on the topic (with lots of links below). Can you share how you come up with your ideas? Add a comment below.

Read more about the things I talked about in the video:

Scene 1: My Office

• The best way to learn about dragging in Outlook is to just start doing it. Point to an item, hold the left mouse button and drag. You can read the directions at Office.com for Outlook 2003 or how to respond to an email with a meeting request in Outlook 2010.

Scene 2: In the wild

• Matt Richtel won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Driven to Distraction, a series of articles in The New York Times that begat his new section, Your Brain on Computers, which is chock-full of insights and studies I mention in the video.
• The study about downtime is from University of Michigan neuroscientist Marc Berman. There is also an interesting 11-minute podcast interview with Dr. Berman at the Sound Medicine site.
• And if you have kids, it's important to learn what they are doing online, even their pediatrician wants to know, (read the NPR article).

Scene 3: On the bench

• Download the OneNote App for the iPhone and read a review about it (including in-depth directions) on the OneNote blog.
• Find out how to get the free Office Web Apps at Office.com.
• Learn more about Office Mobile for the Windows Phone 7.

Scene 4: In the gallery

• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is available in many editions. I used this paperback version.
• At Julia's website, you can download a free .pdf explaining the why and how and the basic tools: the Morning Pages and the Artist's Date.

Scene 5: Back in the Office

• Read on Office.com about adding and changing resources in the Research tool, or jump into a full course training on Research in the Office programs.
• Learn about the thesaurus for Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010 at Office.com.

And here's a bit we mentioned earlier in the blog about a free creativity test from the Scientific American Mind folks.

--Doug Thomas