It Boggles The Mind
Ever been working right up against a deadline and get sidelined because your brain locked-up and you can’t get to the ideas locked inside? It boggles the mind what a little stress and pressure can do to gunk-up your mental gears. Here is a quick and easy exercise to pick those mental locks and get your productivity back on track.
You’re probably familiar with a word game called Boggle.
Boggle was invented around 50 years ago by Alan Turoff and originally manufactured and distributed by Parker Brothers. Although there are many official expansion versions and blatant knock-off games on the market these days, the original game was a made up of a set of sixteen 6-sided dice with letters on them which fit into a plastic tray that was sectioned in tiny squares (like a plastic waffle) to hold the sixteen individual dice.
Players would cover the tray and shake the dice so they would settle randomly into the grid, turn-over a three minute sand timer and then reveal the jumbled dice. Players then had three minutes to write down as many words as they could find scrambled among the lettered dice. Think of it as a rapid fire word search, but the letters in the words you found did not have to be directly aligned in a row — they had to be adjacent to each other in the tray, but they could forward, backward, up, down, right-angle, or diagonal — as long as one letter in sequence touched the next (you can’t jump over dice to connect a letter) you could use them to create as big of a word as possible.
When the timer ran out, players would go down their list of words and any duplicated among the other players would be scratched from everyone’s list (if everyone had the word ROSE, it was eliminated from scoring). All remaining non-duplicated words were assigned point values based on letter-count and high score won the round.
It was a quick, simple, and fun game — easy to explain the rules to new players and didn’t take all afternoon to play a single game (like Monopoly) — so it got a lot of use in my family while I was growing up.
While I don’t play Boggle against others as much anymore, I do still find this random word hunting engine an invaluable creative tool and a perfect warm-up exercise to clear the mental cobwebs when needed.
The next time you’re experiencing a mental lock (or just need a little jump start), break out your Boggle box (you can buy an official version on Amazon or use this web-based Boggle clone called Serpentine), shake-up a random mix of letters, set the timer, and start writing down as many words as you can before the timer runs out.
Once you have the set of words you discovered, see how you can use them to trigger ideas within your project or simply see how many of those words you can creatively work into your writing. This should be enough to get you rolling, and you can typically pick up speed and accelerate your work from there.
Sure, you could pick-up a book and open to a random page and blindly stab your finger in the middle of the text to find a random word to use. It’s something I’ve done before and it’s not a half-bad way to find inspiration, but that method doesn’t have the “hunting” and “discovery” process that a Boggle tray does.
The simple act of having to find the words and assemble them from the random set of scrambled dice does a lot to loosen up your mind and get it to basically “unclench” itself from being locked-up and freezing out your ability to think creatively. The timer gives you an almost literal ticking clock to force you to focus on finding words, essentially making your brain forget that it closed itself off from you and freeing up access to your ability to think creatively.
The next time you get stuck, Boggle is a great way to shake things loose again!
Photo credit: Stilfehler – under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike license.
