Evil Brainstorming is a Great Idea

a wild way to solve a problem

You can listen to an audio version of this newsletter above. Please note that this is unedited and I’m recording in my home office. You may hear some house settling or cat sneezing sounds in the background.

Before we get started, I want to share the ways we can work together.

I’m running a workshop for PhD Life Raft’s Month of Mondays on June 12th (it’s live and recorded). I’m currently accepting new 1-on-1 coaching clients (10% discount for paid tending subscribers), booking workshops with universities and organizations, offering my 6-week Intentionally Productive Scholars Program for undergraduates, and building a waitlist for Perceptible Progress: A Goals Course, which I plan to run in July. If you’re curious about any of these, reach out via email (Kate@KateHenry.com) or schedule yourself in for a free 30-minute chat with me. Thanks!

Umbrella on a countryside by Konstantin Planinski.

What’s Evil Brainstorming?

I learned about Evil Brainstorming from the TikTok creator and graphic designer, David Officer, and I knew it would be a great tool for folks who are working on developing more sustainable productivity practices. Here’s a link to Officer’s Evil Brainstorming video, which I’ll summarize below before I put it to use to solve some productivity quandaries.

Let’s imagine you have a problem. Officer suggests that, instead of looking at your problem and thinking “how can I fix this?,” you’re going to look at it and think “how can I make this infinitely worse? If I was an absolute madman, how could I take this problem and exacerbate it beyond all reason?”

Take the example of a coffee shop owner who wants to improve the ambiance of her shop. Instead of asking her team how to make it better, she asks how they could make it infinitely worse. Her employees excitedly share some villainous ideas: bash in the windows, install sticky carpets and constant flickering lightbulbs. Yikes.

The trick, then, is to reframe the evil ideas to answer the question “What can we do to make sure we are the polar opposite of this?” While our problems and solutions aren’t always this clear cut, as a brainstorming tool, the evil-to-good reframe is a nice way to come at a problem and hopefully spark new ideas we might otherwise have difficulty accessing.

Let’s apply it to our productivity practices.

Problem: I have a chapter draft due next week and I’m not done.

Evil Brainstorming or How I Could Make This Infinitely Worse:

• I could plagiarize.

• I could spend all my time copy-editing one paragraph so I have one really good paragraph but nothing else.

• I could take up a new hobby and spend the next few days doing that.

• I could send my advisor/editor/agent a gif of middle fingers with the note “I QUIT,” skip town, change my name, and start a new life as a cowboy.

Reframe or How I Could Do The Polar Opposite Of This:

• Write a brain dump of all of my original ideas that could go into my chapter.

• Write an outline of the chapter with sections and sub-sections that I can fill in.

• Reschedule any tasks, meetings, hobbies, or events that are not must-do activities in the next few days so I can focus on my writing.

• Determine which activities can help me rest and recharge as I’m working on my writing and intentionally schedule them during breaks or at the end of my writing time.

• Email my advisor/editor/agent to politely request for an extension.

Now You Try It

Use the following template to brainstorm your own solutions:

• Problem:

• Evil Brainstorming or How I Could Make This Infinitely Worse:

• Reframe or How I Could Do The Polar Opposite Of This:

I’d love to hear what you think about this approach. When do you think it could help you? What are some of your evil brainstorms/reframed solutions? Feel free to share below or via an email.

Curiosities

This section of my letters is for things that made me say “hmmm” or “wow!” recently.

• Thanks to readers who responded to my request for magic school books! You all have great taste. I read and enjoyed Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education and I just started Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside. Novik’s book features a lot of dangerous magical creatures at a boarding school, a misanthropic-but-lovable main character, and a literal void that abuts the students’ bedrooms. I’m only 100 pages into Foundyside (it’s over 500 long), but I am loving the fast-paced dialogue, world-building, and the relationship between two of the main characters, a 5-foot-tall thief named Sancia and a sassy talking key (yep, you read that right).

• It’s finally hot out which means it’s time for me to make spring rolls with peanut sauce. Here’s the peanut sauce recipe I use.

• I also recently made this matcha mint almond flour cookie recipe. It’s really yummy, and I just put chocolate chips in instead of melting them as a coating.

For Your Consideration

• Follow me on Instagram

• Order my book, Tend to It: A Holistic Guide to Intentional Productivity

• Listen to my podcast interviews

xo,

Dr. Kate

Kate writing in a notebook. Photo by Amanda Macchia.