I’m an ideas man, an ideas man I am. Following on from my past question here about idea capture, the next step is obviously what you do with those captured ideas. As I said, I have a huge backlog of ideas, hundreds of them are rather fleshed out film ideas that will never be actioned upon. I’m not a very productive person and I believe that what I need to do is radically change my intuitive decision-making model about which ideas I “action” or commit to follow through with. Which begs the question:

So... what might that decision model look like?

Just to be clear, I’m not expecting anything close to all my ideas to be actioned upon. As arbitrary and generous as it is, Sturgeon’s Law feels like a good rule of thumb. If I have 1000 ideas, then 100 should be non-crap or even worth committing to. If I have 350 film ideas, then up to 35 of them should be “non-crap”. I’m not saying I should have 35 completed films, but I should have completed more films in the past 3 years than I have^[1]. And I suspect the problem lies with how I choose ideas.

How do I choose ideas at the moment?

Inspired by Douglas Hubbard’s book How to Measure Anything I looked at my most recent projects he suggests evaluating how an organization currently makes decisions, so I walked backwards from my current projects that were once ideas and tried to find out how I made those decisions. I also looked at which ideas I rejected to get the full picture of my current decision making model.

Finding consistent criteria for my decisions was quite tricky^[2], especially since some criterion overlapped with others, but there was a high degree of consistency. The glib version is I tended towards ideas that were:

• Near-term actionable (can start within 7 days, ideally within the next 30 hours)
• High certainty of completion: which usually meant didn’t require outside assistance or adjudication
• At least a tenuous connection to my career goals

Some obviously irrational patterns emerged:

• I’m attracted to false industry – what I mean is if there are two ideas, one which has a chance of achieving some goal but I can’t act upon it today; and another goal which has no chance but is feasible to start right now – I’ll pick the right now idea. For example, earlier this year I tried to do “one pantomime routine a day”, to what end? Something vaguely about learning the skills of nonverbal communication. But the point was it was instantly actionable and I could do it every day.
  This is because doing “nothing” fills me with shame. So I’m prone to the false industry of quota-filling.
• I’m overly averse to uncertainty – particularly adjudication by others: for example, I’ve always had a vague guilt about not cold calling powerful people, after all what have I got to lose except for maybe a few hours of research? But I don’t because it’s not up to me whether I get through or whether I hit the mark. It’s entirely down to the caprice of the gatekeepers or the person and what they are feeling on that day.
• Tenuousness of connection to goals - example - I make music videos, so the pantomime exercise has a tenuous connection to my career: music videos have no dialogue, neither does pantomime. Becoming a good mime artist should make me a better music video director, right? riiiiight?

How might I fix these irrational patterns?

Fixing Uncertainty: I feel like the aversion to uncertainty is relatively easy to fix, it’s simply a matter of persuasive framing. To look less at the probability of success or maybe to look at a bundle of ideas as a portfolio: for example, if I have 10 ideas, and conveniently enough they all have a 15% probability of succeeding, they each only take 30 minutes to execute and cost virtually no money. So I determine that I can spare 5 hours, considering that between them there is an overwhelming probability at least one will succeed.

Fixing Tenuousness: I am also certain that the tenuousness of many ideas I choose to my goals is a symptom of being irrationally attracted to false industry. And if I solve that then the connections between the ideas I choose and the impact they will have on achieving my goals will be much more direct and tangible. 

False Industry... Uh oh: I’m less sure about how to avoid false industry – because to avoid false industry I must get better at identifying “true industry”. I tried to dig deeper, investigating what commonalities the ideas I actioned had, and what ones I rejected for not being actionable were. I discovered that I don’t so much reject or rule out ideas as non-actionable, I just sort of forget about them because I don’t know where to start and prioritize more immediate ones.

How do I currently determine what is near-term actionable?

What ideas that I had actioned or commit to tended to have was these commonalities:

• They simply involved a writing quota, writing X amount of words every day
• They cost next to no money
• If they weren’t a writing activity, they were something which I could picture in my mind vividly – that often meant I could see fragments of the finished product in my mind like gestures, gaits, body language, colour schemes, specific camera angles and framing
• They didn’t require a collaborator, of if they did, they were someone I knew 100% they would be on-board with

What ideas I de-prioritized or felt weren't actionable weren't actually rejected outright, more they fell to the bottom of the pile and became forgotten about. Although some commonalities they had were:

• Costs tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions, especially for transport and accommodation and insurance and legal fees; such as a period film with period costumes and props and set-dressings
• Require filming permission from local or national governments, world class racetracks or other exclusive locations
• Can't be started in the next week
• Lacked "Structure" - The single most common bottleneck, even for ideas I did commit to only to later became “stuck” on or “indefinitely took a hiatus” from was that of Structure. This is a problem that any author, songwriter, filmmaker, even a painter understands. Whether it was a documentary, a comedy, an essay – the ideas I rejected either lacked a suitable “format” or “structure” – which glibly means that there wasn’t a satisfying narrative arc, and/or the segues between the segments were arbitrary.

So... what should that decision making model look like?

I’m not sure what the next step is - to be honest I'm not even sure I've gone about this the right way - is looking at how I reject or commit to certain ideas the right approach to developing a better framework?

What should this framework look like? What qualities or metrics would it favour and which would it discount? How would it compare to and improve my current decision making model? In particular, how should I determine what is “near term actionable”?
 

1. ^{^}

   Since 2020 I have made no feature length films, nor started pre-production on any. I have made maybe 2 short films. And a handful of music videos. Most of those film ideas are feature length ideas not shorts. Not everybody can be as prolific Clint Eastwood or Woody Allen or even R.W. Fassbinder, they have/d well-oiled production machines that facilitated yearly film productions. Most independent filmmakers take many years to put complete feature film productions. My only feature film took me almost 3 years.

2. ^{^}

   I imagine that this will always be a tricky process because, well, human.