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I have no idea what made me think of this picture the other day.

It’s one of my high school senior pictures, one I insisted upon having taken.

And oh, does it ever show how much of a Scanner I was in high school.

It reminded me of this, from Refuse To Choose:

As kids, most Scanners had been having a great time! At school no one objected to their many interests, because every hour of every student’s school day is devoted to a different subject. But at some point in high school or soon after, everyone was expected to make a choice, and that’s when Scanners ran into trouble. While some people happily narrowed down to one subject, Scanners simply couldn’t.

I personally didn’t start running into the problem of having to choose until I got to college. I went to high school in a very small town, and there were only ninety-three people in my graduating class. The entire high school was only four hundred students.

Fortunately for us Scanners, that meant the school couldn’t apply restrictions like you can’t be in X if you’re in Y. There just weren’t enough students to go around. If you were good at something and wanted to do it, the instructors and coaches had to make it work around your schedule.

There were football games where I’d be on the cheerleading squad, and then dash to the restroom to change into my flag corp dress to march halftime with the marching band. Or similar basketball games where the cheerleading uniform was madly ditched for my dance team attire.

Represented in the photo:

• Academic achievement – The lamp and chevrons (meant to go on the sleeve of a letter jacket) represented my years in National Honor Society. I can’t remember if there are only three because this picture was taken early in my senior year before I got the last one, or because there was no NHS for freshmen.
• Music – Yeah… I lettered in music. I didn’t even know that was a thing until I did it. Don’t remember exactly what qualified me for it, but it could have been any combination of choir, show choir, jazz band, concert band, or…
• All State – More specifically, the Iowa All State Chorus. I made it my junior and senior years.
• Art - You think lettering in music is cool? I also lettered in art club.
• Flag Corps – The large orange flag, of course. I was in the corps my junior and senior years and served as captain my senior year.
• Dance Team – Those would be the silver and (barely visible) purple pom-poms in the lower right corner.
• Mock Trial – I was on a competitive Mock Trial team all through high school that struck fear into the hearts of other teams across Iowa. We went to state all four years, getting as high as 3rd place (we just couldn’t beat our archrival Pocahontas no matter what, it seemed). The gavel trophies are from that, of course, and there’s a large medal right in front of those from the year I won Outstanding Attorney at state.
• Speech Contest – The medals with green ribbons on them are awards from speech contests over the years.
• Athletics – It would be more believable if you knew me to tell you the athletic letter was from my participating in cheerleading and dance team. But nope. I actually lettered in track and cross country. That’s what most of the medals are from as well. This may not seem like a big deal, but you don’t understand – when I was in junior high, I boycotted the mile run portion of the Presidential Fitness Test because I hated running so much. To this day, I have no idea how I even ended up in track and cross country, let alone lettering in both.
• Cheerleading – The big orange box? That’s what I stood on while cheering for home football games. I also designed and painted the front (hey, I didn’t get that art club letter for nothing, baby).

Sound like a lot? Believe it or not, there are actually a lot of activities that were a huge part of my high school experience that aren’t even represented here. Like all the musicals and plays I was in. And the years attending Model Legislature and Model UN (one year we went as the delegation from Vanuatu). And the medals from making it to state History Day competitions several times.

Not much is different today. My fiancé and I went to get our marriage license this morning, and the clerk asked us each our profession.

I wanted to say, “How much space do you have?”

I fell back on my standard answer of “performing artist”. But if you look at the things I’ve been paid for over the past twelve months, the answer should have been something more like “singer-actor-director-voice teacher-piano teacher-photographer”.

That tends to get funny looks, so “performing artist” it is. That is, until Scanner is a recognized profession.

First things first: I vanished for a couple weeks there.

Not because I ran out of post ideas. (A Scanner? Run out of ideas? Never!) No, just because I’ve been über-busy. I’m planning a wedding, and finishing an ebook. So, giving myself a little posting amnesty here.

Also, I think I need to not necessarily hit publish on every post the second I finish writing it. That first week, anytime I’d get an idea, I’d run to my blog and publish it immediately. Not only did this lead to lots of late-night postings (not great for driving traffic), but it also meant that I was posting nearly every day.

Perhaps if I write them and then save them, I’ll have some ready to publish when I go through the seasons of über-busy.

But this is a perfect unintentional segue into what I wanted to talk about today, actually, which is the fact that my brain just moves too freaking fast.

Too fast for what? Um, pretty much for the world.

On the one hand it’s a good thing. I can see, take in, and process new information very quickly. I can look over a situation and analyze it before most people have completely taken it in. Couple this with my ability to be really great at seeing big picture and long term implications of everything I’m presented with, and it’s part of what made me an excellent consultant when I was doing the corporate America thing.

But it gets me into trouble more often than not.

I’m generally a neat, organized person. I get teased for my almost OCD tendencies – all my CD’s and DVD’s are seated perfectly upright in their cases, and said cases are alphabetized. My closet is broken into a handful of style categories, and then sorted by color within those categories.

A place for everything, and everything in its place. Right?

Well… a place for everything, anyway. It’s the everything in it’s place part where it all starts to fall apart. And it’s fault of my Speedy Gonzalez brain.

Preparing a meal is really good example of what happens. I’ll be working. I’m working hard, I’m focused. But I need to eat. I can’t stand to stop working – making food is such mindless activity, no brain stimulation – but I need to eat. So eventually I’ll get up and prepare something as fast as possible, leaving dishes and empty cans and the other acoutrements of meal preparation in my wake. Sometimes things will get rinsed and/or put in the dishwasher, but more often it’s just a race to get back to brain activity as quickly as possible.

Almost anything that I see as a mundane, necessary task gets treated this way. I do the laundry, but never fold it once it comes out of the dryer. (Talk about mind-numbing activity.)

There’s a joke in my family that I never call anyone unless I’m in the car. (Don’t worry, I always use my bluetooth, and in eleven years of owning a cell phone, I have never been in an accident while using my phone.) But in Chicago, things are far away. I’m generally in the car for at least 20 minutes or more any time I get into it. Such wasted time!

My brain cannot tolerate just driving. Sometimes I listen to talk radio or audiobooks or MP3 lessons, sometimes I catch up on phone calls.

So far, you may not be thinking there’s anything terribly novel about this. No one likes to waste time. You’re no different than anyone else.

Ah, but there’s more.

Another family joke is the way I typically have 87 or more Firefox tabs open at one time. Part of this stems from using it as a to-do list. But more frequently, new tabs get opened when I’m waiting for something to load in another one. That’s right – I can’t wait four seconds for a tab to load something, so I open another one to make full use of the time.

One of the biggest places this gets me into trouble is trying to take in information from MP3′s or audiobooks. I do a lot of this – I’m kind of an information product junkie, and I have a lot of lessons and interviews and trainings on my iPod.

And they all talk so sloooooooow.

Okay, I’m sure they don’t, really. It’s my Speedy Gonzalez brain. But believe it or not, there are times where I will actually open up Google Reader and be reading my blogs while simultaneously listening to a lesson on my iPod. The sad thing is, I actually seem to be able to take in all the information from both. (I’m not sure why that’s a sad thing, it just seems like it’s abnormal and therefore should be sad.)

With audiobooks, the iPod has a feature where you can play it at a faster speed. (This fact makes me think that there must be others out there like me, because apparently someone in the Apple programming department thought this was a necessary feature.) Perhaps I need to convert all my MP3 lessons into audiobook format so I can use the feature on them, too.

You may still be thinking that Speedy Gonzalez brain is not all that bad a thing. I mean, look at all the information I can take in! And I will admit, a lot of the time it’s a good thing (except for having a real inability to shut my brain down and just let it relax, but that’s another story for another post…)

But let me tell you, my brain does not make for playing nice with others. It’s not that I intentionally do things to irritate them…

Suppose I’m struggling with a question about how to proceed on something. My lightning brain considers all the different options. Remember how I said I can see the big picture and long-term implications? It’s as if all the different possible paths are laid out in a web in front of me, and I can see them all at once. Like someone handed me a photograph, but everyone else just got an essay. It’s going to be a lot faster for me to process the information in the photo than for them to process the same information in the essay.

So then I ask for advice. But rarely am I given advice that falls outside of the web of the possibilities I’ve already seen. I try to explain to the person that I’ve already considered such an option, and here are the reasons it I’ve already ruled it out. And I’m frequently accused of being difficult or making excuses.

To make it worse, even when I am offered a new possibility that I hadn’t considered… you guessed it, Speedy Gonzalez brain has worked through it all and added it to the web before you can say “¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!”

And if Speedy decides that the new option won’t work, I’m not very good at explaining to the other person the thought process I went through to get there. It just takes so much longer to talk it out than to think it!

The Boy and I run into this a lot. Last weekend I had asked for him to be a second set of eyes on a CSS problem I’d been trying to fix for days on one of my other websites. I sat beside him as he searched Google for a solution. It drove me nuts, because he’d pull up a page and I’d skim over it within about 1-2 seconds and realize that it didn’t contain anything that would help us. Not wanting to miss anything, he’d continue to peruse it for a minute or two.

And by the way, I detest the underlying implication (not from him in that instance necessarily, but from people in general) that I couldn’t have taken in the information so quickly without missing something.

But back to the Google search – not wanting to make waves, and immensely grateful for his troubleshooting help, I let it be. I’d glance at the page, determine it to be unhelpful, and then flipped back to something I could work on with my laptop until he came to the same conclusion and moved on to another page.

I’m curious if this is a Scanner trait, a symptom of ADD, or something else. I’m also a MBTI ENTJ, and one of the characteristics of this type is that ability to see the big picture and all the implications. So perhaps it’s related to that.

Whatever its roots – there are times it’s amazing, and there are times I wish I could just get it to take a spa day.

After a couple days of Scanner’s Prerogative, I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

When last we saw the Idea Lady, she was sorting through some ideas of getting things done, being your best, systematizing, and all sorts of other life skills.

And no, she is not going to write this entire post in the third person.

All right, so something struck me today (a moment of “bing”, as some may call it), and in my very Scanner way I decided to drop everything I was doing at that moment and write a blog post about it.

No, literally. Two minutes ago I was engrossed in something completely different. I got up to turn up the heat and put on a sweatshirt, bing hit, and here I am.

Backstory to the bing

I’ve never been great with to do lists. I want them, I like the neatness and the organization and the satisfaction of crossing something off of them, but I’ve never been good at actually using them.

Putting things on them? Check.

Going back to consult the list for things to do? Umm… well…

I’ve tried a bazillion systems over the years. The one that comes the closest to resonating, that I come back to most frequently, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I think the idea of being stressed because of all the stuff we carry around in our heads is very accurate, and I know it’s one of my biggest problems.

The total GTD system never completely worked for me, though. The “Someday/Maybe” list just wasn’t the right place for the insane schemes brilliant ideas of the Idea Lady, you know?

Barbara Sher’s Scanner Daybook, which I talked about in my very first post ever, was a huge help there. It made so much more sense to sort of journal about the crazy ideas, but in a place that I’d come back and review periodically somewhat like a to do list.

Learning about me

The past few months I’ve been on a mission to really observe, objectively analyze, and understand myself. To that end, I’ve tried to see where the Scanner Daybook Ginormous Book of Awesomeness has helped and where it hasn’t.

For example, after about a month of using it, I realized that I still had an unmet need of having certain ideas heard, so as you know, I started this blog as sort of an online extension of the Book.

Another thing I realized almost immediately was that most of my brainstorms don’t happen when I’m near the Book. A lot of the ideas I most want to capture happen when I’m in the car or otherwise away from home. And the Book of Awesomeness does not travel.

It is the Ginormous Book of Awesomeness, after all. I intentionally bought a huge (11″x14″) hardbound sketch book. I wanted it to feel reverent to write in, so I’d be more likely to a) use it, and b) respect the ideas I put into it.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit in my purse. And if it ever does, will you please politely club me over the head and tell me to get a smaller purse?

So I also bought a sort of Book of Awesomeness, Jr., a pocket sized Moleskine (again with the reverence). It goes with me everywhere, and I can whip it out at any time and scribble down my next plot for world domination.

Since it’s small, I don’t use it in a journaling fashion like I do the Book of Awesomeness. I get just enough detail down to be assured that the idea will not be lost forever in the ether of my mind. At any later point, I can go through and transfer any of the ideas that feel like they more attention into the Book and dive into them with as much detail as I want.

Why it works

It works because it’s easy.

It takes all of three to ten seconds to jot down an idea in Book Jr. But that three to ten seconds gives me peace about letting the idea fade from my brain, knowing it’s safely tucked away in a place I can and will go back to later.

It even takes away some of the stress about the larger Book – just because I am at home with the Book doesn’t mean I can drop everything to spend half an hour writing every time inspiration strikes. But I can always find a few seconds for Book Jr.

It also works because it’s not a to do list. To do lists are for tasks, for things that must be done. This was the part of GTD that never clicked for me – I needed somewhere more special to capture my idea butterflies. I honestly think, being about a month into the Book of Awesomeness, that GTD sounds much more attractive now – for actual tasks, that is.

When it doesn’t

On the flip side, if anything is even the tiniest bit hard about it, I am about 96.2% less likely to actually jot the quick note. If Book Jr. is in the other room and I’m settled on the sofa, the idea will probably just float by.

This was what almost happened tonight, and was the catalyst for this post.

I was working here at my desk, and my Scanner brain (I’ve got to come up with a better term for that) was already starting to move on to another project I wanted to be working on. As I continued to read the thing I was working on, it struck an idea in me that needed to go into Book Jr.

But Book Jr. was not within arm’s reach. Book Jr. was still in my purse, in the other room.

I was already experiencing split focus, between the thing I was reading and the project I wanted to do in the other room, and now I had this third idea floating out there. My likelihood of losing an idea forever is directly related to how many things are stuck in the queue in my head at once, so the split focus meant I needed to get the idea down now before it vanished.

The thing that saved the day was a physical need.

I was cold.

So I abandoned what I’d been reading long enough to go get a sweatshirt and turn up the furnace.

And while I was up, I realized that it didn’t make any sense to not grab Book Jr. and immortalize the idea, so I did.

I felt a tiny wave of peace float over me as I retrieved the small book, knowing that my precious idea had been saved from an almost certain death. And then the bing hit, and I realized that the success of Book Jr. is in its simplicity. It’s the closest thing to a system I’ve ever had, and I’ve been using it faithfully for over a month (which may not sound like much, but is eons in my world).

And then I realized how close I’d come to losing the idea just because the book was in the other freaking room. Another moment of bing: Book Jr. is simple, but even the simplest things can get in its way.

A very educational day in the life of the Idea Lady.

So, what kinds of systems work for you?

A random tidbit from my brain. Because I can.

Can certain types of skills just not be taught?

When I worked in corporate sales and consulting, my company trained us almost obsessively in Neil Rakham’s SPIN® Selling/a> technique (don’t worry, that’s not any kind of affiliate link, just info for the curious).

I interrupt your regularly scheduled blogging for a new feature I’ve decided to start tonight, called The Scanner’s Prerogative.

Part of the reason I started this blog, as you may recall, was to provide a way to clear the decks of my head. Barbara Sher (I promise I won’t mention her in every single post, btw) suggests the use of a “Scanner Daybook” for this purpose – a reverent journal of sorts in which every single fleeting idea is captured in all of its glorious detail.

I do have a physical Scanner Daybook. Although in all honesty, and with all due respect… I think “Scanner Daybook” is a ridiculous name for it. Mine is called The (not so) Crazy Idea Lady’s Ginormous Book of Awesomeness.

And now my secret’s out, you know how this blog got its name.

It’s not an accident that the two share the name, however, because I really see this blog as an extension of the Book of Awesomeness. It’s true that many entries in the Book are still – and may always remain – what Havi Brooks calls tiny, sweet things. They just aren’t ready to be shared with the world.

But for those that are, or for those that just want to make a tentative step outside of my head, this blog is the first place for that to happen.

Including… random thoughts and observations and maybe even an occasional rant. Probably having nothing to do with whatever I’m currently blogging about; because let’s face it, that’s how that Scanner brain rolls. Rapid-fire change of direction.

Like tonight!

I was talking with The Boy (that’s my soon-to-be-hubby) this evening about a hypothesis I’ve formed over the past few years. As we talked, I thought, “I should blog about this! There’s something profound in this! I don’t know what it is yet, but it needs to be outside my head!”

Since said hypothesis has pretty much nothing to do with anything I’ve blogged about thus far, I almost wrote it off.

But then I remember that this is the online extension of the Book of Awesomeness. A place to reverently capture any and all Scanner thoughts and ideas.

And I can write about whatever I want.

So with that, you are witnessing the birth of The Scanner’s Prerogative, a recurring series that will appear on this blog on no particular schedule and completely unrestricted in scope.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say you’re witnessing the conception. Because if I actually started in now on the topic that inspired this new feature in the first place, this individual post would grow long to the point of being offensive.

So tonight’s conception of The Scanner’s Prerogative is just a teaser. You’ll have to stop back tomorrow for the formal birth of this new feature…

“Wow, is there anything you don’t do?”

“I can’t keep up with all your projects – I get tired just thinking about it! How do you do it?”

“You’re so multi-talented, you can pretty much do anything you want, can’t you?

I’ve been fortunate in my life as a Scanner. The comments above (usually meant as compliments) are how my friends and family tend to react to the eleventy billion projects I have going at any given time. I haven’t had to deal with too much of the “Why don’t you just pick something already?”

It’s not all as shiny as it might sound, though.

Long before I knew anything about Scanners or Barbara Sher, I would frequently tell people:

“Yeah, I can do a lot of different things… and it may seem great on the surface, but in reality it works against me most of the time. I may be an 8 in a lot of different things, but the problem is that most opportunities don’t combine all those skills and interests. They only require one particular skill. And if I’m an 8 in that individual skill – well, when someone comes along that’s a 10, the opportunity goes to them instead. Even though they may be a 10 only in that specific area and a 2 at everything else. That area is the only one that counts in that moment, and their single 10 trumps my stack of 8′s every time.”

In her book Refuse To Choose, Barbara talks about how Scanners stay with a new project until a need has been met by it, and once they get that “reward” they lose interest and move on to something else. That underlying need is different for everyone.

For me, the reward is learning the new thing. Saying I’ve had exposure to it. Being able to carry on a halfway intelligent conversation about it. Being able to do the thing, even if only moderately well. Once I’ve gotten that far, my motivation to continue plummets and I’m grabbed by the next shiny, new thing.

If you pick up one of the hundreds of (almost exclusively non-fiction) books from my bookshelves, chances are excellent that you’ll find a bookmark about two or three chapters in.

My hard drive is filled with at least fifty courses, videos and ebooks that I’ve bought from the internet, and yet I don’t think I can name a single one that I’ve gone through in its entirety. (Perhaps I did complete a couple of the shorter ones, although it’s pretty likely that I steamrolled through them in one sitting, far too fast to actually retain anything useful, and then never opened those files again.)

I’ve had a little exposure to a lot of subjects.

It makes me really interesting at parties, I’ll give you that.

But how does it make me a living? How do I survive as a self-employed, self-directed creative and make all those 8′s count for something? How do I make a difference in the world without forcing myself into the mold in which that world expects me to fit?

What does it look like to honor the way my brain works and actually find a way to use it to its greatest potential? How do I need to change my understanding of what that potential is?

I’m still trying to piece all of that together. I’d love it if you join me for the ride.

I think the first time I wanted to start a blog was during the second half of 2006, when I was stuck in bed for six months with a back injury and doing pretty much nothing but surfing the web all day. I wandered into Steve Pavlina’s site, and suddenly I wanted a blog of my very own.

Except I had no ideas.

Now, a little over four years later, I’ve got ideas for two blogs. Blogs which would be tiny components of much bigger businesses I want to start. Blogs that will reach people, change people, help people. I’ve been trying to get at least one of them off the ground for several months, but as of now they’re all still wafting around my neural pathways with no cyber-home.

So, um… I thought I’d start this one instead.

I tend to be a person who jumps from one thing to another pretty quickly. A person who gets really excited about something until something else comes along and then gets really excited about that, too… and never quite sees any of those somethings through to a Real Thing. The somethings live forever in my head.

This process of starting a blog (or two) has become instead a journey of understanding myself and how I work. Because really, what is wrong with me? What kind of a person comes up with multiple ideas each day for new businesses to start, new hobbies to try, new projects to embark upon? I’m not talking about the “Hmm, it might be kinda cool to learn French someday” variety of idea. I’m talking about “OMG I’m going to change the world with this idea, this is the best idea ever, I have to start this idea right now!!”

Yeah, that second one is me.

In recent months I’d actually taken to referring to myself as The Crazy Idea Lady. On the one hand I generally hide all my multitudinous ideas from the people I casually interact with (I’m not that Crazy Idea Lady, the one regaling random strangers with plans for my automatic shirt folder). But with my very closest family and friends, it’s almost impossible to talk about what I do on a day to day basis without revealing at least some of my brainchilds… brainchildren… whatever. Most of the ideas even seem to be met with enthusiasm and encouragement… although that spark does tend to die when I show up with yet another idea, having done little or nothing yet with the previous one. Hence, the birth of The Crazy Idea Lady.

Enter Barbara Sher.

Well, actually, enter Havi Brooks, who indirectly introduced me to the work of Barbara Sher.

According to Barbara, I’m not crazy. I’m not immature and unfocused. I don’t have ADD (which explains why the medication they put me on for it sent my heart into palpitations). I’m not a bad, irresponsible, or flighty person…

I’m a Scanner.

A what?

A Scanner. A person who must pursue lots and lots of different things all at once. “They seem to be highly intelligent, multi-talented people who need to have more interests than the average person,” says Barbara.

I’ll talk a lot more here about being a Scanner in upcoming posts – if you’re a Scanner too, or think you may be one, you may benefit from watching me process what it all means for my life. Or, you may just find yourself entertained in a reality TV kind of way.

But for now, for today, I am going to complete one thing. I’m going to let it not be perfect, I’m going to complete it without getting pulled off onto something more interesting… I’m going to launch this blog with this post.

I’ll figure out what it all means later. But for now, welcome to the home of The (not so) Crazy Idea Lady. It’s sure to be a place of wackiness and self-discovery and hopefully lots of things that will help other people, too. If nothing else, it’ll be an outlet for all the insanity inside my head, clearing the way for more focused energy for my other two blog projects.

Bear with me while I find my voice. Bear with me while I feel out exactly what this site wants to become.

There’s no earthly way of knowing

Which direction we are going.