Well, it’s not too much of a step forward – we are after all “artists”! I’ve taken them a step forward and replaced “artists” with principals. Originally the sayings came in a set of 55 separate cards that wikipedia tells me “offered a challenging constraint intended to help artists (particularly musicians) break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. These days you can go straight to and click a button that will give you a random oblique thought provoking one liner. It’s a little bit more complex than David’s Positivity button, and not quite as deep as all the stuff philosophized over by the Stoics – but essentially it’s all the same A way of looking at the current situation and trying to make some sense of it.Įno’s Oblique Strategies are a set of provocations and ideas that can help you look at your situation from a different view point. In 1975 he teamed up with an artist called Peter Schmidtt to design a box of cards called oblique strategies. So as I was spending the time tidying up the piles on my desk and shredding months of plan workings that all led to the master plan that I had just landed, I got to thinking more about David’s post and his Positivity Button.īrian Eno is better known as a musician/producer who has worked with the likes of U2, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Coldplay to name a few. It’s about giving yourself the permission to give yourself some slack. Remember, this is quite different to being a Better Slacker. You well might, but you might also be better off taking that breather.

If you want to do some of the needs – all good! Jump right in! But don’t put the pressure on yourself to believe that this is the time for you to get ahead.

Instead, use the time to do something in your school that you want to do. It was a good reminder too that when those spaces afford themselves, don’t go packing them full of things that need to happen. But on Friday the stars aligned and there was nothing but space. My empty calendar on Friday could quite as easily have filled itself with all sorts of school led maladies. The difficulty is knowing when this is about to happen. There are ebbs and flows in this job, and every now and again you’ll get through it all and have time to breathe. You’ll know those types of times well I suspect.īut it did highlight something to me though that I should have reminded myself at the time. And it had been like this for a long time. It came at a particularly tricky and difficult time – full of plans that really had to fall like dominoes in the right direction for it all to come to fruition. An empty calendar.ĭon’t get me wrong, there was still plenty to do, but an empty calendar is pretty rare these days. Last Friday when David published his awesomely simple “The Positivity Button” blog, I found myself with something that hasn’t happened in months.

Brian eno oblique strategies cards