I started out with the procedure I describe here, as a warmup. I got to number 11 in the first three minutes, then when I started the second half of the procedure I just kept going.
This list took me about 30 minutes, so it’s probably not the same as “the best 50 ideas I can come up with in an hour”. If I were going to do another 30 minutes to make a better list, I think I’d highlight my favorite ideas so far, ask myself what it was like to come up with those ones in particular, and try to adopt more of whatever mental postures those are for the rest of the time. I expect I’d have fewer ideas in the subsequent half hour, but they’d probably be more to my liking, on average.
A different thing I think I could do with that second half hour to make a better list would be to pick several of the items from the first list that seem like they could use further development, perhaps because they have an obvious practical flaw (such as “but there’s no air between the Earth and the moon!”) and take them as prompts, each for three to five minutes.
If I wanted to just explode this list into way more ideas that are all over the place, I’d try the grid method I describe at the bottom of the document I linked above.
I started out with the procedure I describe here, as a warmup. I got to number 11 in the first three minutes, then when I started the second half of the procedure I just kept going.
This list took me about 30 minutes, so it’s probably not the same as “the best 50 ideas I can come up with in an hour”. If I were going to do another 30 minutes to make a better list, I think I’d highlight my favorite ideas so far, ask myself what it was like to come up with those ones in particular, and try to adopt more of whatever mental postures those are for the rest of the time. I expect I’d have fewer ideas in the subsequent half hour, but they’d probably be more to my liking, on average.
A different thing I think I could do with that second half hour to make a better list would be to pick several of the items from the first list that seem like they could use further development, perhaps because they have an obvious practical flaw (such as “but there’s no air between the Earth and the moon!”) and take them as prompts, each for three to five minutes.
If I wanted to just explode this list into way more ideas that are all over the place, I’d try the grid method I describe at the bottom of the document I linked above.