A simple way to turn half-baked ideas into solid plans

Amy Shearn
Forge
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1 min readMar 23, 2021

🤔 Today’s tip: Schedule a “hunch hour.”

Brainstorm sessions can be useful, but they can also be intimidating. Fred Dust recently wrote on Medium about an alternative: the hunch hour. “A hunch is a whisper of an idea — something that might come to you on a long walk or in the shower. Usually, it’s something so half-baked that you’d normally never utter it aloud, and therefore, it will never become what it could.”

The key is that the feedback that participants receive should be just as half-baked. “You’re not telling the person they’re wrong but rather surfacing a tension in your thinking,” Dust writes. “This allows critiques to be expressed in an open, nonthreatening way.” It also opens things up for some pretty useful conversations.

We have a hunch it’ll work for you, too.

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Amy Shearn
Forge

Formerly: Editor of Creators Hub, Human Parts // Ongoingly: Novelist, Essayist, Person