As I went through school, I was constantly being ridiculed for doodling in my notebooks, on pieces of paper, and occasionally in my books for class. Traditionally, people have seen doodling as a distraction, something to entertain ourselves because the subject matter at hand is too boring to catch our attention. However, according to recent research, doodling is your mind spontaneously reacting with the information it receives in an attempt to understand this information more clearly and concisely.
Sunni Brown, author of The Doodle Revolution, argues that doodling is about staying engaged, processing information, and communicating that onto a page. To effectively doodle, Brown emphasizes that one must learn the visual alphabet and find their doodle DNA, or their own unique way of doodling what they are learning. To become a successful doodler, that is, one that gains deeper understanding of the subject at hand through doodling, one must not be concerned with what their doodle looks like. Brown claims this is the biggest setback to successful doodling.
So what does this mean for being a more productive worker? Brown calls for the creation of a whiteboard culture within the workplace. Visual thinking can accelerate the ideation process, and help you understand complexities more easily. If you know you are visual learner, why not give it a shot? The worst that can happen is a few bad drawings!
