What did I do when it got too hot yesterday?

So, as I write this to post at 8am it is Thursday July 25th at 4pm and 36c.

However, though my post for Thursday July 25th was “Too hot to think“, somehow I found a creative solution to the heat.

I’m sitting here in cool air conditioning in what amounts to a totally private workspace and it is even a cafe serving coffee and protein shakes. I am the only customer from 1:30pm to about 6pm.

Makes me think about creative solutions and where they come from once again.

Now, I work from home a lot, but as with most of London, my apartment has no air conditioning and, with all-time record high temperatures forecast for today, by 8am it was 29c inside and forecast to be WAY hotter as the day went on.

As it turned out, I had booked a spinning class for 9:30am, and as I finished that, I realised they had that rarest of commodities in my neighbourhood, air conditioning. I thought for a moment, then asked if they remained open all afternoon even though they had no classes from 1:30 to 6:30pm. They do!

I then contacted the two people in other countries that I had calls booked with for the afternoon and asked them to reschedule to other days, a rare request and one they were happy to accommodate rather than me trying to focus in the heat.

So, here I am, working away for the afternoon.. and as I finish writing this, the manager has just asked me if I’d like a smoothie on the house as I’ve been sitting here quietly working in a corner all afternoon.

Bonus!

The only other place in my area with air conditioning is a chain coffee shop which is absolutely packed, yet here I am on my own, in peace, with VIP service.

So, where do creative and out of the box solutions like this come from?

I wrote two posts on this earlier this week (before it got so hot!), anchored around my definition of innovation:

“Innovation = doing things differently and doing different things”

Creative solutions come from creative thinking. Those two posts were:

“Want to be creative? Walk a different route to work“

and

“Go and learn something totally different“

One other post that comes to mind:

“Intelligence is both Fluid and Crystallised“

As I get older it takes longer to get warm in spinning class (I felt it for sure this morning!), plus injuries takes longer to heal. Mentally we can retain less information in short term memory, we lose some “raw intellectual horsepower”. some “fluid intelligence”. However, as we age our “crystallised intelligence” actually increases.

To me that feels like an ability to very quickly be able to “join the dots” between various ideas and thoughts, sometimes even without consciously thinking about it.

This morning I worked out almost instantly that a creative solution for me to working in the heat would be to utilise the AC in the spinning studio cafe.

As you can tell, I’m quite pleased with that idea crystallising.

For Londoners who are reading this, what did you do in the heat yesterday?