Your Personal Brainstorm

Need to sort out your thoughts? Steal a page (literally) from Nikhita Singh, cofounder of Artificial. Here's how.

- By Liz Brody

Can I make smarter decisions? Lead more effectively? Be more innovative? Entrepreneurs struggle to find clarity on big questions like these because, as you know, they're busy charging through unmapped territory and figuring things out on the run.

You'd think Nikhita Singh would have a high-tech solution to this. The company she cofounded in 2018, Artificial, uses sophisticated AI and robotics to help laboratories digitize and automate their research. But when she wants to think big, she goes decidedly low-tech:

She starts drawing. As often as once a month, she holes up for an hour or two with a pen and notebook and doodles what's on her mind, often adding words to the visuals. "If you type notes, everything gets equal weight, and it's laborious to go back and read," says Singh, who previously researched robot-human interaction in MIT's Media Lab and worked at Palantir. "When you put things in bullets, they're all just a series. But when you draw, the things that are more important will take up more space or grab your attention. It's a way to see, 'Oh, clearly this stuck out to me-three-quarters of my page was devoted to it. Or there are all these doodles around it. Maybe I colored it."