Productivity Tools Won’t Destroy Creative Work. Don’t Expect a Miracle, Either.
The writing process can seem like endless note-taking for your works in progress. I try everything I can think of to organize various ideas and tasks. The to-do lists I create for a single story or essay, not to mention a novel, fly around my office on papers and sticky notes, in notebooks and digital documents, in recorded voice notes or quickly typed notes on my phone, jotted on the front and back verso page of books. Or my personal weirdest: emails to self, reminders to write a new section or make an edit with something in mind, or think on something, read something, watch something. You may wonder, how many of these attempts to capture the creation of a piece of writing are successfully integrated into the final work? I have no idea.
Occasionally, in a fit of overwhelm, I turn to the tomes of our turn-of-the-century obsession with productivity. Do the productivity systems work, you ask? I’m not really sure. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Getting Things Done by David Allen encourages compiling a list of all of your things to do and breaking each thing into actionable items; then all of the things to do get sorted by project and priority; then the lists of things to do gets reviewed; and then you do (here is a more extensive summary).
I only read the first couple chapters of Getting Things Done (I know, I know). But a few of these strategies have stuck with me. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I list and prioritize. I’ve learned it can be vital to break things down into actionable steps, mostly because my brain doesn’t do this naturally, not even a little bit. I also enjoy reviewing and selecting projects to focus on.
Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban encourages you to visualize all work — from choosing a gift for an aunt to reordering scenes in a short story — as part of a whole, ongoing process. Each action to be taken gets sorted into a few mutable categories: ready to do, doing, complete, and backlog. The emphasis is placed on limiting work in progress, or whatever you place in the “doing” category. The author is certain that you will experience more productivity by limiting your active expectations of yourself, as well as more satisfaction by visualizing all you have completed (again, a more extensive summary).
Granted I don’t write down small, recurring actions such as doing the dishes or eating, and I often forget to do either of those. And it’s impossible to put, “admire the sunlight in the haze breaking through the trees” on a list when you can’t predict that there will be sun or haze. Also, in Personal Kanban, Benson quotes Donald Rumsfeld. That was about where I started skimming. However, I’ve been using the book’s visualization system for ongoing work (still color coding actions into project categories, a habit established from what I learned from Getting Things Done). And instead if the suggested use of sticky notes, I’ve been using Trello, a productivity tool that seems to take a lot of its usability from concepts in both Personal Kanban and Getting Things Done.
What is tricky about using productivity tools for creative work is the strangeness of creative action. I still haven’t found a way to “capture” the ideas or insights that come to me in the shower or on the edges of sleep. Sometimes, the decision to “expand on the characters’ relationship with the city” can’t really be broken down into actionable items. Still, I find great comfort in my lists. I definitely make more deadlines for residencies, fellowships, and other opportunities. The sticky notes and digital notes and scribbled ideas still swirl around my life, and it’s impossible to predict when you might stumble on, during a morning walk, light that changes your mind about the way you wrote a scene. That will never change. But I wouldn’t want it to.
