How Structure and Process Enhance Your Creativity

The habits of prolific creators are driven by structure and process. Paradoxically, structure and process enable spontaneity and creative insights. A lack of structure and process increases the need for willpower, causes decision fatigue, and makes it much more difficult to manage our time energy and attention.

We release a new episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast every Monday and Wednesday. There are several parts to creating an episode. They include editing the interviews, adding the advertisements, uploading to our system and much more. It’s somewhat time consuming and tedious. It requires lots of micro-decisions, and they’re not incredibly high value when compared to conducting the interview or writing an article. But by having a structure and process in place, I don’t waste cognitive bandwidth on something of low value.

The Power of Externalization

People at the top of their professions, in particular, those known for their creativity and effectiveness, use systems of attention and memory external to their brain as much as they can. — Daniel Levitin

Throughout our lives, we do many things that are repetitive.

• Where we store things
• Our morning routines
• Our route to work

In his book, The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin talks about how we can use a concept known as externalization. The brain is a lousy place to store information like a task list, the day the rent is due, etc, etc. By writing something down or storing it somewhere outside our brain, we free up cognitive bandwidth. Hence the popularity of tools like Evernote, Planners, and Moleskine notebooks. According to Levitin

Finding things without rummaging saves mental energy for more important creative tasks. It is in fact physiologically comforting to avoid the stress of wondering whether or not we’re ever going to find what we’re looking for. Not finding something thrusts the mind into a fog of confusion, a toxic vigilance mode that is neither focused nor relaxed.

After reading The Checklist Manifesto and Willpower, I finally decided to create a checklist for our production process. It’s made my entire workflow more efficient, and my mind is free for more creative thinking. A good test for the efficiency of your workflow is whether or not you could hand it someone else and they could repeat the steps without you watching over their shoulder.

By externalizing the monotonous and mundane, we create space for what’s meaningful.

Systems and Lead Measures

Writing 1000 words a day is really a system and a practice. Because I’ve already decided that I’m going to write 1000 words no matter what, I don’t waste my decision-making capacity or willpower on something as arbitrary as word count.You can either waste cognitive bandwidth on the question of how much you’re going to write today or what you’re going to write about today. By removing word count as one of your decisions, you can focus on the actual writing.

I have a goal to hit the NY times Best Seller List. The problem is that I really have no control over that goal. But what I do control is the energy I put into the writing and marketing of my book.

In their book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, the authors make a distinction between what they call lag and lead measures. Lag measures are what we typically think of when we set goals (i.e, my example of the NY times best seller list, a certain revenue goal, etc, etc). Lead measures are the actions that have the possibility to impact the lead measure (i.e. writing 1000 words a day).

Remember, the ideal lead measure is an action that moves the lag measure and that the team can readily take without a significant dependence on another team. — The 4 Disciplines of Execution

In other words, focus on what you can control, and don’t sweat too much about what you don’t.

Time and Scheduling

It’s been said that millionaire’s don’t use to do lists which made a fairly convincing case for a different approach to managing time. That was to schedule everything on my calendar.

• Even though I write every morning, the time from 6am-10am is blocked out on my calendar for writing and Deep Work.
• Every day at 2 pm I either go for a walk or just completely unplug.
• Every Thursday afternoon I do editing and production work for the following week.
• Tools like Calendly and Schedule Once are excellent for this.

While imposing so much structure and process on our work might make things seem rigid, it actually enhances creativity.

I’m the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast.

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