I’m a systems nerd.
Not a “everything must be in precisely the right place, happen at precisely the right time, in precisely the right way” kind of nerd, mind you.
No, I’m more of a “build and tweak systems ad infinitum as a way to procrastinate on other work” kind of nerd.
As far as forms of procrastination go, systems-tweaking must surely rank among the best.
This highly-biased personal assessment is based primarily on the unique and wonderful way in which working on systems can grant a deep-seated feeling of productivity… while entirely avoiding moving the needle on the real work that needs to be done.
When it comes to procrastination, that’s pretty much the dream, right?
Of course I know that while I might tell myself I’m being responsible and productive when working on systems, I’m really in avoidance mode. My version of avoidance happens to be accompanied by a positive outcome, but it’s avoidance nonetheless.
Sometimes I procrastinate on client work or admin.
But most of the time, the work I’m avoiding is the difficult, uncertain creative work that goes into advancing my own creative projects.
If I had to guess, I’d say you probably spend a good deal of time avoiding this type of work yourself.
The irony, of course, is that this is the work most of us spend our days wishing we could do more of.
While we might be bogged down in client work or day jobs right now, we convince ourselves that if we work just a little harder, for just a little longer, we’ll reach a point where we can dedicate more time to the creative work we love.
Then, in those rare moments when the time does open up, we do almost everything in our power to avoid it.
There are a number of reasons we might struggle to take action when it comes to our creative work including many of the usual suspects you’ve likely heard before.
Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of disappointing others, fear of disappointing ourselves, fear of being found out as a fraud… the list of fears is long indeed.
But I think the biggest reason for our avoidance is more practical, mundane even.
We simply don’t know where to start.
Whether we’re working on a book, podcast, product, website redesign, or any other creative project, the starting point is almost some form of a blank page.
As you’ve probably experienced, blank pages are far from conducive for sparking creative work.
Fortunately, there’s an incredibly simple solution to bypassing this particular obstacle, and with it, much of the time we spend avoiding the work to be done.
The solution?
Don’t start from a blank page.
Creative work, it turns out, is like a coral reef. The raw materials are constantly floating around in the ether, but require a frame to attach themselves to before they can flourish and propagate.
Knowing this, our job becomes not to fill the blank page facing us with a fully-formed, coherent idea. Instead, it’s to create a structure around which our ideas can attach and organize themselves.
It just so happens that while systems can be a convenient distraction from doing the work itself, they can also provide us with this structure for each new idea we develop.
Systematizing Your Creative Structure
Over the past couple of years I’ve spent a significant amount of time building out my personal life and business operating system in Notion.
If I was a systems nerd before, Notion and the opportunities it presents have turned me into a full-on fanatic.
One of the aspects I continue to spend the most time on is building out and tweaking templates.
Pretty much anything I do more than once has a template associated with it, and if it doesn’t yet, you better believe that before long, it will.
Initially, my templates were productivity-oriented, designed only to help me save time. But I’ve increasingly been focusing on building creativity-oriented templates which provide the initial structure for ideas and projects to build off of.
Take the podcast episode templates from my old show for example.
Instead of a simple list of tasks, the templates include a series of prompts like:
- Why does this topic matter to my audience?
- What are the common cliches to avoid?
- What’s unique about this guest’s story or approach compared to other similar people?
- Why do I resonate with this topic/guest?
- What’s the one thing I want people to take away from this episode?
- Act 1/2/3 themes
- And more…
These prompts not only inform the direction of the episode content and interview questions, they also help me ensure that the episode is worth creating in the first place.
They also ensure that I’m never faced with a blank page when starting to work on a new episode. If I can’t easily answer a single one of the prompts, that’s a signal that I shouldn’t be working on the episode in the first place.
But podcast templates are just the start.
In addition to the podcast templates, I’ve created templates for blog posts, meetings, workshops, and maybe most importantly large, long-term projects, especially those involving a paid offer.
Much like the podcast episode templates, my project templates contain a series of prompts that helps me define the project, both for myself and my audience while guiding me through the process of building out the list of actionable next steps.
Over time (usually as a form of procrastination), I’ve tweaked these templates to add structure to the specific places I know that I personally get stuck when starting a new project.
The result is that I’m now able to map out the important parts of a new project in 30 minutes and have a concrete, tangible path forward.
Compared to how I used to approach projects, this feels like a superpower.
And it’s a superpower that’s accessible to all of us.
By taking note of where we typically get stuck in our creative work, we can build structures to help us avoid those roadblocks, and, like an artificially seeded reef, give our ideas something to latch onto and build around.
Having these structures ready and waiting to be deployed can save us hours, days, weeks, or even years when it comes to developing our ideas.
Creative Coral Comes In Many Shapes & Sizes
While the beginning of a new project is rife with opportunity for distraction and procrastination, most of the time we spend creatively stuck comes later.
Most often, we find ourselves stuck in the middle of projects or in our ongoing day-to-day creative work.
We get stuck writing blog posts, stuck recording podcasts or YouTube videos, stuck with the small stuff as much as the large.
What’s more, we regularly find ourselves stuck in situations we’ve never encountered before, problems for which we have no template to simply fill in the blanks and work through.
While we might not have the specific blueprints, however, approaching these challenges from a structure-first mentality can help us design those structures on the fly to help us work through all kinds of creative roadblocks big and small, familiar and novel.
Structure + Space = Magic
So much of the challenge of doing creative work is the time we spent stumbling around in the dark, searching for the boundaries of the space in which we’re attempting to create.
What we often forget is that we can create those boundaries ourselves.
And we need to.
While open space allows room for possibility, it’s the structure that provide something solid against which we can both latch onto and push off from.
As such, the structure and the boundaries are just as essential to creativity as the space.
A well-built structure gives us a frame in which to focus our ideas, as well as enough space for serendipity, inspiration, and iteration to work their magic.
The next time you find yourself struggling and frustrated with your attempts to channel that swirly sea of creativity into something solid, stop.
Shift your attention from the ethereal and shapeless to the concrete, the raw materials that are easily grasped and assembled.
Much like it’s easier to pour water into an existing bottle instead of building a bottle around the water, the surest path to producing creative work is to first build the structure and then fill it.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Listen Up Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
Fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilderness of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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