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Creative Systems
To many creators, the idea of systems being helpful, let alone essential to creativity is anathema.
There’s a deeply ingrained belief in many of us that the purest form of creativity — the kind the produces the most transcendent work with the most depth — can only come from sudden, sporadic bursts of inspiration.
Systems evoke images of factories and assembly lines, decidedly uncreative work, and as a result, we find ourselves rejecting the basic concept of systems on principal.
But there are many types of systems, some of which can greatly lubricate the creative process and allow us to get to the crux of what we’re trying to say with our work faster.
These systems can be set up within our creative process itself or to simplify the rest of our lives and make more space for our creativity to thrive.
When I used to write and record music, I had a highly systematized folder structure on my computer. I had a system for storing my instruments and recording equipment so that within two minutes of having an idea, I could be recording it and working on it.
These were all organizational systems that enabled me to bypass what had previously been a tedious setup process that often resulted in the idea dying while I was busy finding and plugging in microphones, cables, hard drives, and so on.
