Creativity is messy

As a digital ops and Notion certified consultant, I am hired to turn someone's scattered system or lack of one into a productivity haven. I have built dozens of digital workspaces for teams to work in, that are bespoke and perfect for their needs. In some cases, they aren't used or are turned back into some variation of the original. I've come to learn that most people need a bit of mess to be creative and too much prescription will be thrown to the wayside in pursuit of getting their work done.

Does this make my work null and void? No. It has informed me how to be a better consultant and less prescriptive with my personal workflows. How do we find the balance between productivity and creativity? When to instill control and when to let freedom of thought take over?

Control

In order for a system to be useful there needs to be consistency and repeatability. This means that things need to look and feel the same across spaces. There also needs to be ways to work on repetitive tasks in a templated or automated manner. These are the limits to which control should be instilled. What does this actually look like?

Setting a Single Source of Truth (SST). This is a place where all information is housed. This can vary from team to team or person to person, but in an ideal workflow – this is where everyone starts their journey, leading to other tools or adjacent workflows.

An SST should house as much internal information as possible. This can and should be the place for all personal or company knowledge, high-level projects, tasks, personal/internal documentation, meeting notes, and portals to get to other tools or services.

In order to enforce control, there needs to be consistent practices and a great user experience (UX). This means that dashboards and landing pages across the SST should feel similar. Meetings and basic task management are handled the same from project to project and team to team.

Control is great in theory, but it will only be accepted and adopted if the team understands how to use it – training and the person(s) know that they have a place and the freedom to get messy.

Freedom

Like with most things, there needs to be a level of freedom within any successful system. If it is too prescriptive people will be resistant to it. While an SST is the foundation of a system, there must be a clear place for the messy and creative work.

You might be thinking that you don't do creative work because you are a project manager or executive assistant (EA), but you do. Everyone has work that falls into the creative bucket. As a project manager, that might be during your timelining process or during budget allocation. As an EA, it might be when you are adjusting calendars. In a system, there needs to be a place for this.

This type of work can happen in various places for various roles. As a project manager of a software development team, that likely happens in a tool like Linear or Jira. As an EA, that likely happens in a calendaring tool like Google Calendar or Outlook. These places are your canvases to create. Your SST might not be the best place for this work, because it might not fit its prescriptive rigidity.

But there are also ways to include the SST in this process. Sure, SSTs are great as jumping-off points – using them to link meeting notes to calendar appointments or setting up basic projects for informational purposes. But there are ways to integrate the messy workflows in your SST too.

Using templates for high-level information and prescriptive structure tends to work best for the work that does best when controlled. This usually takes the form of meeting notes, tasks, and documentation templates.

When getting messy, keep documents more like an open canvas. In a document tool, this could be prompts at the top of a page, but no pre-defined sections or data. Everything here should be created from scratch or manually brought in. If using a board-like tool, these could be stickies or tables, but they should be left mainly empty. Starting points, less guidance.

Templating every workflow is tempting at first. You figure out something that works for you and maybe your team and try to over-optimize the work. Try to lean away from this.

My workflow tends to start in Notion. I keep my high-level information here. When I get creative I tend to head to FigJam, Apple Freeform, Obsidian Canvas, or Goodnotes. These places allow me to think and iterate quickly. They also do not force me to stay within many constraints. Obsidian, Goodnotes, and Apple Freeform also work 100% offline which allows me to get even more creative, due to there being no delays in syncing information. That work can then be turned into something more "final", either in FigJam/Figma, Notion, or Google Sheets.

Organization is great, within reason. Knowing the breakpoint for a controlled system is key. That breakpoint is when freedom should take over. At that point, try to provide as little structure as you can when the work should get messy. This will allow people to work more efficiently and prevent systems from dying out or becoming inconsistent. Messy is creative and creativity is where the real fulfilling work happens. So give yourself and your team room to be messy.