Organizing Creative Professionals: Sorted

It's not how you think, it's how you think about how you think.

When creatives talk about themselves and their habits, one set of terms that seems to come up a lot is "left brain" and "right brain." I've seen people describe themselves as completely one or the other, but frankly, unless the person in question is an extreme medical outlier, that's simply not true. Just about every human being uses both hemispheres of their brain every day.

And yes, I realize that when people say, "Oh, I'm totally right brained," they're not being literal (which would be very left-brained of them). But the language we use about our abilities, our capacity and our functioning can be very powerful; it can open up options to us or close them off sight-unseen. If someone thinks of themselves as being solely right-brained, they're constructing barriers to behaviors they perceive as being left-brained, no matter how useful those behaviors may be or how well that person can already perform those behaviors.

We're getting dry here, and I know the right brain loves itself a metaphor, so here's an example near and dear to my heart. I'm a mesoendomorph, which means I have a big squishy body with a solid layer of muscle underneath the squishyness. My body is very well-suited to Muay Thai kickboxing, which I practice several times a week. My body is *not* very well-suited to running; the body of a runner is much lighter and more streamlined than mine. I often say, "I am not a runner."

But that's not completely true: I am certainly capable of running (especially if I think there's a snake nearby). And most kickboxing classes begin with an aerobic warmup, which usually includes running. So there I am, with a body that's built for kickboxing, doing something that my body isn't ideally designed for. But the bit of running that I do helps me with the kickboxing, helps me do it longer and with more speed, and helps me catch my breath afterward.

So it is with organizing, sorting and planning. These activities might not be the favorite things of creative folks, but I promise you, you can do them. You might have told yourself you can't do these things so often that you actually believe it, but it's simply not true. The good news is not only can you do these things, doing them just a bit on a regular basis can bolster your creative pursuits tremendously.

My upcoming eBook "How to Harness a Hobgoblin" will talk more about how to grow accustomed to doing these left-brain activities. If you're not willing to wait that long to learn how to get and keep yourself Sorted, give me a call or drop me a line.

How have you traditionally thought of yourself, as right-brained or left-brained? (Or neither, or both?) Talk to me about your perceptions of your thought processes in the comments.

What if the muse visits you -- and can't find a place to sit?

I've experienced a kind of neat synchronicity of online memes about creativity lately. On Friday, I watched a fascinating speech by Elizabeth Gilbert on Christine Kane's blog. And over the weekend, I've been reading Productive Flourishing about profitable ways for creative professionals to harness their individual idiosyncracies. Both bloggers understand that you can't exactly set your watch by the visitations of your creative muse. But you can prepare the best possible environment for that muse -- and if you're not careful, you might do something wacky like create the best possible environment for yourself as well.

Here's an example. Imagine that your desk looks like this. Now...

Hey! You just got a great idea! Now's the time to write it down, sketch it out, map it, give it a shape -- oh. You couldn't find your sketchbook, panicked for a bit, lost some of the idea in the panicking, grabbed the envelope your cable bill came in, and managed to get a few words and doodles onto the back of it. Well, it's definitely better than nothing... but now what are you going to do with that envelope? (And if you said "Put it with the other envelopes that I wrote ideas on," you really, really need to give me a call.)

As Charlie at Productive Flourishing put it, "when creativity happens, it’s important for you to be in the position to harness it." That means having a workspace that's functional and inviting -- for you and your creative impulse. That also means knowing what your primary distractions are (email, phone, TV, Facebook, etc.) and knowing how to get focused long enough to honor your visiting muse. And it might mean having a strategy in place in case the muse drops by at a bad time (when you're away from home or fast asleep).

But the cool thing about clearing a space -- physically, time-wise and mentally -- for your muse is that once you've got a place reserved for that divine inspiration, you might find that the muse stops by more often and sticks around a bit longer.

What happened the last time you had a creative brainwave? Were you able to capture it, or is it on the back of a cable bill right about now?

What a cold can teach you about getting Sorted

The cold moved in on Saturday. I spent all Valentine's Day sacked out on the couch, and Sunday wasn't much better. By Monday, I was getting antsy. I had to get things done, dangit! I couldn't let anything like this pesky body get in the way! So I went to a couple of appointments, ran a couple of errands, and went to my Managerial Accounting class. And halfway through that class, the instructor and my project teammates pretty much asked me to go home because I wasn't adding much beyond an unpleasant sinus-based soundtrack.

On the drive home, I had a kind of epiphany, based loosely on a Harry Belafonte song: A house built on a weak foundation will not stand, oh no. In my determination to get stuff I considered important done, no matter what condition my physical foundation was in, I hadn't done anywhere near as good a job on the other stuff as I could have.

And it occurred to me that many folks do that with their professional enterprises, too. Whenever you have to clear a space out of desk clutter to try to do some work, you're working on a weak foundation. Any time you scramble to get stuff done without a workable system for managing your time and energy, you're flying on half power. It's easy enough to say "I don't have time to get this all Sorted," just like I was convinced that I simply didn't have time to be sick, but the truth is that improving your foundation is an investment of time that will reap some major rewards.

Steven Covey calls it Sharpening the Saw. Harry Belafonte might call it working on the foundation. I call it getting Sorted, and it was obvious that I was long overdue for some sorting of my own. So I spent today doing the biological equivalent of a Productive Environment Day™. I got all the fluids, sleep and warmth I could stand, to help my body clear out all the unnecessary stuff that was holding it back. And I can already feel the rewards in the form of nasal passages that work more often than not. Like a Productive Environment Day™, my day of recuperation has allowed me to be more responsive, more resillient and capable of doing my best work.

Does your body need a day of repair and rejuvenation? What about your office or workspace? If you could spend a day clearing out stuff -- biologically or materially -- what would that feel like, and how would you feel afterwards? Let me know in the comments!

In defense of the office

In creative fields, it's not completely unheard of for a professional not to have an office. Perhaps you do your creative work on your laptop in bed, or on the kitchen table between meals, or in a corner of the garage. And it's worked, mostly, so far... although the paper piles are starting to take up an entire side of the room along the floor there. And the shoebox of receipts has finally split a seam on one corner. Hmm. Maybe it's not working that well after all.

There's a strange idea among folks who like to create that having a designated work space will stifle creativity, kill spontaneity, turn creating into Work. But if the space is well planned and part of a supportive physical environment, the very opposite can be true: your creativity will be nurtured in a space where it can grow, your spontaneity won't be shut down by constant searches for the items you need, and when your environment supports you, creating becomes less like work and more like the stuff you were put here to do.

The office, in general, has gotten a bad rep. (My dad used to refer to his workplace as "the orifice." My mom Did Not Like That One Bit.) And in all too many cases, offices are badly designed, badly maintained, overstuffed... you get the point. But it doesn't have to be like that! And when you deliberately create your own workspace, you can ensure that it motivates you to do your best work -- and gives you the space you need to do so. (This is exactly what The Birth of an Office service provides.)

If you could design your ideal office space, artistic studio, workspace, etc., how would it look? How would it function? What would you include, and what would you most definitely leave out? (Note: these aren't rhetorical questions; lemme know what you think in the comments!)