For some, chaos is essential to benefiting from the creative process. There are endless tools for controlling and crimping creativity, tools that help you organize, outline, and sequester creative thoughts, ideas, concepts. Place them in a text file, an outline, a box, and you can forget you ever created it.
The trouble is, creativity often relies on chaos, on thoughts hovering in the far corner of the mind. If you quiet all the random thoughts, connections stop occurring. Without the connections, the ideas remain as random disconnected parts. Yet, the reality is often that the seemingly unrelated creative thoughts are actually part of a greater whole, even if you are unaware of their connections when you first conceive of them.
Of course, some people get overwhelmed by the random and find great benefit in organizing in finite detail. It all depends on the overarching goal. Sometimes, however, even the goal is a mystery until we have really leaned into the work. In that case, why not try both? Try creating from chaos. Then try organizing your chaos into a kind of order. See which one works for you.
For some, organizing their chaos will have the opposite effect, rendering an uneasy feeling that results in what some people define as creative block, while for others organizing is essential to finding and keeping focus.
One-size-fits-all does not apply when it comes to getting something out of your creativity.
Kelly Hobkirk - teaching marketers how to harness strategy, goals, reality, and purpose to connect and do better work.
Kelly Hobkirk has been helping companies succeed in creative ways for nearly 25 years. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, and books by Rockport and Rotovision. Get exclusive articles when you sign up for his monthly newsletter.