Being creative is difficult.
It’s time consuming and does not happen on a clear schedule, but it can be incredibly rewarding.
I’ve tried to make the creative process more efficient over the past year. Here are the three improvements I wish I had made sooner:
Improvement Number 1: Invest in Note Taking
Trying to be creative and find new ideas without a clear process is inefficient. Stupidly inefficient.
That’s because the brain is literally an idea machine.
🧠 Sleep? Nah, let’s think about things.
🧠 Shower? What about this cool article idea?
🧠 Listening to a podcast while Driving? That topic would make a perfect article!
You could be putting in maximum effort, but if you are only writing down 50% of everything you learn and your new ideas, you’re 50% less productive.
We are all constantly producing seeds of what could be great content. However, if you never plant the seeds (i.e. write them down) they will never grow.
To tackle this problem I invested the two resources I have:
- Time
- Money
Investing in note-taking and your creative process is easily one of the best places to invest, because the more efficient you are, the more time you will save.
If you think time is your most valuable resource (it is), then put the time in to take proper notes.
Improvement Number 2: Consume the Proper Content.
For the first 10 years of my adultish life (i.e. late teens, early 20s), the content I consumed was either a business or self-help book.
That was a boring time in my reading life.
Today, I either read or listen to a much wider range of books and topics. Fiction, non-fiction, podcasts of all different shapes and sizes, and blogs I had never heard of.
Recently when I’ve been looking for specific takeaways to improve my day-to-day, I’ve listened to Creative Elements. It’s a podcast that only interviews content creators. It goes into minute detail on the creative process and provides a step-by-step guide on how to come up with ideas (which happens to be the area I need the most help currently).
For general learning, I listen to anything and everything. You never know what you’re going to learn from an autobiography, a fiction book, or a random blog. Just search for important takeaways and you will find them.
Improvement Number 3: Reduce Friction
You know what’s difficult? Pausing your life to take down your notes and ideas.
You know what’s easy(ish)? Creating a frictionless process to capture notes and ideas.
Here is how I built mine:
First, pick a note taking app. I use Roam Research and cannot recommend it highly enough.
Second, identify ways to take notes when you previously couldn’t. Here are a few recent improvements I’ve made:
- Use Airr when listening to podcasts so I can record audio clips that generated ideas.
- Use Audible‘s clip feature (same as above) to record Audiobook clips.
- Broke out my 6 year old Kindle to begin highlighting everything I think is important.
- Push all my notes / highlights into Roam (Where I write all my articles).
Third, choose a way to keep track of your ideas (ideally in the same note taking app). I have five buckets in Roam where I create content for my blog and social posts:
- 💡 Writing Ideas: New ideas go here. I use this as a bucket to write down anything that could ever become an article or post.
- 📑 Writing Outlines: Next step for any ideas is outlining them.
- ✍🏼 Writing Drafts: Once a real draft is fleshed out, it sits here for review before being published.
- 📗 Writing Published: This is where published articles go.
- 💀 Writing Graveyard: Not all ideas are created equal. Ideas that never made the cut go here. Maybe I’ll revisit them later. Probably not though.
Below is what this actually looks like in Roam.
This process is not perfect.
In fact, I’m always looking to improve it.
But it’s infinitely better than what I did a year ago, which was take NO notes ever.
To make any change, you first need to take a small step forward.