My family knows me as an “idea guy” but in the past, they knew me better as a “no execution guy.”
As a creative personality type, I had loads of ideas. Good ones here and there, bad ones often, and sometimes even great ones.
But ideas are useless without the execution of them. They’re missing a critical step between the ideation and the action.
And that step is called organization.
As a creative, you need structure and clarity of your ideas to craft anything of artistic value. Ideas without organization become nothingness. Black holes. A gooey residue left in the mind to dissolve into the abyss.
I was too familiar with this. Doing nothing with my creative ideas. And shrugging them off to family and friends with “convincing” excuses.
Cal Newport, a renowned productivity author, not only teaches the importance of focused deep work but also “organizational productivity.”
But the path that leads to organized productivity needs to start with organized ideas. Because without organization, the execution of ideas often becomes too daunting of a task.
The key is to have structure from start to finish.
Consider the fact that you could be just one executed idea away from changing your entire life.
If you organize your creative ideas now, they’ll work harder for you in the future. The big ideas will become more obvious and the execution of them becomes more clear.
As a creative, drowning in my unstructured thinking, I realized something. If I don’t have a system to organize my thoughts, none of them would ever become more than just that… fleeting thoughts.
In other words, ideas without organization are ideas without a living future.
The Suffocation of Ideas
Your creative ideas deserve a chance to sprout. To live. To breathe.
As creatives, we’re addicted to consuming art, whether it’s in the form of books, movies, paintings, or music. When we experience the work of other artists, we’re infused with the same energy that inspired them. It’s how we’re all connected as creatives. We’re all cut from the same cloth. Inspiring each other and obsessing over our next creative idea to become something more than just a thought.
The human mind is the most powerful tool on earth. It’s what separates us from the animals. But it comes with its own caveats…
On one end of the spectrum, it can be an incredible creativity machine. On the other end, it can destroy your mental health.
For me, and what I know now, my hyperactive mind was the culprit for my debilitating insomnia for 10 years.
The place where my ideas came from was also the most detrimental place to keep them stored.
This viscous cycle of hyperactive thinking ironically gave me a false sense of hope for my ideas. That if I thought about them long and hard enough, somehow they would materialize into a creative direction all on their own. Instead, they left me restless and anxious, as if I was being suffocated from my own thinking.
We all know that proper rest is critical for the overall health of the mind, yet there I was, tossing and turning at 3 am, lost in thought. Lost in stress. Trying to solve a complicated puzzle in my head.
The root problem of my insomnia was stemming from how I process my thoughts, or more so the lack of my thought processing. Not the act of thinking itself. But the act of overthinking my ideas too often, without a proper ritual of releasing them. This is determinedly for creatives. It’s a blockade between the artist and the maker.
If the root problem of my hyperactive thinking and insomnia was lacking a system to process my creative ideas, then the solution became obvious: I needed to find a method to capture my daily thoughts instead of obsessively thinking about them day and night.
Empty the Mind to Free Creativity
As I went down a rabbit hole of research, I landed in an area of note taking systems called Personal Knowledge Management (or PKM for short). Some of these PKM systems are even referred to as a “Second Brain” because of their powerful functionality for creative deep thinkers.
Don’t let these names confuse you though, they’re just fancy titles for a ‘note taking system.’ At their core, that is all they are.
We often compare the human mind to a computer, but it fails at the most important aspect of one. The ability to neatly organize files into folders.
This is where a “Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)” system comes into play. It does exactly what the name suggests: It’s a system to store, organize, and manage our personal knowledge and ideas.
The mind is an impressive, yet vulnerable, organic thinking machine. It’s three pounds of fatty tissue, with neurons communicating through electro-chemical signals all day long.
As incredible as that sounds, it’s also the playground for chronic hyperactive thinking for creatives. These dopamine-seeking thoughts can easily consume your cognitive attention, depleting your mental peace, and affecting your sleep and overall well-being.
The Power of Writing (for Creatives)
Creatives are deep thinkers, and deep thinkers have unique insights and perspectives about the way they view the world around them. Because of this, I believe every creative should also have a ritual for writing.
I’m not saying you have to choose ‘writing’ as your preferred art form like me. Maybe yours is music, or filmmaking, or acting, or (fill in the blank here). But what I am saying is that the practice of writing is a powerful tool that most creatives should to tap into and take advantage of. Perhaps your futures greatest art depends on it. The act of writing your thoughts down surfaces the richest artistic ideas that are currently locked away in the crevasses of your mind, begging for your discovery and attention.
No matter what art form you choose, writing your thoughts down will lead to an outcome of better crafted art. You are a creator, and art flows out of the deepest facets of the mind. Maybe no one truly knows where the art begins and the creator ends. Sometimes it’s as if you’re just the vessel between the creative energy and the artistic craft that flows through you. Either way, the mind is the gateway to arts creation.
We hear about the benefits of journaling everywhere. It’s a powerful method for releasing what’s locked inside your mind. Journaling is just a simple method of pouring out your thoughts onto blank pages. Even though most people focus on the therapeutic aspect of it, for creatives, it’s a powerful practice for unclogging your creative ideas and clearing up the mental capacity for more creative thinking to take place.
A PKM system takes this concept to the next level. Allowing you to not only write down and organize your thoughts into a powerful filing system, but will also surface profound discoveries that you wouldn’t have pieced together without it.
Having a consistent writing ritual like this will become the vehicle for your greatest artistic accomplishments. It creates a bridge between creative discoveries and actionable awareness.
Do you need to be a good writer to use the specific PKM system that I’m about to share? Not at all. Writing is just the external transfer of thinking. If you can take notes, then you can already write well enough.
There’s a constant dialogue happening inside your head. I’m not talking about the egoic mind here, I’m talking about the creative consciousness that lives far deeper than the ego. It’s where us creatives tap into the creative flow. The energy that puts us into a trance when crafting our work. As creatives who want to make art for a living, it’s crucial we learn how to lean into this energy any time we feel it coming on. Writing connects you to the creative conscious energy that’s begging for your craftmanship to take it somewhere new.
I love reading ancient philosophy, but I’m well aware that no record of their teachings would exist today if the philosophers chose to never write down their insights. They had ideas floating around in their head that they felt were worth analyzing. If they never chose to write them down and reflect on them, the world would have been robbed from some of the greatest philosophical and psychological breakthroughs.
Or consider therapy. Why does it work for so many people? It’s a way for them to vent their deepest thoughts. Often times even surprising themselves with what flows out. Even the act of speaking your thoughts out loud to a therapist helps people gain clarity, relieving stress and anxiety, and, guess what… even sleep.
If journaling and speaking about your thoughts out loud is therapeutic because of the mental release of them, it only means that the opposite, keeping thoughts caged in, is anti-therapeutic. Anti-creative. You’re keeping the lid of your mind sealed, pressure cooking your ideas into a thick, useless sludge. For creatives, that’s a catastrophic state of being. It’s the anti-state of creative flow.
This is why the benefits of PKM are so potent for creatives. It’s a system to not only let you vent your creative thoughts, but to also evaluate them on a deeper, methodical level.
And, if your art form of choice happens to be writing, like it is for me, then having a system like this will be one of your most powerful resources.
By writing down your ideas daily, you will naturally become better at the art of writing. I’ve witnessed this myself. I wrote mostly gibberish the first few months. Maybe I still do, but I can tell you it was definitely worse. I struggled to transfer my thoughts clearly to paper. Then I noticed over time, my thinking and writing became sharper. Practice and effort will always lead to improvement. One can’t exist without the other improving.
And many people overthink what writing is at its core. The influential writing teacher, William Zinssler, says it best, “writing is [simply] thinking on paper.” That’s all it is.
Maybe you’re not looking to become a writer. That’s perfectly okay too. Then let’s look at the impact of written communication through history and how far humanity has gotten because of it. Written words are how we share stories, messages, and lessons with each other. It’s the reason higher education exists. How religions were documented. And how laws and governments are formed. Written communication is how we advanced as a civilization. Most people underestimate the true value of writing.
And it goes in all directions…
Would any of your favorite books, movies, or songs exist without writing? They were crafted through written chapters, screenplays, and lyrics.
Would any of your favorite brands, products, and softwares exist without writing? They were crafted through written business plans, scripts, and documents.
This is why I believe that if you’re a creative, writing should be at the core foundation of your creative workflow. You might have something to share with the world, or you might not. Regardless, you’ll never find out if you don’t start writing your ideas down in the first place.
The Fall of My Google Drive
Before learning more about PKM systems, I was previously using my Google Drive as a half-baked solution to store my ideas. But as time passed, and the folders filled up, its functionality became unproductive.
This is because Google Drive was designed to be a cloud storage software, rather than a robust PKM software.
I thought making Google Docs for all my ideas was enough, but those ideas were left to die within the cloud. I never read them again. Never searched for them. Never reflected on them. They were forgotten about the second they were typed up.
My Google Drive became overwhelmed with topical lists of ideas. These bloated documents and folders lacked structured and reflective search-ability. My Google Drive turned into a digital “brain-dump journal” rather than an organizational system. I was extracting the chaos of ideas from my mind and uploading them into another form of chaos on the cloud.
Even though brain-dumping your thoughts is beneficial on a therapeutic level, as creatives, we’re after more than just that. We’re after organizing our unique insights and perspectives in order to craft something of artistic value from it later. Something meaningful. Something worth sharing with the world.
I didn’t just need a system for idea extraction; I also needed a system for idea discovery.
I wanted a way to find all the big creative ideas I had between the mediocre ones. An organizational system that would ping my attention when something worth the investment of my creativity would surface. And my Google Drive wasn’t cutting it.
The Art of Idea Organization
While observing the routines of some of history’s most successful creatives, The New York Times Columnist, David Brooks, came to this conclusion: The most successful creative minds are the ones who can not only think like an artist but also work like accountants.
In other words, creativity as an artist is not enough in the long run of creative success. You have to systemize your routines around creativity to make a worthy impact on the world, over and over again. No artist wants to be a one-hit-wonder. We love losing ourselves in the making of art, and we often crave to want to do it for a living. We’ll never be able to make a sustainable career out of it if we don’t have consistent rituals, routines, and systems in our workflow.
David Books’ discovery about creative successes is at the core of what I’m saying in this article.
It’s exactly how we need to operate in order to succeed in our creative endeavors. We’re up against a rock and a hard place as artist. We can either succeed with our creative skills, or submit to the monotony of a “traditional” career that we’ll likely dread every day.
Just like professional accountants rely on software tools like Microsoft Excel to manage their data, creatives need to rely on organizational tools, like a PKM system, to manage their creative ideas.
And don’t be afraid of structure and routine as a creative. The friction between the two is a common misconception. We often think we need complete separation from order to flow out our best ‘creative output,’ but in reality we NEED structure and routine in order to consistently craft our best work.
Now there are different variations of PKM methods out there, but the specific one I recommend the most is the very one I write in EVERY SINGLE DAY to run my digital writing business.
It’s called a Zettelkasten.
The Zettelkasten
A Zettelkasten is a PKM method that was invented by German scholar, Niklas Luhmann in the 1950’s.
The word ‘zettelkasten’ is German and simply translates to “notebox” in English.
So it’s just that, a notebox where you store your ideas.
But where the magic happens is how you organize the notes within this “notebox.”
Luhmann was a prolific writer in his times, and published over 50 books and hundreds of academic articles, which is a massive amount for a single person to accomplish in their professional career. It’s a rare achievement.
Whenever asked about how he could produce so many writing projects, he would always give credit to his very own methodical note taking system (the Zettelkasten), as being the sole reason behind his impressive writing accomplishments.
Now, of course, since Luhmann was writing in the 1950s, he only used an analog version of a Zettelkasten, meaning paper-based notes, but most people these days use a digital version, including myself, since we have the benefit of computer technology.
I would like to imagine that if Luhmann were still alive today, he would use a digital version of his Zettelkasten, but in some online communities that opinion is controversial since there are still advocates of the original analog version.
Note taking softwares like Obisidian or Roam Research do a great job at digitizing the system by having the important functionality of linking between notes (If you’re curious, I use Obisidian for mine).
My Zettelkasten experience is a bit unorthodox, as I actually started out using a digital version, then converted to an analog version to try out Luhmann’s exact process, but I eventually opted to go back to digital since it made the most sense with my workflow and on-the-go writing practices.
Even though I experienced several benefits from using the analog version, the convenience of digital out-weighed them in the long run.
So what makes a Zettelkasten so special compared to other PKM methods?
Its concept revolves around notes being organized into a unique filling system compared to other methodologies.
For example, a popular PKM system that several writers use, like authors Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene, is called a “Commonplace Book.”
With this method, you simply file your notes under topical categories. So if you wrote a note within the topic of “Self-Improvement,” you would file that note in the category section or folder labeled “Self-Improvement.” Pretty standard stuff.
Even though I’m an advocate for simplicity, in rare cases, like Personal Knowledge Management for creative work, the most basic of methods are not always superior.
For me, the “Commonplace Book” method reminds me of how I was previously using my Google Drive, which, as you know, didn’t work for how my mind wanted to naturally gather ideas together.
This is where the strength and, in my opinion, superiority of a Zettelkasten system shines.
To outside viewers, it often seems like a complicated PKM system, but its foundation is quite simple.
Here’s the gist of it:
If digital-based, you write your ideas down in a software like Obsidian or, if analog-based, you write them down on index cards.
Luhmann himself used a note card similar in size to a 4×6 index card.
The reason I bring this up is that this specific index card size forces you to write a note that can only fit onto the physical real estate of it.
This is more important than you think. A Zettelkasten’s note should never be too long. It should only have ONE atomic idea on it. Meaning small in size, like a single thought, or a quote, or factual piece of information.
Having a note with a page-length of content is the exact opposite of what you want in a Zettelkasten. It’s one of the benefits of using the analog version. You’re confined to the physical writing space of the index card. If your idea doesn’t fit on it, then it’s an indicator that you need to conceptualize the idea more precisely.
It forces you to master the art of writing by stripping complex ideas down into their simplest yet most impactful form. Packing them into a potent piece of written knowledge.
But since I use a digital Zettalkasten, and I can technically make the length of a note as long as I want via the digital document (where there is no end to the notes real estate), I still force myself to visually imagine that I’m writing the note on a 4×6 index card to keep them as atomic as possible. This has helped me a lot.
Many of my notes are even one sentence long, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Once you have notes with atomic ideas written on them, the next step is to organize them by placing each note near other notes that are contextually related to each other. This is very different from organizing notes based on topical categories like you would in the ‘commonplace book’ method like mentioned to earlier.
In other words, if the concept of a new notes idea relates to another note already filed in your Zettelkasten, then you’ll file this new note right next to the related one to keep their ideas linked together forever.
The analog version uses physical index card filing boxes to do this in, but in a digital Zettelkasten, like mine using the application Obsidian, I’m simply linking the notes together within software functionality to keep them digitally connected within the system.
This filing methodology changed everything for me. It organizes my creative ideas in a way that’s similar to how the mind naturally thinks. Because we don’t think of ideas based on topics, we think of them based on conceptual relations. While reading a paragraph in a book, it might remind you of “this idea” which then reminds you of “that idea” and so on…
That’s the magic of a Zettelkasten. The notes inside it are organized based on the relationships between ideas, rather than the topics and categories of them.
To show you how amazing it is, imagine you wrote a note about ‘productivity’ as creative, then the next week you wrote a different note about the ‘mental health’ benefits of doing creative activities.
In a topical-based system, like a Commonplace Book, you would have these two notes in separate sections. One under the “productivity category” and the other under the “Mental Health” category. But a Zettelkasten is different. Your note about mental health might end up right next to your productivity note if you felt that there’s an interesting connection between the two ideas and felt it was worth keeping them together.
Now imagine doing this as your Zettelkasten grows from 50 notes to 50,000. While sifting through your “note box” to inspire your next creative project, you would stumble across incredible connections and unique insights between ideas that you would have never discovered without a relation-based filing system like the one it offers.
Slow Down to Create More
A Zettelkasten might seem more time-consuming than other “traditional” note taking systems and, the truth is, it is. But that’s also the beauty of it. The act of making good art often stems from the slow digestion and inspiration of big ideas. So the “time-consuming” aspect of a Zettelkasten is also responsible for the creative genius of it. It’s how the inventor, Niklas Luhmann, was able to write so many profound books and articles from his Zettelkasten, even though he spent the majority of his time processing and organizing notes into it.
Within your Zettelkasten, sections of your notes will begin to sprout up, reaching for the light. Waiting patiently for your attention to craft them into something more. Maybe those ideas will become a book, or a screenplay, or a song. Your Zettelkasten is the bridge between your ideas and the execution of them. Allowing you, as the creator, to see more clearly where you need to focus your creative efforts.
Chris Aldrich, a popular Zettelkasten blogger, put it best; “A zettelkasten isn’t simply the aggregation repository many use it for – it’s a rumination device, a serendipity engine, a creativity accelerator.”
And from my experience, using one can even put you in a creative trance that’s hard to describe. Perhaps the closest thing to it is feeling like a mad scientist working in his laboratory, dissecting ideas, reflecting on the data, and discovering new breakthroughs.
To wrap things up, here’s the Zettelkasten method in a nutshell:
1) Think, research, and read about your creative interests to inspire ideas
2) Write these ideas down into atomic notes
3) Organize and file them next to relating notes
4) Review your notes periodically to discover unique connections between them
5) Use these discoveries to craft your art (in whatever form you prefer)
6) Then repeat
And remember, in the end, a Zettelkasten’s purpose isn’t to be a note-collection system. Its purpose is to be an output-creation system.
Don’t just be a collector. Be a creator.
So with that said, write, write and write. And then when you think you’re done, write some more.
You might surprise yourself how much you enjoy the writing process. You might just be the next great creative who has something important to share with the world.
Believe in that.
Keep writing your ideas down, my friends.
May thy keyboard chip and shatter.
-Chase Mac
