I have been helping creative people organize their processes for decades now, and one characteristic common among all those who succeed is quite paradoxical. These aren’t the people who possess the most advanced processes and the best tools around. These are the people who know the secret of maintaining simplicity in their creative processes, guarding themselves from the complexity that slowly suffocates the creative process. Simplicity, I think, is the least appreciated creative skill of all.
Complexity is the enemy of flow
Creativity requires flow – a completely immersed state that enables people to produce great things. Complex environments are counterproductive for achieving a state of flow since each added resource, step, or process represents an opportunity for interruption. Elaborate environments seem to be productive, yet they distract from flow and create interruptions at exactly the point when you need to be uninterrupted. Professional creatives defend their environment of flow by stripping it of all unnecessary layers.
It is amazing how talented people destroy their creative process through complexity by focusing too much on how to manage their system instead of just creating something new, getting lost in the complexity of their own system. Complexity made them feel like their work was serious and professional, but in reality, it was separating them from what they were really doing. Simplicity in creative system design leads to the highest degree of creative productivity.
The discipline of subtraction
Maintaining simplicity within the creative process involves discipline since complexity is naturally created. New elements are introduced one by one, each of which seems useful enough, until the creative process becomes overly complex. The key to simplicity is in taking things out that are not needed, avoiding the urge to constantly add. This is more difficult to do than adding things since it involves being honest with oneself about what contributes to creativity and what does not contribute. It is those creatives who are able to subtract successfully who maintain their simplicity.
The key here is to keep the tools you have small and pointed at what they need to do – help the creative process. I keep my own stack to a few dependable online AI tools that remove friction from the routine parts, precisely so the creative work stays simple and the flow stays unbroken.
Tools should disappear
Great creative tools become invisible once used. They stop drawing attention to themselves because they assist in your work in such an elegant way that they never take you out of flow. Such tools that demand one’s attention, which must be managed, configured and always decided upon, have the exact opposite effect and they disturb the creative process rather than help it. It all comes down to invisibility, or lack thereof, when evaluating the effectiveness of a creative tool.
This is why I am always very cautious about tools designed for the creative process that come packed with numerous features, regardless of how great they are. These features require your focus, which is precisely what is lacking when you are in the creative zone. In contrast to a complicated tool that always draws your attention to itself, an uncomplicated tool that performs one task quietly is much more helpful for creativity. Capabilities themselves are not what matters, but maintaining uninterrupted concentration.
Protecting the creative core
Underlying all of this is a rule: shield the creative kernel from everything else that isn’t part of the creative act. The creative process itself, the doing, the writing, the design, the composition – these are the essence of the creative process, and everything else – the tools, the processes, the setups – must support them, while getting out of their way. This is precisely what complexity does; simplicity ensures that this priority remains correct.
Simple by design
If your creative endeavor seems too difficult, try to examine the level of complexity involved, and ponder how much more easily things would go if you simplified radically. Building on a lean set of this free AI tool options is one way to keep the process simple enough that the tools disappear and the creative work takes center stage.
Simplicity, being the most under-valued creative skill, emerges from the fact that complexity builds up as an inevitability, and it comes across as a way of being serious. The successful ones ensure that the creative part of themselves remains untouched by the practice of subtraction, whereby keeping things minimal and processes easy ensures that the creative process remains unobstructed. Refrain from making things overly complicated, and keep your equipment small and non-conspicuous so as to maintain the right environment for your creative process.
Most difficult thing to convince any creative person about is that the solution to his problem lies in taking away and not adding since he is being bombarded at every moment with the information and ideas that this can be achieved by adding some tools or system or making some further optimizations, while in reality this solution lies in simplicity that he is trying to achieve through unnecessary complexity. The creators that understand this principle and have enough self-discipline to reduce instead of adding are protecting some very important resource — uninterrupted flow in which work takes place. Their setups may look inferior compared to those of their colleagues and friends, but the results speak for themselves. In creative sphere, as in many others, simplicity is much more valuable than complexity.