Not unnecessarily ornate, but gracefully spare

Prolificacy has speed as its main fuel.

Creative volume is a function of executional velocity.

But the thing about speed is, it’s more than just making decisions faster. It’s also about eliminating deliberations about decisions that aren’t important to you in the first place.

Because if you’re highly efficient at making choices about chickenshit tasks, that doesn’t count as a win. Doing something efficiently that you don’t even need is a form of waste, too.

My old agency once attempted to introduce a project management software platform to our client onboarding process. And while the tool itself seemed efficient in theory, mostly, it just gave our account team more annoying notifications to keep up with.

Which led to more distractions and stress. And it interrupted the flow of the simple, spreadsheet based process they’d been successfully using for years.

Of course, our founder was adamant. He believed in this project management tool, and told everyone that once we did a few of the tutorials and learned how to use all the awesome features, our process would eventually streamline.

It didn’t. Account people just got annoyed, tired and resentful. Using the software itself became a second unpaid job. It added no material value to the clients. After about three weeks, we cancelled our subscription and went back to the old way.

Have you ever made this mistake before? Did your team ever aim for efficiency and wind up consuming more time than it saved?

You’re not alone. Happens to organizations big and small every day. It’s a seductive vortex that’s hard to resist. Overthinking is like an aphrodisiac for the psyche. Complexity seems attractive because it feels like progress.

But if being prolific is the goal, then it’s always better to keep it clean. To do work in way that is not unnecessarily ornate, but gracefully spare. Forceful and simple. Trim and streamlined.

And we strive to make decisions faster, yes, but also to eliminate deliberations about decisions that aren’t important to us in the first place.

One personal creativity management tool you can try is called whitespacing, aka, defining your creative journey by the work you decline. This may mean declining certain venues for your work, like not showing your abstract paintings at galleries, or not doing magic performances in clubs where they allow smoking.

Or it could mean declining certain processes around your work, like not allowing your graphic design clients to get more than three rounds of edits. Or not attending the open bar company mixer the night before your big presentation.

Whitespacing is about making creative room to say yes to the work that will have the highest impact and fulfillment. You keep it clean and lean to avoid the erosion of your time, the decay of your focus and the meaninglessness of your work.

That’s where speed comes from, and where prolificacy is born.

What deliberations about unimportant decisions should you stop making?