This workflow secret also helps boost my creativity

Inbox Zero and the creative life?

I hate being stuck.

Maybe I’m staring at a work email and I’m temporarily frozen in indecision over what to do with it, or I’m noodling around for the next creative project and not finding anything that gets me excited. The more I overthink, the more paralyzed I am, and the less I can tap into the instincts and experience that will help me tackle that task or reach for that next goal.

So here’s my secret: I don’t make a decision. Yet.

Much has been made of the idea that everyone should maintain an “Inbox Zero” where they go through each email and immediately act on it, delete it, or file it. I think that for many of us, that’s an unrealistic goal that will cripple productivity because it means spending too much of your time staring at one email and trying to make a decision between dealing with it immediately or deleting it forever.

When it comes to work emails, if anything isn’t a fast, easy reply or automatic delete, I don’t make a decision right away. I simply pin emails that look important to the top of my inbox and come back to them later, once I’ve sped through all my unread emails and I have a better idea of the most time-sensitive task. (Note: My office uses Microsoft Outlook, and I like the web browser version. If you’re in Gmail, “starred” emails are a similar function.) If I forced myself to make a decision on every email before moving on, I could spend hours or even days bogged down in the tricky ones with intricate tasks, with no idea that an email closer to the top of the inbox needs to be dealt with ASAP.

Wait, you say. I thought this was a newsletter about creativity in your spare time, not work efficiency in late capitalism.

Yes. I started by explaining my email trick because it’s related to how I fuel my creativity … I give myself the freedom to not make a decision.

When it comes to writing, I love not making decisions. In concrete terms, that could mean any of these things:

I write a rough newsletter draft as the thoughts come to me, telling myself that I can throw this one out if it doesn’t work later.

I jot down an idea for a podcast because it sounds fun, but I don’t do anything concrete about it yet (Note: I threw out several different variations before I decide to create my mini reading podcast’s 12-episode season last year!).

I write quick, rough, outline-y notes for ideas as they’re coming to me. Crafting full sentences involves too many decisions.

I daydream all the way through an idea without making myself start it or giving myself any assignments (yet).

Tl;dr – I let myself freely have ideas and scribble them down in the easiest, most natural way without putting any pressure on myself to decide what to do with them. Later, when I’m looking around for what I want to work on next and I’m in decision mode, the ideas will be there for me to discard or leave in a notebook for later or start writing in earnest.

Of course, if you want to embark on a creative project, you will eventually have to make the decision to start, and then you’ll have to make lots of decisions along the way as you work to complete it. But when you’re gathering creative fodder and (especially!) when you’re trying to reignite your creativity or find it for the first time, you need to give yourself space to wander and daydream and scribble without any need for decisions, commitment or deadlines.

When do you know it’s time to make a move? I did The Artist’s Way in spring / early summer 2019, and it took a couple of months of frantically-scribbled-then-discarded ideas before I knew that I wanted to write this newsletter. I think you’ll know when the time is right.

We’ll talk more in a future newsletter about the moment when you know you can’t wait on an idea any longer, but for now, I’d like to encourage you to take that decision-making pressure away from your creativity. Give yourself space for joy and daydreams and creative freedom, and see where it takes you.

For people who love cheesy Hallmark movies:

If you missed it this past Christmas, Happiest Season (on Hulu) could also be a fun Valentine’s Day watch. Starring Mackenzie Davis and Kristen Stewart, Happiest Season is a quirky family comedy disguised as a holiday romantic comedy. It’s a few steps up from the cheesy Christmas Hallmark movies I adore, with an impressive ensemble cast (Allison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and Dan Levy co-star) and enough of an emotional core to keep it from being too treacly.

For ’90s girls:

Even with all the podcasts at our fingertips these days, I struggle to find one that I enjoy. I’ve had to give up on the idea that I can catch up on every single episode of every podcast I listen to and let myself dabble. My latest “I’ve listened to a bunch of episodes and enjoyed them” podcast is American Girls, a show about what we mid- to older millennials consider the “original” American Girl doll collection. That’s right … the days of Felicity, Josefina, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, Molly, and (of course) Pleasant Company. The podcast hosts, Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney, are credentialed historians as well as self-titled pop culture addicts who are reading through the original American Girl doll book collections and realizing how much they don’t remember. It’s funny, it’s informative, and it’s an absurdist yet timely millennial approach to revisiting history with a modern sensibility.

For anyone who needs a great romantic comedy in book form:

Pepper is a straight-A high school senior and imaginative baker who reluctantly moonlights as her family’s restaurant conglomerate’s snarky Twitter account. Jack is her classmate and frenemy who tweets for his family’s small business, a local sandwich shop. When the two cross paths in real life and online, their respective restaurant accounts go from snarky replies to an all-out Twitter war. Oh, and by the way … Pepper and Jack are also talking daily on an anonymous app with no idea that they’re falling for each other. Tweet Cute by Emma Lord is a delightful YA romantic comedy about homemade desserts, family disappointments, and big life decisions. Think You’ve Got Mail meets Julie Buxbaum’s Tell Me Three Things.