Productivity
A Question of Structure: How Much Works For You?
Bob and Susan are desk shopping at IKEA (where else?). Susan sees a desk with four drawers, a built in cabinet, and a keyboard tray, and starts swooning. Bob sees a minimalistic desktop and calls off his search for office-furniture nirvana. Two flat-packs, a boatload of twine, and two soft-serve vanilla cones later, and the happy couple speed home.
On the way, Susan thinks about all the ways she can organize her stuff in all her cute little drawers, and Bob waxes poetically about the wide-open expanse of nothing that will be his new desktop environment.
two desks, two different ideas of perfection (images by IKEA)
Question: Who’s happier? Who will be more productive? Who will have an easier time managing their workload?
Answer: Who knows?
To Each Their Own
That’s the funny thing with productivity; what’s good for one person isn’t necessarily the end-all, be-all solution for another. So, how do you know what to do?
- You have to experiment.
- You have to be willing to try, fail, and learn from the experience.
- You have to know yourself (which comes, of course, from doing #1 and #2 over and over).
Because structure is a funny thing. Bob would go nutso trying to work at Susan’s desk, because (in his mind) there’s way too many places for things to get put and forgotten, way too much visual clutter, and he’d feel cramped. Susan would loathe Bob’s new desk, because (in her mind) there’s no place to put anything. She’d end up piling everything on top of the desk, and feel swamped every minute, unable to focus.
Are You A Susan, or a Bob?
Susan is someone who revels in having external structure. It’s easiest for her to be organized when she has many places to put things, because in her mind, thoughts tend to swim around like fish. Without the help of external structure, Susan’s unbounded creative impulses get scattered and lost. Once she has the help of those external boundaries, though, she’s free to let ‘er rip.
Bob, however, brings a lot of structure with him. It’s not that Bob’s not creative; he’s tremendously creative. But the way Bob’s wired, he brings a lot of structure to his thoughts. He needs a wide open space that he can impose his sense of structure upon in order to be productive; too many restrictions, and his flow slows to a trickle.
Knowing Thyself Saves Thee Many Headaches
Knowing which way you lean can save you so much time and energy, it’s flabbergasting. Take, for example, desk shopping (just kidding). Or evaluating software…
Say you need to organize your thoughts, or brainstorm ideas for a project. If you’re more internally structured (like Bob), you’d reach for a program like Curio (or Keynote) that gives you a wide open space to create in. If you’re more externally structured (like Susan), you might reach for a spreadsheet likeNumbers orExcel, or an outlining app like Process or Omni Outliner, or a mindmapping solution like iMindMap, Curio (again), or PersonalBrain (thanks to Kathy for mentioning this one).
The question, essentially, is: do you need structure, or will you bring your sense of structure to it? And you can ask yourself that in any situation, whether you’re organizing your computer, your personal information, your belongings, or a vacation.
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3 comments for “A Question of Structure: How Much Works For You?”
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2008 Viverati. 
“The question, essentially, is: do you need structure, or will you bring your sense of structure to it?” My answer is both. I need it and I’d bring it. I’m thinking that this is way too complex to peg us in one or the other. To each his own is right.
Adam,
The mental image I had of myself said that I was pretty well organized internally. But after reading this article, I realized the opposite is true. The more creative I get, the more projects there are on my plate, the more I rely on an external structure to hold it all in place. Continually changing and improving that structure is actually an ongoing creative project of mine.