How to Maximize Your Creativity with Systems

Whether we realize it or not, our creativity is very important to us. It’s not just artists, painters, or even writers who profit from their creativity. Unless your profession is extremely mechanical in nature, you also employ your creativity to solve problems at work. That’s how most of us add value to the company we work for. The problems we address may be small or it may be big, still the outcome helps the business operate effectively.

Photo Credit: maven (Creative Commons)

To make the point concrete, here are some examples to illustrate how we use our creativity at work:

1. A machine operator needs creativity to meet his output target despite execution problems
2. A nurse needs creativity to address the patient’s concerns and make him feel at ease
3. A truck driver will have to use his creativity to face the challenges along the road which can affect his schedule
4. A farmer needs to be creative to maximize the yield of his crops
5. A call center agent needs creativity to satisfy an irate customer

It’s difficult to imagine a line of work that cannot benefit from a creative mind and spirit. No matter how easy your job may seem, it will get better results when you are in your most creative self.

But there lies the challenge. How do we make sure we use our creativity effectively? Like any other resource, our creativity has its limits. When we go through the day using it to everything we do, our creativity could be diminished by the time we most need it. That’s what we want to avoid by establishing systems.

What Are Systems

Most of us use systems in many of our activities. For example, we may have a system in place to know what to wear for the day. This system could help someone who doesn’t want to worry too much about deciding which clothes to wear. We may also have a system to determine what to eat. Or even one to know how to spend our weekend with our families.

When you think about it, these activities could require a degree of effort to figure out. Without a system in place, it will take our time and energy away from other more important things. It will surely spread thin our creativity by the time we need it to do our jobs well.

How Systems Help

The objective of having systems, therefore, is to lessen the effort needed for you and me to use our mind to think. We should be able to trust our system to come up with the appropriate results. Examples of systems would be the following:

• A monthly schedule of daily meals to maximize the recipes you know
• An arrangement of clothes inside the cabinet which automatically lets you know which should be worn for the day
• A weekly plan for family weekend activities good for a year to optimize budget and everyone’s schedule

These are just examples of many systems we can use. The idea is to help us lessen the time thinking about unimportant things. When we have established a system, we can spend the bulk of our creative juices solving important problems or doing creative projects. That’s where we should spend our energy and creativity. It will multiply our results by helping us gain our focus to succeed.

Let’s live and work smart with smart systems. If you have a system you want to share, hit the comments section. Let us learn from each other!