Episode 94: How Structure and Flow Impact Creativity and Productivity

Brad Dobson: In today’s episode, find out how structure and systems can increase your productivity and creativity so you can grow your creative business.

Minette Riordan: Have you ever said to yourself, “I don’t have enough time.”

Brad Dobson: I am so overwhelmed.

Minette Riordan: I need more clarity.

Brad Dobson: I don’t know how to do this.

Minette Riordan: My to do list is miles long.

Brad Dobson: I’m exhausted.

Minette Riordan: There’s got to be a better way.

Brad Dobson: Hi there. I’m Brad

Minette Riordan: And I’m Minette. Not only have we said all these things ourselves, but we’ve heard our community of creative entrepreneurs say them over and over again.

Brad Dobson: That’s why we created the structure and flow podcast. I’m structure.

Minette Riordan: And I’m flow. This is the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs.

Brad Dobson: We believe that doing more and working harder are not the solution to your productivity challenges.

Minette Riordan: We believe in more play, more fun and more profit. Join us as we explore the interplay between structure and flow so that we can bring more grace and ease to your creative business.
Hey, welcome to episode 94. This is the first official episode of the Structure and Flow podcast. Pretty darned exciting. I’m Dr. Minette Riordan, and along with my husband, Brad Dobson, we are the founders of the Path to Profit Academy, where we teach creative entrepreneurs how to make money.

Brad Dobson: Yup.

Minette Riordan: In order to make money, you need some productivity. Yet, as creatives, I know that I really struggle with how to be more productive without feeling like I’m sacrificing flow.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. All that. What she said.

Minette Riordan: All that, which is why our topic today on this episode is how Structure and Flow impact creativity and productivity. If you listened to our last little, brief, we’re so excited, announcement of the change in focus for the podcast, we’re thrilled to be going down this path where we’re digging deep into both structure and flow.

Brad Dobson: You’ve heard it in the title. You heard it in our intro. I’m Structure. She’s Flow.

Minette Riordan: In case you didn’t know that already.

Brad Dobson: That’s not like Flo from the insurance ads.

Minette Riordan: Flow with a ‘w’.

Brad Dobson: That’s right, Flow with a ‘w’. We really want to be able to delve deeply into this stuff. I thought it was important that we have this initial episode where we break down specifically what we mean by structure and flow and what the context is in terms of productivity.
We got a couple of quotes today that I think are really relevant to this discussion. I was kind of excited because I thought they nailed it-

Minette Riordan: And you found the quotes, so it was extra exciting.

Brad Dobson: I’m proud of myself, exactly. Two quotes today. You get a bonus quote. The first one is from Orson Welles, at least it’s attributed to Orson Welles. “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” The second one I knew would be sexy for my wife, because she’s a big Rilke fan from Rainer Maria Rilke. “May what I do flow from me like a river. No forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”

Minette Riordan: I do love that one.

Brad Dobson: Right. We’re going to talk about those limitations around art that actually improve it, and we’re going to talk about flow in terms of your best stuff flowing out of you like a river, which I think sounds great to most creatives. That flow state is where we want to be.

Minette Riordan: It is where we want to be. We also know from building our own businesses as well as from helping hundreds and hundreds of creative entrepreneurs over the last five years that flow is awesome, but so is structure. I don’t know that I would have said that five years ago.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, right.

Minette Riordan: I’ve learned that as one of my mentors, Kendall SummerHawk, always used to say systems liberate you and that when you have the right systems and structure in place, you actually have more freedom and more opportunity to be in that flow state because you’re letting go of some of the overwhelm, some of the repetitive tasks that perhaps you’re wasting time on.

Brad Dobson: You’re wasting brain energy re-doing things.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, that you’re doing over and over again. I’m laughing because we keep saying we’re going to set up a recording studio. You can see we’re in Brad’s office today, if you’re watching us on YouTube, instead of in Minette’s studio. We keep saying and saying and saying we’re going to set up a studio, and we must have wasted an hour today mucking around.

Brad Dobson: I don’t know if that was the word you wanted-

Minette Riordan: Over the microphones and trying to get things set up because as you can see also we’re using two microphones instead of one. We’re trying to upgrade our sound. Not only are we rebranding and refocusing the theme and the content of the show, but we’re up leveling what it is that we’re doing and we want to bring you guys. I’m saying that because one of our goals is always to be really transparent in what’s happening inside of our own business and how that transparency can either make you laugh hilariously at our silliness or can help you realize that you’re not alone on this path to creating more structure and flow in your own business.

Brad Dobson: Definitely. Let’s dig in a little bit about what we mean, a little bit more specifically, about what we’re talking about in terms of structure and flow.
We believe that for creative entrepreneurs to be more productive they need to spend more time in the box of business structure and business system. I know that sounds horrible and icky for you creatives.

Minette Riordan: It’s the box part. Can we just say spend more times in system and structure and not have it be a box. Maybe it’s a triangle or a circle.

Brad Dobson: It’s those limitations that Orson Welles was talking about. We want you to spend more time in creative flow, whether that’s creativity in your business or creative play, more time in that. You’ll find that the structure, whether that’s the structure of a great calendar or the structure of having blocks in your calendar associated with different things, it’s easy to apply that structure both to creative play and your creative work.

Minette Riordan: I think it would be helpful if we maybe defined some or set out some distinctions under structure, systems and processes because they’re not the same thing. You need all of them, and they all serve different purposes. I think of structure like architecture where it’s your business model, it’s your business plan. It’s kind of the guideline. Structure, to me, is the big picture. Can you maybe define the distinction between systems and processes?

Brad Dobson: I think they all are constraints. I think you can look at them all as constraints. Structure might be a larger model of your business, a model of your day or your work flow. Systems are individual, repeatable things that you can do, whether that’s every Friday I get my transactions out of Wells Fargo, and I ship them off to my accountant or every time I write a blog post, I go through this checklist that ensures that I don’t miss anything or every time I record a podcast, I know that I need to unplug the phone and turn off the notifications on my phone. Those are systems.

Minette Riordan: Are they? Or are they processes? Help me understand the distinction between a system and a process.

Brad Dobson: I don’t make a distinction between-

Minette Riordan: You don’t make a distinction between the two.

Brad Dobson: No.

Minette Riordan: I would think systems can also be like software that we use to, tools that we use to run things more effectively like QuickBooks, and then a process is really that repeatable thing like we have a podcast process. You can see we have a little planning template that we use for each of our episodes. We have a step-by-step process for what our VA does with the episode once we get it recorded. For me, there’s a little bit of distinction between structure systems and processes, and they all have an important place.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess we could … You’ve got me thinking now. I look at them all as constraints, limitations. It’s that box that I’m talking about that you need to work within to make sure that you do something right the second time, the third time, the fourth time. I think in a lot of cases, creative business owners find themselves repeating a task, but they don’t have a repeatable process or system in place to make sure they do it right every time. That’s the type of thing that we’re talking about.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, because Brad said the word ‘constraint’ a couple times, I want to give you a fun reframe on the word ‘constraint’. When I hear ‘constraint’ or ‘limitation’ or ‘box’, I’m like, “Ick. I don’t want any of that,” but there’s actually a principle, a very common, well known principle in the design industry called ‘creative constraint’. What creative constraint says it that we actually are more creative when we’re given a starting place. For example, if you gave a child a crayon and a piece of paper and said, “Draw a picture” they might feel a little overwhelmed. As an adult you might feel even more overwhelmed if I handed you a crayon and a piece of paper and said, “Draw a picture,” which I do to my clients all the time, and they freak out.
You might hand that same crayon and piece of paper to a child and say, “Using only a triangle and a circle, draw a human body.” That’s the principle of the creative constraint. The same is true inside of systems and processes. When you have creative constraints, you are able to be more creative because you know what the steps are to follow.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and you’re not spending processing time, decision time, brain energy on those details that are the repeatable monkey work types of things.

Minette Riordan: They go a lot faster. Especially once you start building team, which is if you’ve been listening to the Path to Profit podcast for the last year and a half or so, then you know we’re a big fan of outsourcing, bringing on team, not feeling like you need to be doing this all by yourself. The trick about team is that you have to be ready to tell them what to do. In fact, I was just talking to one of my clients, and it’s like, “You are the one that needs to say exactly what the timelines are and what needs to happen when and what the structure of that looks like and what the process is for getting it done.” We have to train people.

Brad Dobson: Otherwise you need to be prepared for a lot of mistakes and paying a lot extra for people doing monkey work all the time that is just churn type of stuff. Then you can also invite your team member to create the system and the process when they’re in it. If they’re the one doing the day-to-day work, they may be able to capture that and annotate it as they go along so that by the time they’ve done it a couple times, they’ve actually perfected the process.
I can tell Minette is starting to shut down on all this structure stuff. I think it’s time to let her talk a little bit about creative flow.

Minette Riordan: What? I was just getting into talking about structure. Man, between you and Lena Renquist, the president of Ontraport. I have become such a fan of structure and systems. I love this concept of flow as well. It was actually the term ‘flow’ was coined by a Czech guy whose last name I can’t pronounce. Mihaly that we’ll put in the show notes. It was, I looked it up.

Brad Dobson: Csikszentmihalyi

Minette Riordan: That one.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, yeah.

Minette Riordan: In 1975. The concept has been around in positive psychology as this concept of flow or being in the zone. There’s a lot of different names for it.

Brad Dobson: A flow state.

Minette Riordan: A flow state. Mindfulness in Buddhism. In different spiritual traditions there absolutely this concept of meditation as a flow state. This is not a new concept, but as creatives know, it’s when we’re in this state that we do our best work. I would also say it’s like ‘Deep Work’, which we talked about on this show before. It’s one of our absolute most favorite books of all time by Cal Newport. It’s finding that place where you are completely free of distractions and you’re attuned and focused on the creative work at hand, whether that’s writing, programming, taking pictures.

Brad Dobson: To a certain extent you’re not thinking. You hear it from sports. They’ll go through their whole career hoping for one 90 minute period where they spend the time not thinking and actually just relying on muscle memory and being in a flow state. It’s what Rilke was talking about in the quote where it’s flowing from him like a river. It’s flowing the way it is with children. No baggage-

Minette Riordan: And not worrying about what anybody thinks. There’s nothing more fun. I love being at the grocery store, I don’t know why I tend to notice it there, and there will be a year old little girl or boy standing in line in front of me. They’re just dancing and singing and moving around. They just are so careless and clueless if anybody is watching. They could really care less. They’re just totally in their flow moment. It’s such a beautiful thing to watch.
If you’ve ever been watching people doing painting, and they’re in that flow state, and it doesn’t matter if anyone around them is watching or noticing. They’re in the moment. When I’ve been in the presence of really amazing great speakers who are also in that impassioned flow state. I love Rilke’s quote. It flows out of us. There’s nothing holding us back.
We can set ourselves up for it with our systems. One of the things Brad’s been doing, and I think we have in a few episodes we’re going to do a deep dive into talking about focus blocks. You can set rules up for yourself and systems to make it easier to get into the flow state.

Brad Dobson: I have them on my desk in front of me.

Minette Riordan: Brad has made actually little flashcards about the thing he sets himself up for to do the flow state. I think I do it a little more organically, but I get my coffee. I go to the bathroom. I find something on Netflix on watch. I fill up my paint jars with water.

Brad Dobson: That’s for play.

Minette Riordan: For creative play flow state, but even for work, I fill up my coffee. I go to the bathroom.

Brad Dobson: Maybe not the Netflix part.

Minette Riordan: Maybe not the Netflix part. I turn off my email. I have fallen in love with the ‘Do Not Disturb’ button on my phone. I have it on my phone, and I actually found it on my iPad, so nothing is binging and bonging in the background. There’s nothing to distract me but my own thoughts. If I’ve done my research ahead of time for what I’m working on as well, I can distract myself for hours and hours doing research and avoiding actually writing.
What structures do you need to put in place so that when you show up to the canvas, to the blank screen, to the blank page-

Brad Dobson: To your musical instrument.

Minette Riordan: To the camera, to your musical instrument, to a coaching session with a client. What do you need to do so that you can be totally in that flow state? This is where that interplay between structure and flow is so powerful. The more that you understand that they’re both there to serve you, then we think the more productive you’ll be and actually the more fulfilled you’ll be. There will be more grace and ease. There won’t be this longing for uninterrupted creative time because you’re planning for it. You’re setting yourself up for it.
It gets you also over that hump that Steven Pressfield talks about in ‘The War of Art’, of this inner resistance. Writers, I think, more than any other creative, talk about how important it is to just show up at the page every single day. Steven Pressfield, like I said, ‘The War of Art’ is an amazing book on resistance and procrastination and dealing with your inner critic. Just well worth the read. Again, it’s setting it up so that when you show up you’re ready to go. Brad’s writing that down.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, we need to remember that, while we’re putting in the show notes.

Minette Riordan: Putting in the show notes, yes.

Brad Dobson: I guess just to wrap. Our intent for this podcast is to focus on productivity and explore the balance of these concepts of structure and flow, the tension between them, how they can support each other in your business, in your creative play, and how you can integrate them into your life and business. That intersection of those concepts, turning that into your productivity for your creative business.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, it’s so so true. It’s bringing more play. I love the word ‘interplay’ because I do think it’s interplay, intersection, interconnection. Your time is your own. Every single one of you that is listening to the Structure and Flow podcast is here because you want to get more done. At the end of the day, we all want to get more done, but we need to get more of the right work, more of our deep work, more of our most important work done that’s going to move us forward in our business. We cannot tell you how excited we are to continue to dive really deeply into this topic over the next hundred episodes.

Brad Dobson: Absolutely. We love your support. Any opportunity you get to give us a review, an honest review on iTunes is fantastic. We’re running a contest, if you’re listing to this, in April, 2018 at PathtoProfitAcademy.com/contest. That will be in the show notes. You can sign up there real quick. It will show you exactly how to give us a review. We’d love you for it, and you have the opportunity to get some really cool swag. We have printed copies of the ‘Artful Profit Planner’ and a wonderful mandala coloring book, all created in house by us. You’ll love them.

Minette Riordan: And our amazing son.

Brad Dobson: And our amazing son, Conner. In the next episode we’ll begin to delve into the unique productivity styles of creative business owners. Are you a commander, a contemplator, a conductor or a creator?

Minette Riordan: Or all four?

Brad Dobson: Listen in to find out more.
Thanks for listening to Structure and Flow, the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs. To find out more about this episode and others, go to PathtoProfitAcademy.com, and click on the podcast link.