Transcript: Episode 25

Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

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Okay, I wanted to put that little obligatory pod host spiel up top today, because I think this is going to be a slightly long episode… not that my episodes are ever all that long, because I kind of don’t think anybody needs to listen to me talk about anything for more than 35 minutes once a month. Which is actually relevant to today’s topic! I’m inviting you to come along with me through some thoughts and feels I’ve been having about overwhelm, productivity or prolificness, and creative expression – which I know has been coming up lately for a lot of writers I know, and possibly for you as well.

I want to start this exploration today by sharing a term I heard recently that has been incredibly helpful for describing an experience I’ve been feeling more and more in the weeks since the election: “information dysregulation.” This term comes from YouTuber and autism educator Taylor Heaton – and while she uses it specifically in the context of autistic experiences, I think some form of this concept is probably relevant to a lot of creatives, regardless of your neurotype.

I’m personally relating to the term as someone who is in a bit of a gray area in regards to neurodiversity; I don’t have a specific diagnostic label currently, but I am becoming increasingly confident I’m under the umbrella somewhere. There’s not really space to say more about that in today’s episode, but I think it’s going to be relevant to some future ones, so I just wanted to share that context.

I’ve linked Taylor Heaton’s video about information dysregulation in the show notes if you want to check out her full explanation. But basically, it’s a term she’s coined to describe the kind of mental and physical distress she feels after taking in too much information and content without actually integrating or processing it. It’s a feeling that goes deeper than simple overload – or maybe it’s what happens when overload becomes chronic, which again could apply to someone regardless of neurotype.

Information dysregulation is that tight, stuck, literally skin-crawling feeling when you’ve spent too much time in too many research rabbit holes, or when you’ve been scrolling through news headlines for 45 minutes straight, or when you’ve listened to podcasts all day while you’re also trying to get stuff done around the house.

For me it feels kind of like my mind and body are an old-school typewriter and all the little internal hammers have gotten tangled up and jammed and there’s nothing I can do about it but if I don’t do something about it I’m going to burst. And especially if you’re neurodivergent, that feeling can spiral into a more serious state of nervous system dysregulation that can take a long time to dig yourself out of (and that can ripple out into your relationships and your work and every part of your life).

Information dysregulation can happen even when the information you’re taking in is exciting and interesting. But it’s an especially awful state of affairs when the information you’re taking in is focused on how everything in the world is in an awful state of affairs (hence why I’ve been experiencing this a lot lately). Your brain and body are pinging with more content and urgent stimulation than you can reasonably integrate – you’ve mashed all the typewriter keys at once, and now nothing’s getting processed into coherent responses.

Taylor’s video shares several suggestions for how to avoid or diffuse information dysregulation, but one of her key tactics is to include quick moments of creative expression during the day: jotting down a haiku, dancing, doodling. Something that probably doesn’t feel like you’re processing information, but that’s still giving your brain a cue to shift into an expressive mode. Something that hits pause on the state of ingesting information and invites you to integrate it instead – a moment to discharge energy and create enough breathing room to begin sorting out what you actually think and feel about all that input.

One of the concepts Taylor mentions about creativity in the video is the need to balance out over-engaged, overstimulated energy with moments of space – even though we tend to associate creative expression with a state of being full and stimulated. Taylor says, quote, “this might seem counterintuitive, taking slower paced rest in conjunction with creativity. But I really think it’s important to slow down in order to create.”

I think this bears out in my own experiences with information dysregulation – once I’ve hit that state, there can’t be any deeper integration until I clear enough space for it, by simultaneously pivoting toward expression and slowing down. I have to write my silly haiku, and I also have to be patient enough to see what might follow that shift into creative processing, if I allow it to emerge.

I also read something about this idea of creative expression as a remedy for overwhelm in a totally different context this month – the context of productivity hacking. Regular listeners of this pod might now be wondering why I was spending time reading productivity culture content, given that I often talk about how much I really don’t like productivity culture. And yet, here we are; part of my dance with information dysregulation this month involved getting duped into reading an entire book about a specific productivity hack for writers.

I’m using the word “duped” here to be funny, not to imply that the author of this book is actually duping people with his marketing. The book in question is about a system of note-taking called a zettelkasten – that’s German for “slip-box,” as in a file of notecards. And since I generally don’t hang out in the productivity world, I didn’t know that this system is beloved by an entire subculture of writers who spend their time getting in reddit fights about the optimal way to take badass notes that will enable you to establish yourself as a prominent thought leader and become a six-figure entrepreneur with your monetized daily newsletter read by millions of subscribers.

Luckily, not all adherents of the zettelkasten are full-on alpha biz bros, because it does sound like a pretty cool system or creative practice, if it’s separated a bit from the productivity spin. The book I read is A System for Writing by Bob Doto, who is also a spiritual writer in addition to being a zettelkasten expert. This is my first encounter with his work, so I’m not entirely sure how much it ultimately adheres to the productivity party line – but I did find the book both interesting and approachable even as a hardcore productivity skeptic. And like I said, the zettelkasten practice itself has a lot of appeal to me.

For one thing, it seems like potentially an excellent way to avoid information dysregulation. Be warned that my understanding of the practice is totally shaped by this single book, and by my lack of firsthand experience. But to give the most basic outline, a zettelkasten is an archive of succinct notes that each record a single thought, fact, or fascination that you want to save. Each note is also linked to other notes that inform or complicate it in some way.

And so over time, as your zettelkasten expands, you collect a sort of minimally-organized chaos of information and ideas that you can dip into as fodder for writing projects. You dive into it from either a chosen starting point or a random one, and then you follow the trails and clusters of notes that emerge – trails that will shift and evolve each time you explore the zettelkasten, as you choose which notes and connections currently draw you in.

A key point here is that the chaotic, unpredictable element is a feature, not a bug. The point of the zettelkasten is that it ideally helps you make unexpected connections between your areas of interest and research (and between your thoughts about those areas of interest). It’s not a neatly ordered, hierarchical collection like a library catalogue, a place you go to “look stuff up.” It’s more like a knowledge cauldron, cooking up surprisingly tasty and varied combinations of ingredients over time.

(Again, this is my attempt to describe something I’ve just barely begun to work with, so check out the show notes for links if you’re curious about the system.)

The thing that immediately struck me as I was reading A System for Writing is that the act of notetaking could potentially be the kind of expressive antidote to information dysregulation that Taylor Heaton talks about in her video.

Instead of taking in more and more content without integrating it, someone using a zettelkasten would be habitually hitting pause to record their thoughts about something they’ve just taken in, and then linking those notes to other thoughts – which is a kind of creative expression in and of itself. It also seems to me that the act of deciding what to add to your archive would be really psychologically helpful for just letting the rest go and creating space for integration, instead of constantly feeling like an overstuffed water balloon or a jammed-up typewriter.

I suspect that Bob Doto would agree with me, based on one of his blog posts that I found – and while his zettelkasten book doesn’t have a particularly spiritual bent, this piece of writing does take a spiritual angle on the topic of creative expression and productivity. The post is called “The Spirit of Productivity: Channeling Inspiration Into Doing What Matters Most.”

Instead of trying to paraphrase his main points, I’m just going to share some key snippets – this is a pretty long composite quote, so be forewarned, and I’ll try to be really clear when I’m shifting back into my own voice.

Doto writes, quote:

“…when I first came across [productivity systems], I interpreted this new world not through the lens of “scaling my business,” but through the practices and philosophy of self-awareness, ritual, and spirit work.

If spirit and productivity seem like an unlikely pairing, consider how we describe work we're fully invested in. We "flow" with it, we “move” with it, we “get in the zone” … Spirit and productivity are far from incongruent. In fact, they fit together seamlessly. …

A handful of simple, flexible productivity systems can behave like a check against an otherwise unruly surge of inspiration. These systems help route [that] powerful force… into designing necessary projects and executing the many tasks required to see them realized.

… One of the ways creatives engage with spirit is through the practice of “capturing.” Capturing is a concept repeated in many productivity circles… And, for creatives, it’s the surges of inspiration that are so often in need of capturing. …

But, over time capture can lead to hoarding. ‘Capture bloat’ is the experience of having taken in more than is getting released into the world. Spirit is movement and needs to move. … If spirit doesn’t get expressed, it can translate into agitation, anxiety, lethargy, despondency, or any number of unpleasant emotional experiences. And, it’s through release in the form of expression that we ease the pain. … Productivity, personal knowledge management, and the many systems and methodologies that come with each are perfectly suited to help facilitate the smooth flow of spirit into inspiration.”

[And here is the end of the mega-quote and the official shift back into my own voice.]

There’s a lot in Doto’s post that feels very familiar to me – the idea of creativity as an expression of spirit, and the need for free movement of that spirit in order to honor it and be in relationship with it. At least from what I’ve read, Doto’s ideas on this have some common ground with the work of philosopher and poet Lewis Hyde, who I’ve mentioned back in episodes 9 and 12. He describes creative expression as “a circulation of gifts” that makes, quote, “an empty place into which new energy may flow. The alternative is petrifaction, writer’s block, ‘the flow of life backed up.’”

Doto’s post also mentions an experience of creative or intellectual overload that sounds a lot like Taylor Heaton’s information dysregulation, and he proposes a similar solution: processing and expressing your insights through some form of creativity.

So… if what he’s saying aligns with a lot of concepts I agree with, and if a core argument of his work is that productivity culture, creativity, and spirit “fit together seamlessly”… is my deep-seated distrust of the productivity world perhaps misguided??

I still don’t think so, and here’s why. It has to do with two concepts that might sound similar and compatible, but that I think are foundationally opposed: “next actions” and “next right things.”

“Next actions” is a productivity term from David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, which Doto actually references in the blog post I just quoted from. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have not read the book Getting Things Done, but I see the term “next actions” frequently enough that I know what it means. I may be a productivity skeptic, but I’m also a small business owner – so I’m still immersed in all the elements of productivity culture that filter out into the creative business scene. A “next action” in productivity-speak is the next concrete, granular, immediate task you can do to continue executing a project.

The idea of the “next right thing,” on the other hand, comes from the world of addiction recovery, and before that from Jungian psychology. A “next right thing” is an action that’s available to you right now and that aligns with your values – especially if it’s a small action, something you can accomplish easily (even if it’s mentally or emotionally hard). Here’s how Jung himself phrased it:

“…you want to know how one ought to live. [But] one lives as one can.  … If you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate.”

So, here’s where I see a core problem with productivity culture, the problem that I think puts it consistently at odds with meaningful creativity: It’s just way too easy to mistake next actions for next right things. And when productivity itself is a guiding value, I think it tends to encourage us to make that mistake – even when we attempt to harness it to support our other values and do things that are deeply meaningful to us.

Here’s a personal example to illustrate what I mean – and it also illustrates how information dysregulation can collide with next actions.

This podcast is a deeply meaningful part of my creative life, and I hope it’s meaningful at least in small ways to listeners as well. But it requires a certain amount of mundane logistical work that is prime territory for getting stuck in a productivity mindset. This past week I decided to work on a concrete pod project I’ve been meaning to do for a while: I’ve been considering changing my website platform to something simpler (and, honestly, cheaper). But before I can make that decision, I have to figure out what other platforms are viable in terms of the tech.

So, I broke this project down into next actions and started executing. (I didn’t use that specific framework to think about how to go about things, but that is basically what I was doing.) I googled tech specs. I compared pricing. I chose a potential new platform to test. I purchased a single month of said platform so I could see all the backend features.

I’d already been in a state of information dysregulation for a few days, and at this point it started to feel worse. My inner typewriter was for sure getting jammed. This should have been the moment where I hit pause and pivoted to expressing and integrating – that would have been the next right thing for my nervous system and for the state of my creative brain.

But instead, I poked around the web platform and decided on a new set of next actions. The day wasn’t over and I wanted to keep moving ahead on this project – I wanted to get something done, to make myself feel less bursting with awful.

I have some desired webpage features that are non-negotiables, so I started testing them one by one. I tested how much I could style text. I tested embedding a podcast player. I tested manually coding the css for the podcast player when the embed looked stupid. I refreshed my memory on the correct css elements when my coding didn’t work. I refreshed my memory on an entirely different set of css elements when the ones I usually use still didn’t work.

You get the picture: I fell into a kind of flow state that was feeding my information dysregulation, even as I was trying to remedy it by “being productive.” I spent an entire day with my head down at the computer, next-action-ing myself so deep into that dysregulation that my brain and body were full-on vibrating with awful. Thanks to having just watched Taylor Heaton’s video, I was able to see what had happened and diffuse the impending meltdown. I wrote a haiku about how much I hate css and then I did a little neurodivergent stim-dance around my office for twenty minutes.

This is a very low-stakes example of how one can mistake a productivity-driven next action for a next right thing. But I think it illustrates how productivity culture can not only misdirect our priorities, but then also keep us in a form of dysregulated flow that carries us away from the aspects of our lives and work that are “meaningful and intended by fate” (to borrow Jung’s words).

And if I zoom out a bit on my low-stakes example, larger implications start to emerge. My lost day of dysregulated flow didn’t come out of nowhere, and it’s also not an isolated incident. It’s part of a pattern I have of wanting to “optimize” my web platform – which itself comes out of a very productivity-influenced business goal I had when I first started the podcast.

There’s a strong narrative in creative business spaces about following best practices for monetizing your work. And while I’d never imagined this podcast would be a full-on income stream in my editing business, I still fell into the trap of wanting to be ready to monetize it in some way. Basically, I followed the prevailing advice that I should be ready to create a paid offer for my audience, and that this was in fact part of the value of my podcast – so I needed to have tech in place to make it possible, right from the beginning.

Over the two-plus years that I’ve been creating this pod, that initial mindset has had me sinking time into various projects and tasks that have little or nothing to do with actually creating and sharing the pod. And I tend to drop into one of those productivity-heavy projects whenever I feel overwhelmed and dysregulated and out of touch with my creativity. Instead of slowing down to expand the available space for creative thought, I speed up – taking in more information, making more lists, doing more tasks.

The irony is that I haven’t monetized, or even seriously considered it – even though I’m definitely not, like, morally opposed to the idea. Whenever I start wondering if there’s a need I might be able to meet for some of my listeners, it’s like I hit a mental wall. I can’t even begin to feel out whether monetizing is right or what I’d make. And I’ve realized that this keeps happening because I’ve lost my ability to sense or recognize the next right thing. The next right thing has gotten eclipsed by a swarm of potential next actions, ready and willing to pull me into a sort of shadow flow that will eat my day and my nervous system alive.

In his blog post, Doto references “flow” as an example of how spirit and productivity culture are aligned with each other. And I’m not gonna say that’s never true – I certainly don’t disbelieve his own experience with successfully pairing the two. But I would say that not all flow states are good. (Or maybe, not all flow states are channeling good spirits.) And I’m beginning to see that sometimes the flow of getting things done tricks me into thinking I’m pursuing my creative work – when really I’m just banging through a bunch of next actions, executing slick-sounding projects that slowly but surely move me further away from what I actually value.

Not to mention the fact that productivity culture is an endless quagmire of trending ideas and terms and systems and information. So for many of us sensitive creative types, it’s just dysregulating as f*ck. And creative culture is impacted by the productivity world even if you’re not approaching your creative work as a business.

All this brings me back to the need to slow down to access creativity, to bring back balance when we’ve become overstimulated and overfull. Productivity culture keeps us from slowing down enough often enough, and it also contributes to our continued overload – all while expecting us to do and say and create more and more things in less and less time.

A lot of writers who advocate for working with a zettelkasten cite increased output as one of the main benefits of the system. And like, I can get behind a goal of wanting to write more. But when I say “increased output,” I mean a level of output that seems preposterous to me as a productivity skeptic. Even Bob Doto’s book, which is light enough on the productivity-core for me to enjoy and recommend – even that book casually references writing and publishing a daily blog post as one of the possible benefits of using a zettelkasten.

Let me ask you this, friend: Is there anybody in the world you actually want a blog post from every day?

Maybe there are some people currently showing up in your inbox or your newsletter feed every day. I certainly have a lot of people who show up in my inbox every week. But here’s my perpetual hot take: I don’t think either my or their creative lives are necessarily better for it. I think this is just where productivity has lead us, and we’re collectively trying to make the best of that reality.

There’s nothing wrong with being prolific – but there’s nothing inherently good about it, either. Being prolific requires the courage to speak – but speaking well requires space for deep and creative thought. Sometimes it requires prioritizing slowness over productiveness.

This kind of goes without saying, but I’m by no means the only person out here sharing consistent (if not daily) critiques of productivity culture. There’s a current trend of “slow productivity” attempting to address these critiques – productivity writer Cal Newport put out a book about a year ago that’s actually titled Slow Productivity.

But that book itself has been critiqued as offering solutions that are only viable for highly successful solopreneurs. I’ve read some of those critiques, and apparently slow productivity is about avoiding projects that require meetings of any kind and lowering your yearly income while also taking month-long vacations.

That doesn’t sound super promising to me as a solution to a wide-ranging cultural problem. But I guess if you end up in the tiny percentage of all those folks on the productivity subreddit who do actually monetize their daily newsletter into a six-figure business… then maybe you too can join the slow productivity movement.

I’m being a bit rhetorical here – I’m aware that when it comes to creative practice, you can slow down the pace of your output, at least for work that’s not being done on anybody else’s schedule. And in that sense, you can slow down your personal productivity. But I’m not sure if you can slow down productivity culture – at least not enough to make it care about what’s actually best for you as a creative and as a human.

Maybe that sounds a bit fatalistic. But when you do find ways to give yourself more space and slowness in your creative practice, I think that has more effect than you might immediately realize. You may not be able to control all the places where productivity culture intersects with your life – but you can control some of them. And by reorienting to the next right creative thing instead of the next action, you’re reattuning and reclaiming your overall sense of what’s most meaningful.

One of the fascinating things to me about the zettelkasten system is that a zettelkasten is fundamentally slow. According to Bob Doto, a lot of productivity nerds miss this aspect, only focusing on its potential to make individual writing projects easier and faster (which is to say, its potential to make you prolific).

But while a zettelkasten can support a writer’s desire to write faster, if you choose to use it that way, a zettelkasten itself runs on slow time. For one thing, it takes an initial commitment of time spent collecting notes before the zettelkasten really begins stewing. There has to be a critical mass of thought in the pot for the controlled chaos to get cooking.

And even once it does start offering up new and unexpected connections of notes, the zettelkasten is still playing the long game. It’s just as content to lead you to a forgotten note you added five years ago as to one you added last month. Maybe the zettelkasten will help you write an essay about something that’s currently trending in the Internet Discourse. But the zettelkasten is ultimately far more interested in the trends and patterns that emerge from your fascinations over time – and the ones that stand the test of time.

There’s a phrase that jumped out at me in Bob Doto’s post: he refers to creative inspiration as “the quickened spirit.” It’s a comparison that definitely resonates with me, especially on an aesthetic level – I mean, this podcast is called the Inspirited Word. But beyond the mystical vibes, the word “quickened” has some excellent layers to it when you apply it to creative thought and expression.

Yes, it can have the obvious implication of moving quickly. But to quicken is also to deepen, to kindle, to make alive. And maybe that’s the real center of a creative life – finding our own balance that keeps the dance moving without blowing out the spark.

Here’s a final quote from the blog post: “The fact is, the "quickened" spirit needs to be directed into suitable behaviors, as its pure expression is almost always at odds with what in-the-world situations call for.”

Despite how it might sometimes seem listening to this pod, I’m not actually inherently against the idea of performing suitable behaviors for achieving things in real-world situations. It’s necessary to be able to do that. But this is exactly why I think we have to be scrupulous about the core guiding values we’re using to discern what’s worth doing, and what compromises to make as we navigate in the world.

The methods we use to relate to our creativity shape what we create. And over time, they also shape what kinds of action we perceive as being available to us – they shape our ability to perceive the next right thing.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: When it comes to my own creative practice, I’m not against using the framework of productivity as an occasional tool to get things done. But I don’t want to make productivity itself a guiding value of my creative spirit. I don’t want productivity to shape the way spirit moves through me, or the way I perceive it in the world.

There may be ways to rehabilitate productivity culture, to engage with it directly without buying into values that conflict with the full, deepest aspects of the creative spirit. But I think that’s becoming increasingly difficult. I mean, in an era when American public servants are being told to stop serving the public good so they can move into, quote, “higher productivity jobs,” it feels like the well of productivity has become pretty thoroughly poisoned.

But, on the other hand… I am really glad the perverse magic of the internet introduced me to the zettelkasten, and I’m experimenting with creating one of my own. Here’s hoping it will help me get things done while also nurturing my connection to the cracks and possibilities and surprises of slow time.

Maybe the whole zettelkasten thing really doesn’t appeal to you. But whatever is currently quickening your creative spirit, know that it’s worth clearing space to explore. Because, make no mistake, your fascinations are fertile – even when they don’t seem to be immediately productive, when they lead you down slowly unfurling paths, when they can’t be summed up and shared quickly (and even when they aren’t shared at all).

It’s feeling especially hard right now to slow down and integrate instead of being swept up in a dysregulated flow. But we don’t have to be perfect at it – we just have to be committed to it. Give yourself the grace of knowing that every time you do find a way to create that space for yourself, you’re also creating an opportunity for meaning to emerge. And ultimately, that’s what being a storyteller is all about.

 

Thanks for being here with me for this episode of the pod – and if you’ve listened this far, be sure to scroll down into the show notes, which are especially full of good links today. If you’re at all intrigued by the idea of the zettelkasten, I definitely recommend checking out Bob Doto’s book; it does an excellent job of explaining both the potential of the zettelkasten and how to set one up in a straightforward way. The title again is A System for Writing, and I’ve also linked Doto’s blog, which is well worth poking around in. There are also links to Taylor Heaton’s video and to a few other posts that were part of my research and thinking for the episode.

And last but not least, if you’re currently subscribed to the pod newsletter, check your inbox for some bonus material to help you put today’s episode into practice – no productivity system required. That’s it from me today, and as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.