The virtuous circle of creative systems

When you do creative work, it is advisable to use a creative system because it will allow you to:

• save time
• improve quality.

However, these benefits go deeper than they may seem at first glance. Using a creative system adds many virtuous circles that improve your creative capacity in different ways.

For example:

• Using a creative system improves your capacity. This is the most obvious path. If you have a good strategy for doing creative work, your capcity to do creative work will improve.

• Using your creative system improves it. If you have a strategy and you use it, over time you will discover what things work and what don’t, allowing you to improve your creative system and, therefore, your capacity.

• Improving your capacity improves your creative system. When you improve your understanding of that creative work, you will be in a better position to improve your creative system.

This situation—where the tool improves the capacity and, vice versa, the capacity improves the tool—is a virtuous circle that occurs in many really good tools, the most paradigmatic case being the Zettelkasten method itself.