❧ Permission Slips: My Creative System ❧
Have you ever opened a file on your computer and realized that you got 20% of the way into drafting a novel and then somehow completely forgot about it? Or opened a drawer to find a knitted shawl that was 90% finished, sitting on the needles for who knows how long? Keeping track of creative works and actually seeing them over the finish line is really hard. I've spent my fair share of time looking at systems that other people have set up to get creative work done and none of them have ever stuck for long. In late 2023 I decided to really commit to figuring out how to write more and dedicate more time to other creative projects. I've been slowly moving in the direction of making my creative practice regular and sustainable, with lots of bumps in the road. I'm sharing the creativity system that I created and have been using over the past several months, not because think it will work for you, but because it demonstrates the process by which someone could create a system that works for them.
What I'm defining as a system for creativity is a method of organization and time management that a writer, artist, or other creative person might use to keep creative projects organized and complete them. It might involve formal tools like calendars, spreadsheets, databases, or more informal things like inward commitments to self or outward commitments like accountability buddies or practice groups. What I've come up with is a sort of 50/50 split of those things.
A VERY IMPORTANT PRELUDE
If you are a planful person, you likely derive pleasure from making plans. We usually think of planning as a rational, rather than emotional, activity, but planning can be immensely pleasurable for some people. And I'm not just talking about filling in your weekly planner or making a to-do list. This pleasure can come from something as simple as a hypothetical solution to a problem. Let's say that you would like to have a daily running habit and are having trouble getting up in the morning to do it. So you think, "What if I got a better alarm clock than my phone, one of those smart things that wakes you up gradually?" It seems for the moment that your problem is solved. If you take a second to feel what it's like in your body, you might feel a rush of energy, or a warmth spreading through you. Sometimes these sensations are difficult to notice because we generally don't equate thought processes with bodily feelings. But making plans can help us access a number of positive emotional states, like feeling competent, in-control, or relieved.
Not everyone takes pleasure in planning, but for those who do, it can be addictive to try out new organizational systems and programs over and over again because the process is in itself pleasurable. So we can easily be fooled into thinking that doing the work and planning to do the work are one and the same. But here's the thing: they really are not. Making the plan can feel exhilarating while actually carrying it out can feel like pulling teeth. Even the fanciest new alarm clock won't keep you from hating life when it goes off at 5am on a 20 degree morning after a night of poor sleep. A planner full of class schedules and blocked-out study times doesn't actually do the work of studying for you. Planning can be a great pleasure; doing is rarely one. And so if this is you, try to remember in the rush of making a system to solve your creative problems, following through on the plan is a very different matter.
This is all a way of saying: take this with a grain of salt. I have wasted a lot of time adopting other people's systems for myself because the planning itself was pleasurable, but that time ended up being wasted because the system that someone else created was not what I needed.
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At my job, when we are in a meeting that's getting derailed by hypothetical details and worries, my boss asks, "What is the problem we are trying to solve?" Knowing the problem you need to solve helps you weed out solutions that won't work for you. Someone else's system won't apply to your life if you have a different problem than they do. A person who has trouble coming up with a creative idea has a different problem than someone who is overwhelmed by their creative ideas and can't keep them all organized. Someone whose self-doubt keeps them from ever marking a page has a different problem than someone who has trouble editing and refining the work they easily put on paper. Solutions to help people be creative are not one-size-fits-all because we all have different problems. You can't find your solutions until you know what your problems are. And it may take months or (more likely) years to figure out this through trial and error.
The problem I had on the surface, "I'm not writing as much as I'd like," is not a very specific problem and does not have a specific solution. In order to address it, I needed to base my observations on actual behaviors and outcomes, rather than a goal or outcome that I thought I should be achieving.
I have been trying for about the past three years to spend more of my time doing creative work, especially writing. But finding the obstacles to that and overcoming them has taken time. There was a writing project that I was working on intermittently for a few years; I would start work on it in excitement, then after a few weeks or months stop the work, only to pick it up again about a year later. Then after a while the process would start over. It wasn't until earlier this year that my circular work on this project finally spurred me to change how I approach creativity from day to day. The turning point was a moment when I wrote an idea down thinking it was original, only to discover in a notebook a couple of days later that I had written down almost exactly that same thought about three years earlier and completely forgotten I had done so.
What I finally realized, then, is something that I think project managers have known for a long time: the place where the work gets done needs to be separate from the place where you keep track of the work. I realized that whenever working on a creative project, I would put everything about that project into one pace, OR I would scatter it around notebooks and computer files and randomly choose where to write or make notes. But if I forgot to look in those places, say a notebook or a folder on my computer, for any number of reasons, I would forget that the project existed and lose the benefit of all my work. I would then start again later, often in a new notebook or piece of software, so that at the end of a few years I had disjointed notes scattered across a number of physical and digital holding places.
I think this happened in part because I did not have a system for keeping track of my creative work that kept it top of mind. It's very easy to start a writing project with excitement; it's just as easy to forget about it when something takes your attention away from it for even a few days. Emergencies, holiday seasons, vacations, and life changes like a new job make it easy for a project to slip one's mind. I could not make headway on this or other large projects because it all depended on me remembering day to day that the project existed. If I forgot about it, as I inevitably would, nothing else was there to remind me the project existed and get me back on track.
After some reflection, here are three problems1 that I identified regarding my creative practice.
- I tend to forget about larger creative projects that I am working on.
- This is in part because I tend to forget where I am storing those projects while I am working on them.
- And related to that, I often get overwhelmed by large projects that require sustained work over time.
Once I finally understood my problems, I found myself wasting the better part of an afternoon watching videos about the Zettlekasten system. I won't got into details about it here; suffice to say that it's a personal knowledge management system that is high-maintenance and traditionally involves index cards or slips of paper. I knew as I was watching these videos that I wasn't actually interested in starting or keeping a Zettelkasten; I am no longer in school and I think being a research academic is one of the few situations in which the effort that goes into maintaining one would be rewarded. But I was fascinated by the slips of paper themselves. I realized that I had intuited something about the slips, which had led me to watch these videos. I did not need a personal knowledge management system, but I did need a system where each creative project I work on is logged and kept track of on a separate slip of paper. And for all of the slips to be stored together in one place, away from the actual projects they pertain to.
So I came up with this system in mid-August 2025 and still maintain it about 5 months later. I cannot say whether or not I will maintain it far into the future; that remains to be seen. But I present it as an example (and ONLY an example) of how one might implement a system for one's creative work.
Permission Slips
I called these Permission Slips mostly because I didn't want to leave the pun on the table. But also because these slips are a reminder that I am allowed to express myself creatively and manage my creative projects in whatever way I want. The slips of paper I use are stored in two places: a small envelope where active projects are kept, and a binder where non-active projects are archived. Each slip only has the following information on it:
- the date the slip was created
- the working title of the project it represents
- the date the project was started
- where the project is being stored while I am working on it
- the date that the project was completed, set aside, or abandoned
- where (if anywhere) the project lives after it has been completed
- how many days I have worked on the project (each day represented by a dot)
There is no information on the cards about the content of the project, only these parameters. No categorization of the kind of project (writing, knitting, bookbinding, etc.), no record of which dates it was worked on or for how long. The information on the slip is designed to be as simple and low-effort as possible to produce and maintain, and to require no effort to organize. This is because I finally learned that all of my previous attempts to document creative projects required too much maintenance. Eventually, my desire to organize the projects would take precedence over actually doing the work. And that is the ultimate goal of this system: to keep my attention pointed at the work.
The active slips live in an envelope that is small by design. Only about 10 can fit in there at once, so I can work on no more than 10 creative projects at a time. The slips are stored out of order and in fact I shuffle them on most days I look at the envelope. This is to make sure that if I am trying to find just one, I need to flip through all of them, reminding me of each project's existence. Once I finish a project, or decide to set it aside or abandon it, the slip goes out of the envelope and into the binder. Although I do certainly feel satisfaction when I archive a slip because the project is finished, I try not to judge abandoning or setting projects aide. It's unrealistic to assume that every creative idea I have will result in a finished project. Right now, I have 9 active projects (including this very essay), 7 finished ones, and 4 set aside. Twenty projects in 5 months is honestly more than I would have given myself credit for before starting this system.
Every day that I have worked on a project, I take it out of the envelope and make a little dot on the back of the slip. The bar I've set for doing this is very low. I don't set word or time quotas. If I did any work at all on a project on a given day, it gets marked, even if it's just 5 minutes or less. There are two reasons for this: first, I am lightening my burden when it comes to maintaining the system. I don't have to time or measure my output before getting out the slip. Second is that this system rewards frequently returning to projects instead of specific progress made on them in any given session. Frequency is what keeps them at top of mind. My only requirement for what counts as "work" is this: I must have made some physical action on the project that day. It could be opening a computer file and typing for 5 minutes, reading a chapter of a book for research, emailing someone connected with the project, or taking a minute to make a few stitches. Doesn't matter. If I have taken physical action on the project, it counts. I find that sessions of sustained work on projects are infrequent, but are supported by frequent days of small actions.
A major part of designing this system was dialing in where I wanted to create friction vs where I wanted to create ease. It's an immense privilege that I am often able to decide in daily life where I want to balance those two forces. The experience of the person who chooses to take the bus to work in the rain for environmental reasons is very different than a person who must stand the rain for the bus because they can't afford a car. Friction created with intention is very different from unwanted hassles. So I am cognizant of how and where I choose to take the buses and cars of my creative life, so to speak. Creating too much friction for ourselves can make the creative process too difficult, and likewise, creating too much ease can lead to distraction and procrastination. I have written elsewhere about why I choose to use a manual typewriter in some situations as writer but not in others, and also why I have chosen to code my own website instead of using a pre-made platform. Both are instances of strategically placed friction in service of a goal.
In my system, then, I removed friction where I saw it serving me the least, which had to with categorizing the creative work and keeping a minute record of progress. I realized that it was enough for me to make a very simple system of progress-tracking. Earlier in my life, I likely would have made this system into a notebook where I tried to keep a journal about each ongoing project. But this is at odds with my original objective. My goal is not to keep a journal of my creative projects, although that might be a goal for some people. Rather, my goal is simply to get the creative work done; to make progress on the larger projects I'm working on, keep all of the pieces together, and to be able to decide quickly when a project isn't working out and cut it loose so I can move on to the next thing.
But that doesn't mean I have built no friction in to the process either. As I mentioned earlier, I do not keep the slips in order and shuffle them regularly. I actually got this idea from Marie Kondo. When she talks about tidying your papers, she recommends keeping as few as absolutely necessary and them putting them in a fodder in no particular order. If all of your important papers fit inside of a single folder, it's not an issue to flip through the entire thing whenever you are looking for one of them. The benefit is that you then have a built-in mechanism for reviewing your papers every time you need to use one. In the same away, whenever I make a change to one card, I have to flip through all of them to find it. That forces me to look through all of the cards and remember each of the projects I am working on. Perhaps I am sick of flipping past a particular card so many times because I realize that the project is no longer meaningful to me, so I can cull it. And sometimes being reminded of a project is a jolt to return to working on it. If you are familiar with the process of hand-copying bullets from month to month in a bullet journal--if you're tired of copying a to-do list item from month to month, then it must not be that important.2
I also don't spend a lot of time deciding how to divide projects among slips. Sometimes a large project gets one slip, sometime I do it up as several individual cards on work on them separately. I don't spend time planning this out in advance--if I need to split a slip into multiple ones later, that's fine. It's often not a good use of time or energy at the beginning of a large project to make detailed plans for how many parts it has and what they will be, because those details are almost certain to change as the project goes on. I am not using this system to set up any big rules for myself by which I can fail later. It's not that failure doesn't enter into it, but I reserve the failure for something that happens within the creative projects themselves, rather than within the system I use to keep track of the projects. The system should be as free from pressure as possible.
An important reason to keep the system simple and pressure-free is that it WILL take effort to maintain. And that's where many of my idyllic conceptions of creative systems failed in the past: I figured that if I found the system that worked for me, it would be like a perpetual motion device that never needed any input or work. However, every creative system takes work. If I have a creative system that takes more effort to maintain than the creative work itself, it is likely to fail.
So what is my overall goal? To make at least one dot on one card most days. That's it. Adding a single dot to a single slip is a bite-sized, attainable goal. If I can do that much, even when my life is busy and I have obstacles to creative work3, I'm in a better position to devote longer periods of time to projects when I can afford it.
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I hope this overview has been helpful for you. I enjoy geeking out about these sorts of things, so if you'd like to discuss further, consider dropping me a line at emilynhoward at proton me or consider becoming my penpal.
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1 It's important to note that the kinds of problems I'm talking about here only deal with planning and organization. I have other obstacles to creativity that don't have anything to do with planning and organizing per se. For instance, I have written elsewhere about why I have put a lot of effort in to separate the processes of drafting and editing in order to keep my writing projects on track. Likewise, cultivating the discipline to not allow myself to procrastinate and get distracted is also important for me; it's very subjective and squishy and can't really be reduced to a system. ↩
2 While it has its merits, Bullet Journaling is one of the creative systems that I put a lot of effort into learning and maintaining that ultimately didn't work out for me. ↩
3 As an example, the day when I did the final editing work that pushed this essay over the finish line, I learned that the United States, my country, had illegally arrested the president of Venezuela. This news was devastating to me and it felt like doing any creative work was trivial in comparison. But my system reminds me that I have my work to do, and that what seems trivial in the moment is not to be abandoned. ↩
Drafted between 12/1/25-1/3/26, typescript and Microsoft Notepad. And yes, I did use my system to keep track of my work on this essay.
Published: 1/3/26