Today, I want to talk about the importance of creating “structured flexibility" when you are running a project.

To do that, I’m gonna talk to you about my underwear drawer. Don’t worry…it’s not going to get (that) weird.

Y’all know Marie Kondo, right? The KonMari organization method?
Well, I got fairly obsessed with watching her TV series at one point. I particularly loved this unique way of organizing underwear that she had. She made something so boring look so special.

I got to work imitating what I saw her do. I found these pretty gift boxes that I’d been saving and I lined my two upper drawers with them. I watched, and rewatched, how to compactly fold each underwear to minimize bulk while still showing off the front of it.

I arranged them in neat vertical rows by color and type in my little gift boxes.
And it was beautiful. Every time I opened the drawer I got a blast of dopamine because I felt like I was opening a present.

It was awesome……until the time came to do the laundry.

The thought of redoing all that work of folding and sorting made me groan. I hate cleaning at the best of times.

I put off putting away my clothes at all, telling myself I’d “get to it” while fishing clean clothes out one by one from the laundry bag as I needed them.

…At last, something had to be done. I couldn’t go on this way.

So I came up with a NEW method. Something that let me be organized, but with flexibility so that I didn’t have to spend 10 years folding things into fussy little vertical rectangles.

I split each dresser drawer in half with a divider. It gave me around 12 clothing areas or “buckets”. I gave each bucket an assigned clothing type. Underwear, pants, tights, shirts, etc.

THEN I gave myself ABSOLUTE LICENSE to stuff those clothing types in any old way I felt like. Inside out? Yes. Crumpled into a ball? Fine. As long as they get in there, doesn’t matter. The point was being able to finish faster and also in being able to find it later. Of course, for things that get wrinkles, I hung them.

This was so successful for me that I applied it to my kids’ dressers as well. It made the whole process so much easier.

Some days, I still go full Kondo just for the hell of it.

Why did I tell you this?

It’s because I see one of two things happen over and over again with creative managers.

Either there is absolutely no structure whatsoever…the “fishing clothing out of the laundry bag one at a time” situation…

…Or there’s SO MUCH STRUCTURE that you can practically see their clients’ eyes rolling when they load up the 48-paged deck choreographing exactly what they must do and when.

The creative process can be “messy”, and it is necessary to allow the mess. It is necessary to make space for pattern association and inspiration and freeform brainstorming with your client. It is necessary to make space for pivoting. If you choke it to death with Patty Pocket’s Rules of Polite Project Management, this is not going to lead to a good experience for you and your client.

But it’s ALSO necessary to walk in with a plan. It’s necessary to make a clearly defined SPACE for the mess, and then to cut it off before it derails everything. If you simply throw a wild rash of storyboards or “cool” stuff at your client in every meeting, without a sense of progress, timing, start and end, or what the heck it is you are trying to accomplish, you’re going to make your client feel very uncomfortable in a whole other way.