Productive Chaos: The system you do not need to think about
The best system for learning is the easiest one
Stop Organizing, Learn in Chaos
Ever feel like you need the 'perfect' plan, the 'right' system, before you can actually start creating? Yeah, that pressure is real, and honestly? It's often a trap. 🪤
That quest for the perfect content calendar or niche definition before you've even started writing a single tweet? That obsession with upfront perfection is often just procrastination in disguise, keeping you stuck.All this unnecessary planning and organization kills your momentum and leads to quitting due to overwhelm.
Conventional wisdom screams "Get organized first!" But that's precisely the wrong advice for beginners. This is not how experts learn things. Forcing structure onto something you barely understand is counterproductive.
The secret isn't more organization or a new better note-taking system. Fumbling in the messy chaos is the actual path forward. You need to get your hands dirty, and ditch all these restraints to get started.
The Big Idea: Welcome to Productive Chaos
I call this idea Productive Chaos.
💡 Here's the gist: Productive Chaos is that vital, messy phase when you're learning or creating. You intentionally wallow in the disorganization – gathering raw stuff, exploring tangents, building intuition – without rushing to structure everything prematurely. It's crucial for beginners finding their way and for experts tackling something unfamiliar.
It’s that initial swim where everything feels jumbled. You're flooded with info, examples, half-baked ideas. No clear map exists yet, and trying to draw one now is pointless.
It connects to ideas like:
🐥 Embracing Beginner's Mind (Tim Ferriss): Diving into anything new, means accepting a period of incompetence and rapid, messy experimentation. You have to be okay with flailing initially.
🌊 Context Broadening (Elizabeth Filips): Medical students often need that initial overwhelming flood of information to builds a crucial mental scaffold before specific facts can hang properly. You need the big, messy picture first. This is how you build intuition (more on that later).
🧠 Mind Gardening (Anne-Laure Le Cunff): Think of it as letting ideas bump into each other messily at first, like planting seeds without perfectly neat rows. The goal isn't instant order, but a rich soil for insights to sprout later.
Bottom line: You can't organize what you don't deeply grasp. You can't structure a project you haven't felt out intuitively. Forcing structure early is like starting a house build with the roof tiles. Needs some direction, sure – a general area of interest – but not a rigid, suffocating blueprint.
The Problem: Why Premature Structure Kills Progress
So, what happens when we try to skip this messy phase and jump straight to the color-coded spreadsheets?
❓ Consequences I've definitely lived through:
🥶 Analysis Paralysis: Spending ages researching the "best" note-taking app (thanks for the warning, Ali Abdaal!), the "perfect" niche, the flawless outline... and launching precisely nothing. Often fueled by perfectionism or fear of looking dumb (something psychologist Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG would likely point out).
💥 Brittle Systems: Creating a structure that looks neat on paper but shatters the second reality hits, because it wasn't built on deep, messy understanding. Useless.
🎭 Inauthenticity: Your work feels stiff, generic, like a bad cover song. You're following someone else's map instead of discovering your own landmarks through messy exploration.
🫠 Quitting Too Soon: It feels hard and unnatural (because it is when you force it!), so you bail. "Guess I'm not cut out for this." Add it to the pile of unfinished projects. We give up before the good part.
🔥 Overwhelm & Burnout: Trying to maintain a perfect, premature structure when your brain naturally wants to explore and connect things non-linearly is exhausting. Especially if your focus sometimes resembles a pinball machine after too much coffee. This friction just kills curiosity and drains your batteries, as writer Tim Denning might observe.
The Goal: Embrace the Mess, Build Intuition First
What we want instead is a process that actually aligns with how real learning and creativity work.
✅ The Real Goal:
To consciously use the messy phase for maximum learning and exploration. Get that Context Broadening done first!
To build deep intuition and genuine understanding before trying to optimize or structure everything perfectly.
To discover your authentic way of doing things, not just clone someone else's setup. Clarity emerges through the chaos.
To make starting easier, not harder. Give yourself psychological permission to be messy.
Examples from the Trenches
This isn't just theory. I see (and deploy) this "Productive Chaos" approach everywhere:
✍️ Chaotic Content Strategy:
Forget the perfect 12-month content calendar and rigidly defined niche on day one. Just start creating. Write posts, film shorts, tweet ideas that genuinely spark your interest right now. Ship it. Then, analyze. What resonates with people? What feels right to you? Let the signal emerge from the noise. Your unique angle or "niche" often reveals itself through the messy process of doing, shipping, and iterating – Write to find ideas. Discovering your path through action.
🖼️ Practical A/B Testing:
Need a video thumbnail? Instead of weeks agonizing over theoretical design perfection for one option? Bang out 3 decent, different versions quickly. Run a simple A/B test. See what actually gets clicks in the real world. Learn from data, don't stall on theory. Test, learn, iterate. Faster, smarter.
💻 Chaotic Skill Acquisition:
Learning complex software like Motion Graphics? Ditch the rigid A-Z course for now. Dip into various YouTube tutorials on specific techniques that look cool. Try stuff. Break things. Build an intuitive feel for the tools through hands-on, messy practice. You can master the formal theory later, once you actually have a practical foundation.
📚 Chaotic Note-Taking (The Emergent Structure Way):
When I first started building my "second brain" in Obsidian, imposing strict folders felt wrong. So I didn't. I just dumped everything in: ideas, article highlights, shower thoughts, journal entries about how I felt, tried out a bunch of exercise. Pure chaos that was only held together by my daily note. Randomly tagged and sometimes I didn't even tag.
Structure wasn't forced later; it emerged. Using links ([[like this]]), tags (#likethis), my note database grew and connections started revealing themselves. I made a Zettelkasten that grew organically, bottom-up, based on my actual thoughts. It wasn't Chaos -> Forced Structure. It was Structure emerging iteratively from Chaos.
Trying to pick the "perfect system" upfront is a waste of time because those systems were designed by people who thought differently from you, They have their own habits of collecting information and how to process it, and those are unlikely to just fit for how you think. Start capturing, then connect.
Real Life Examples
🧵 Chaotic Sewing:
You don't always need a pattern or precise calculations. Beginners don't start with haute couture; they start with simpler projects, learning the quirks of different fabrics and machine. Stop researching the "absolute best" patterns for beginners. Just cut, sew, adjust. Rip seams, try again.
Sewing a sundress for $8 without a pattern - YouTube
Look at how this experienced seamstress completely ditches measurements and wings it based on intuition. Learning to adapt beats perfectly executing a plan that doesn't fit reality.
🍞 Chaotic Baking (Sourdough Style):
Forget precise gram measurements sometimes. Mix some starter (like milk kefir or sourdough) with flour until it feels right. Let it rise. Maybe toss it in the fridge for a few days (cold proofing). Take it out, shape it loosely, add toppings, let it proof again, bake it. No scales, just feel and experience. This is how you really learn how ingredients interact and how to adjust recipes on the fly.
My recipe for baking with no scales goes:
Mix milk kefir + flour till it seems to somewhat hold together.
Leave outside for first rise till doubled.
Leave in fridge for a few days.
Take out. Drizzle olive oil + herbs. Put toppings (olives).
Let it rise for a few hours. Bake (approx 200 to 220 C) for 20 to 40 mins, lower temp to 170 C for another 20 mins. It all depends on how much you are baking.
Bonus: Garlic butter spread on top. Then bake about 5 mins.
I might be really wrong. These timings are really vague. And yet, I make bread that I can eat and it is some of the most delicious bread I've ever tried. Got gushy reviews from my cousin too.
I think it's really important to learn how to compensate for mistakes or just adjusting so that they are course corrected. So if I feel like my bread is not going to rise that well, I tend to stretch it out, and make it into focaccia / pizza with generous toppings. In a sense, I repurpose the basic dough into different things depending on how it feels.
Also butter and olive oil makes everything taste delicious. Just add a bit of salt and you are good to go.
The Benefit: Why Chaos is Actually Your Friend
Okay, randomly messing around feels weird, like a waste of time and energy, because you just know, that this is gonna be a mess. Why make this mess? What's the real upside?
✨ Here's the Real Payoff:
🚀 Obliterates Starting Friction: This is HUGE. Giving yourself explicit permission to be messy transforms Step 1 from "Create Intimidatingly Perfect Plan" to simply... "Start Exploring." Infinitely easier to get momentum.
🎯 Ultimate Perfectionism Killer: Perfectionism often = fear. Productive Chaos reframes the initial mess as a feature, not a bug. It's supposed to be imperfect early on. Expecting chaos frees you from the paralysis of needing perfection now. This is incredibly liberating, especially if rigid structures drain you or feel impossible to maintain (hello, fellow brains that don't always follow the standard productivity playbook – sometimes linked to things like ADHD or burnout). Surrender to the process.
💪 Builds Real, Adaptable Skills: Following a plan teaches you... to follow a plan. Navigating chaos teaches you to think, improvise, trust your intuition, and reflect on what works. You build skills that function even when things inevitably go off-script.
🌱 Your Stuff Becomes Genuinely Yours: When your path, style, and ideas emerge from your exploration, they're authentic. Not some pre-digested framework you borrowed. It resonates differently.
Basically: Easier starts, less burnout from chasing impossible standards, and more unique, robust outcomes. Win-win-win.
The Process: How to Harness Productive Chaos
Ready to try it? It’s less a rigid checklist (obviously) and more a phased approach with a mindset shift:
👇 Your Chaos Toolkit:
🌊 Phase 1: Immerse & Collect (The Sponge / Context Broadening):
Dive in with a general direction. Read, watch, listen, experiment. Gather raw material. Build that mental scaffold.
Don't filter too much yet. Capture everything that sparks interest. Loose notes, highlights, voice memos, brainstorms. Think Mind Gardening. Hoard insights, the key here is to only save things, that are your insights. Don't bother summarizing a ton of videos you can rewatch (My philosophy on capture systems here).
🐥 Phase 2: Play & Experiment (The Sandbox / Action & Iteration):
Start doing low-stakes things. Write a messy crappy first draft, test a small technique, build a prototype, create varied content. You are still learning.
Focus on action, quick loops, getting feedback (data, comments, your own gut feeling). Failure = data. Success = data. You are still in the info gathering phase.
👀 Phase 3: Reflect & Notice Patterns (The Detective / Finding the Signal):
Step back regularly to reflect. What connections are emerging from the noise? What themes keep popping up? What surprises you? What's getting traction or feels energizing?
Talk it out, journal, link notes actively. This is where intuition sharpens and structure begins to whisper hints. Don't skip reflection.
🌱 Phase 4: Introduce Gentle, Emergent Structure (The Gardener / Mapping):
Now organize, but only as needed, based on the patterns you actually see. Maybe a loose outline (Hub note)? Content pillars based on resonant themes? Linking related notes into clusters (Tag'em, Don't folder)? A simple template for repeated tasks?
This structure should support your discovered workflow, not impose external rules. It grew from the chaos; it didn't replace it wholesale.
That said, you can definitely get fancy eventually. My meta-template picker has been used everyday for the 5 years.
The Concept: Productive Chaos
Let's call it: Productive Chaos.
It's not laziness or permanent disarray. It’s a strategic, intuition-first approach. It acknowledges that clarity, structure, and genuine insight often emerge through navigating the initial mess, not by meticulously avoiding it. It's about building a foundation strong enough for meaningful organization when the time is right. It's about letting go of the training wheels of precise systems and recipes, to build intuition so you can work in chaos, adapt to reality and make it work.
Related Ideas (For the Nerds 🤓)
This way of thinking hooks into some bigger concepts by other creators.
Already covered above:
🌱 Mind Gardening (Anne-Laure Le Cunff): Letting ideas cross-pollinate freely before imposing rigid structure. Productive Chaos is the fertile, messy soil.
🏗️ Context Broadening (Elizabeth Filips): The need for that initial, overwhelming flood of information to build a cognitive scaffold before details can stick. Chaos builds the foundation.
🐥 Embracing Beginner's Mind (Tim Ferriss): Accepting initial incompetence and diving into messy, rapid experimentation is core to skill acquisition. Chaos is the training ground.
New:
✍️ Writing to Find Ideas (David Perell): This challenges the notion that you figure things out then write. Instead, the (often chaotic) act of writing itself is the mechanism for discovery and clarification. Productive Chaos is the engine of this discovery process.
🎯 Action Reveals Signal (Dan Koe / Tim Denning): Your authentic path or "niche" isn't found in pre-planning, but emerges from the noise generated by consistent, varied action. Shipping messy work allows the market and your own energy to tell you what's resonating. Chaos provides the raw data.
🏃 Bias Towards Action / Shipping (Seth Godin): Prioritizing the act of creating and releasing work—even imperfect work—over getting stuck in planning loops. Overcoming "The Resistance" often means embracing the chaos of starting now.
📥 Capture First, Organize Later (Tiago Forte): Aligned with the 'Capture' habit in Building a Second Brain. Get raw, messy ideas out of your head and into a trusted system without premature filtering or structuring. Deal with the chaos reliably, then process it into order as needed.
🔀 Divergent Thinking: That creative phase focused on generating many possibilities without judgment. Productive Chaos is about actively operating within that divergent space for longer.
🧐 Reflection-in-Action (Donald Schön): The idea of thinking, adapting, and learning while you're in the middle of doing complex work. Our "Reflect & Notice Patterns" phase is a deliberate application of this.
Productive Chaos is simply my practical label for leaning into these powerful ideas, especially when facing a new topic or tempted with a new fancy PKM system. It’s about trusting the process of emergence over the illusion of upfront control.
It's about giving yourself 🧠 Permission to Be Messy. The drive for perfect organization can be a defense mechanism against fear (of failure, judgment). Explicitly allowing chaos lowers activation energy and bypasses perfectionism paralysis.
So, next time you feel that pressure cooker building – the need to have it all figured out before you start – just stop. Take a breath.
Give yourself permission to be messy. Explicitly. Write it on a sticky note if you have to.
Here:
Dive in. Collect. Experiment. Reflect. Trust that the valuable structure, the unique insight, your path, will emerge from the exploration itself. Stop trying to force it. Start doing.
What do you think? I have been on a bottom-up thinking kick recently and would love to hear about other ways you leverage this kind of messy simple approaches. 👇
And if you're into practical, no-fluff strategies for learning, creating, and building systems that actually work for your brain (not some productivity guru ideal), hit subscribe. 🚀
And if you are curious about that bread:
