4 principles for a digital workspace that sparks ideas—not frustration
Digital tools are great…until managing them becomes your second job
ICYMI: We’re hosting an IRL retreat in the French countryside! Only a handful of spots remain. Let us know if you’re interested so we can reserve a château spot for you. :)
Hi there! You’re reading the Bonfire newsletter from Kevan Lee & Shannon Deep. Each week, we highlight brand, marketing, and creative learnings from our experience as in-house marketers turned agency owners who think a lot about creativity, our relationship to work, and how all of that impacts our identities. We’ll also feature insights from our digital community of super smart folks (which you’re welcome to join).
Wishing you a great week!
Digital workspaces that spark ideas
If you’ve ever opened your digital workspace—Notion, Asana, Figma, G Suite, whatever—to “get some work done,” and two hours later emerged with no new ideas and nothing checked off your to-do list, but you’ve managed to alphabetize and color coordinate all your project folders…you are not alone.
A lot of digital tools promise to facilitate clarity, productivity, even creativity. But too often, they become places of overwhelm, admin guilt, or endless optimization loops.
Your digital workspace should do one thing really well: Help you think better. Not necessarily think faster, or more productively, but support whatever your best thinking means for you as an individual.
So here are four principles for designing (or redesigning) a digital workspace that supports your thinking and creativity rather than strangles them.
1. Keep your “thinking” space separate from your “doing” space.
Don’t try to plan, brainstorm, build, track, and document all in the same place. Thinking and executing require different mental states—so give them their own little digital homes.
You know how sleep specialists say that the only thing you should do in bed is sleep, and if you have insomnia, you should get up and go sit in another room? That’s because it’s helpful for our brain to have a dedicated space where something happens, which facilitates that very thing.
Our digital spaces are no different. Keeping them separate allows for faster, cleaner transitions between purpose and the next.
You can divide your spaces however is most natural for you to work, but think about having separate areas for:
Messy, generative thinking vs. polished deliverables
Task management vs. executional work
Individual effort vs. collaborative effort
Visual vs. written vs. holistic creation
Evergreen strategy/foundations vs. day-to-day tasks
For example, at Bonfire, we do a lot of messy notetaking for internal projects in Notion, we chat about those things in dedicated Slack channels, and “final” products are often GoogleDocs for ease of sharing. We also use FigJam for brainstorming and live workshops, but we’ll connect directly into our clients’ Notion instances, so we deliver a lot of the polished work as structured Notion pages.
If we tried to do everything in Notion, I would scream. (Have you ever tried to make a robust table in Notion? Don’t—you’ll throw your computer out the window. Side note: Notion, I am begging you for a Merge Cells button good LORD almighty!!!)
2. Don’t build temples. Build playgrounds.
You don’t need a perfectly architected second brain. You need somewhere to play.
I, too, can fall victim to the “But everything is so nice and neat and has a place!” bias when needing to start a new task, project, or brainstorm. If I’m too sensitive to the work that’s already there and the structure that already exists, I’m curtailing possibilities before I even explore them. The most helpful workspaces are ones you can rearrange and allow to evolve with your needs, rather than cramming your needs into what already exists.
If you can, let your workspace feel unfinished and prioritize ease of use over aesthetic appeal. The more polished and pristine your workspace becomes, the more intimidating it is to use. Perfection is alluring, but it can kill momentum.
Also, while a rigid system might feel is super satisfying to set up, it often becomes a chore to maintain. (We humans are great at building our own mental prisons.) How much time and energy are you losing to the system itself vs. the work it’s supposed to enable?
Instead, think about creating light scaffolding that allows for flow and flexibility. For example, you could have a “Now / Next / Later” board instead of a full-blown sprint planning system, which would allow you to keep momentum without requiring constant grooming. Something Kevan and I do is put holds on our calendars for “Big Picture” planning, because even if we don’t know exactly what we’re going to talk about, we know that we probably didn’t have time for those topics during the week.
3. Establish a cleaning routine.
I generally hate cleaning and organizing except in periods of intense emotional distress when it seems to be the only thing I want to do. (TMI?)
But just like our IRL spaces, digital spaces get messy.
Give yourself easy ways to “clean” spaces. Think: weekly rituals of archiving or deleting, or frequent sweeps of things into folders that can be shelved and only resurrected if absolutely necessary. Sometimes, you can even set things to auto-archive or auto-delete if there hasn’t been activity on them in X-number of days.
Example of one of my systems: Both of my desktops are cluttered with innumerable screenshots and inscrutable things I’ve downloaded. (I won’t tell you what Kevan said when he caught a glimpse of the chaos on a screen share.) Whenever my desktop totally fills up, I drag everything into a folder called Screenshot Trash. I repeat as needed. Years go by. I get a new computer. I do not transfer the Screenshot Trash folder to the new computer.
Voilà! Problem solved.
Hmm. Maybe I’m not a healthy example of this. Moving on…
4. Ask the question: “Does this help me work better?”
Don’t evaluate tools or systems based on how many features they offer. Ask whether they make your creative and cognitive processes feel easier, lighter, or more expansive.
If it sparks ideas, if it feels intuitive, if it fills a need, then it works! If, after the natural learning curve of a new system or software, it’s a time and energy sink, give yourself permission to ditch it or reimagine how you use it.
You can gauge this by paying attention to moments when you’re in a flow state and then noting when and how you get interrupted. Maybe you have a great idea for a blog post that you’re excited about, but as you try to figure out which app to use or which Notion page to note it on, you’re frustrated and lose track of your thoughts. Or maybe you’re in the groove designing something, but then when it comes to sharing that design for review and feedback, you encounter clunky, broken workflows and lots of friction as you try to upload it somewhere everyone has access to.
Moments when you lose your flow can show you what’s not working about your digital workspaces!
Digital tools are meant to serve your creativity and thinking—not replace or structure them to death. There’s no perfect setup. What matters is whether your tools make it easier for you to access your own mind, voice, curiosity, and imagination.
What are some of your favorite digital workspace practices?
Hopefully some of these ideas will prove useful as you’re building your digital workspace. And we’d love to hear what’s already working for you! Feel free to drop us a comment or hit reply to start a conversation.
Notable links, convos, and events
You can see all this and more in our Campout community.
Meg Moore, community member and executive comms consultant gave a fascinating demo/tutorial about how to use AI to define your taste and voice. You can check out the replay here. (Stay tuned for a template related to this in the Template Library soon!)
Did you know we’ve got a Job Board in Campout? Check out this recent posting, which is maybe one of the best job descriptions we’ve ever seen??
We’ve got a new exercise template based on last week’s newsletter about using the 4Cs—Curiosity, Creative friction, Contribution, and Context—to guide your career choices.
And if you missed
’s Career Ecology Framework, we’ve got an exercise for that, too!
But wait! There’s more…
Wanna be friends?
If you love this newsletter and wish it were more interactive, you’re in luck! Join us over in Campout, our digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious.
Wanna work with us?
If you need help with brand strategy and storytelling, fractional brand and marketing leadership, and bringing your brand strategy to life in impactful ways, send us an email at hello@aroundthebonfire.com to get in touch.
As always, you can find us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads.
LOL at Screenshot Trash — so relatable!