Use Your Head

Joni Mitchell is a famously creative person. But she is also meticulously organized: her house is filled with “custom-designed, special-purpose drawers,” each of which is devoted to a particular type of object—one for Scotch tape, a different one for masking tape, one for string, another for light bulbs. “I don’t want to waste energy looking for things,” she notes. She wants her mind clear for creating. Other ferociously productive musicians have similarly methodical households and workplaces. Stephen Stills’s home studio has oodles of little drawers (guitar picks, plugs, guitar jacks), and Michael Jackson was so categorical that one of his personal staff was a “chief archivist.”

For Daniel Levitin, these Herculean efforts are not incidental to the artist’s creativity. They are central to it: organization is the catalytic force that releases their creativity. That is because our...