In Mark McGuinness’s popular series, Time Management for Creative People, he started out with Why You Need to be Organised to be Creative.
A couple of the comments were in disagreement, so Mark, definitely a creative guy, twisted around with Why You Need to Be Disorganised to Be Creative.
As always, a great read. Thanks Mark!
Catherine (cat) Morley | Project Manager
Creative Latitude | NO!SPEC | BoDo team
This post went live on February 11th, 2008. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
In this series I’ve given you my take on time management and how it can help or hinder creative work. In doing so, I’ve taken elements from different systems, having assimilated them over time and adapted them to my own needs. If you are keen to investigate these systems, please make sure you try them one at a time! Otherwise you’ll end up confused. It’s worth devoting some time to working with a system until you know it really well, before deciding whether you need to add to it.
The following are all resources I’ve used myself - if you have any recommendations of your own to share, please leave a comment.
If you enjoyed this series you can download it as a free e-book. The Creative Commons licence means you are free to copy and share the e-book on a noncommercial basis, as long as you keep it intact and credit me as the author.
My GTD del.icio.us bookmark is where I bookmark any web pages I find with useful material about time and workflow management. (‘GTD’ stands for ‘Getting Things Done’.) If you subscribe to the RSS feed for this bookmark then you’ll receive new recommendations as I find them.
The Creative Habit – Learn it and Use it for Life, by Twyla Tharp
Very down-to-earth, very practical, very inspiring. The famous choreographer shares her working routine and argues passionately that inspiration doesn’t come without a lot of perspiration, discipline and hard work. Highly recommended for anyone who takes their creativity seriously.
Creativity – Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Classic study of the creative process, based on the idea that peak creative performance is characterised by the state of creative flow, in which distractions are tuned out and there is a single-minded focus on the work. Achieving more creative flow is one of the main reasons for a creative person to learn about time management.
Creators on Creating, edited by Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, Anthea Barron
A rich collection of first-hand accounts of the creative process, including some fascinating descriptions of creators’ working habits. Contributors include Leonardo da Vinci, Brian Eno, Ingmar Bergman, Isadora Duncan, Richard Feynman, Rainer Maria Rilke and Frank Zappa.
Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management, by Mark Forster
If you’re pushed for time and want a book on time management that will deliver results fast, this is the one I recommend. The book is deliberately provocative, prompting you to reconsider working habits you take for granted and full of non-obvious suggestions that make complete sense once Mark has explained his reasoning. Not only that, the ideas work and can be applied almost immediately.
Mark’s system is not as complex as David Allen’s (see below) but that doesn’t mean it’s less powerful, it’s just different. It may well be all you need.
Mark also writes a lively and useful blog, Get Everything Done and provides a selection of Time Management Articles.
Getting Things Done - How to Achieve Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen
David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ is a powerful system with legions of devoted fans. It’s not for the faint-hearted however - once you’ve read the book it takes 2-3 full days of work to capture all of your commitments and set up the system. Having done this, I would definitely say it’s been worth the time and effort, even if it means sacrificing a weekend.
David Allen’s website - lots of resources, including free articles, a blog and forums.
Productive Talk Podcast - Merlin Mann Interviews David Allen about his system.
Getting Things Done Guru David Allen and His Cult of Hyperefficiency - Wired Magazine feature on the origins of Getting Things Done.
Getting Design Done - excellent piece about the Getting Things Done system and Creativity, from D. Keith Robinson at Graphic Define.
Implementing GTD for Creative Work? Merlin Mann of 43 Folders responds to Keith Robinson’s article and asks whether GTD and creativity are compatible - prompting an interesting discussion in the comments.
If you’re a Mac user, Isolator will help you concentrate on your work by blacking out everything on your screen except the menu bar and the application you are currently working in. I gather Dropcloth does the same for Windows.
I use iGTD to organise my projects and ‘to do’ lists. It’s flexible and reasonably user-friendly.
When I had a PC I used Thinking Rock which has similar functionality.
43 Folders is a hugely popular GTD blog, run by Merlin Mann. A vast archive of tips and techniques for improving your productivity. I’m tempted to say I don’t know how he finds the time, but I’ll resist.
Lifehacker is a constant stream of potentially useful productivity tips, many of them tech-oriented, e.g. Manage a to-do list with your iPod touch. There are lots of posts published every day, but it doesn’t take long to read - I just skim through the headlines until I find something useful.
Lifehack.org is another deservedly busy and popular productivity blog, run by Leon Ho and his team.
The Four Hour Work Week - As the title of his book The Four Hour Work Week suggests, Tim offers a radical and provocative approach to rethinking your work and life. It goes way beyond time management and is a provocative and stimulating read for anyone who feels overloaded with work and wants to spend their time doing more interesting things. I first heard about Tim’s ideas through this interview with Darren Rowse of Problogger.
The Behance team specialise in helping creative professionals ‘make ideas happen’. They espouse a philosophy of ‘productive creativity’, embodied in their Action Method and in their range of products for capturing and processing creative ideas. I blogged about their Action Pad for creative meetings a while ago.
There’s an argument that having good quality tools will encourage you to use them more. Since buying some Moleskine notebooks earlier this year I’ve definitely noticed my fingers itching to scribble down more creative ideas and lines of verse.
What about you? What resources do you use to manage your workload? Please share your recommendations for books, websites etc. in the comments.
Mark McGuinness | Coaching Creative Professionals
Time Management for Creative People is one of the ways business coach Mark McGuinness helps creative professionals and creative agencies succeed.
For more practical tips and inspiration visit his Wishful Thinking blog. Subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts delivered to you via RSS or e-mail.
This post went live on November 30th, 2007. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
So you’re ring-fencing your creativity, avoiding the Sisyphus effect of endless to-do lists and getting all your commitments off your mind and into buckets. So what happens next?
Obviously, there’s no point capturing all those to-do items unless you’re going to do something about them. Which means regularly ‘emptying the buckets’, reviewing your commitments and deciding what to do. How you do this and how often is up to you, but here are a few principles to bear in mind.
In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen suggests that you review your to-do lists as often as you need to in order to feel on top of things. I do a mini-review every morning when I look through my e-mails and other in-trays (from yesterday of course).
A larger-scale weekly review is one of the cornerstones of the Getting Things Done system. David Allen describes the weekly review as a time to:
I’ll be honest and say I don’t do the review every week. Some weeks simply feel too busy, other weeks I’m so caught up in what I’m doing that stopping to review seems like an unnecessary interruption. But whenever I do make time for it, I always feel better – the review gives me a clear sense of where I am and what I’m doing. I nearly always find something important that was in danger of slipping through the cracks. After finishing the review, I’m full of renewed enthusiasm for my work. So maybe I’ll do it this week after all…
In his book, David Allen gives detailed instructions on performing a weekly review. But it’s really up to you how you do it – the review is about doing whatever you need so that you feel on top of your work.
Here’s what I usually do:
It’s important to empty your buckets by making sure you have a record of each task in a place where you will find it when you need to. It’s up to you how you manage your to-do lists – you might like to have one big list or several, on paper or in digital format. David Allen suggests you have different lists for different contexts – e.g. a list of phone calls to make by the phone, a separate list of things to do when you’re in town etc.
I use iGTD to manage most of my lists – it’s designed for the Getting Things Done system and allows me to assign tasks to both projects (e.g. ‘Blog ideas’) and contexts (e.g. phone calls or e-mails). When I empty my buckets, I transfer any tasks from meetings, answerphone messages, notes etc. to iGTD. There’s no need to do this for e-mails, as the e-mails themselves serve as reminders of the tasks – I’m not finished until the inbox is empty.
Reading through that last paragraph, I realise how geeky I must sound! Well, I’ll let my friends be the judge of that. The system probably sounds like a lot of work, but I hardly notice it any more. It took a while to get used to this way of working, but now it works so well for me, I take it for granted. Dealing with tasks in this way has almost become automatic, leaving my mind free to think about more interesting things.
On the subject of geekiness, it will probably come as no surprise to learn that Getting Things Done and similar systems can become an obsession with some enthusiasts. If you’re not careful you can spend so long reviewing and tweaking your system that you never get round to actually doing the things on your list… Having said that, I’ve found the time I’ve invested in investigating these systems and changing my working habits has been repaid many times over. I hope this series helps you make your working life more productive, enjoyable and creative – please share your experiences and questions in the comments.
In my final post I’ll point to some useful books, software and websites to help you fine-tune your own personal organisation system.
Mark McGuinness | Coaching Creative Professionals
Time Management for Creative People is one of the ways business coach Mark McGuinness helps creative professionals and creative agencies succeed.
For more practical tips and inspiration visit his Wishful Thinking blog. Subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts delivered to you via RSS or e-mail.
This post went live on November 23rd, 2007. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
So you’re sitting at your desk, trying to focus on a piece of creative work – but it’s hard to concentrate, there’s something nagging at your attention. Suddenly it pops into your mind – you’ve forgotten something urgent! Or even worse, you get a phone call or an e-mail out of the blue demanding to know why you haven’t delivered on a promise. Or you notice a post-it on the floor, which has fallen off your monitor, containing a reminder to DO SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT… by yesterday.
If this happens to you often enough, you get used to living with a constant low-level anxiety – scanning your memory, your desk, your e-mails, you post-its, your scattered to-do lists – as you worry that you’ve forgotten something important. When you agree to do something, you may write it down – but can you be 100% sure you’ll notice the note in time to do it? Or if you’re out and about and make a commitment, how can you be sure you’ll remember to put it on your to-do list when you get back to the office? Wherever you go, whatever you’re doing, somewhere at the back of your mind you’re wondering whether you’ve forgotten something vital that could blow up in your face at any moment.
How about this for an alternative?
No, it’s not an ancient Zen text – these words are lifted from David Allen’s best-selling book on productivity, Getting Things Done. When I read this section of the book, I grasped the true value of having a system for managing your workload – not merely to be more productive but to reclaim your own mind by clearing out unnecessary mental clutter caused by trying to keep track of all your work commitments.
Before discovering the Getting Things Done system, I would typically have several to-do lists on the go at once, on different sheets of paper, not to mention the post-it notes stuck to my monitor. But I wasn’t in the habit of writing everything down, so there were always several items I had to remember at any one time. I was vaguely aware that the effort to remember – and anxiety about forgetting – was taking up valuable mental energy and clouding my mind. I resented this all the more, because I had experienced the opposite. I had been on retreats where I had experienced a wonderful mental clarity and peace of mind after several days of silent meditation. But each time the retreat ended, I was frustrated when this clarity was eroded by the demands of everyday life.
When I read David Allen’s book, I saw the possibility of experiencing the clarity of a ‘mind like water’ in the midst of my daily work. Apart from the obvious emotional benefits, I could see that it would help my creativity – the ‘mind like water’ state sounds very similar to creative flow as described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: ‘an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness’.
So how does David Allen suggest we can achieve this state of mind while dealing with the pressures of work?
‘Buckets’ are physical or virtual containers where you capture important information, demands and commitments so that they can’t ‘leak’ away and be forgotten. You should have as few of these as possible, but as many of them as you need.
Here are my buckets:
Important:
So am I now living in a constant state of blissful peace and clarity? Not quite. If that’s your goal then it’s hard to beat the monastic routine. But I’ve definitely removed one big source of stress from my life – the effort of remembering important commitments and the danger of forgetting them. I’ve been using the ‘buckets’ system long enough to know that once I put a task in a bucket, I won’t forget it. So once I’ve made a note, I can stop thinking about it and concentrate on whatever I’m doing right now.
Mark McGuinness | Coaching Creative Professionals
Time Management for Creative People is one of the ways business coach Mark McGuinness helps creative professionals and creative agencies succeed.
For more practical tips and inspiration visit his Wishful Thinking blog. Subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts delivered to you via RSS or e-mail.
This post went live on November 16th, 2007. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
In my last post, I described the problems created by a never-ending stream of incoming demands: on the one hand, the constant interruptions can destroy the concentration required for creative work; on the other, endless to-do lists create the ‘Sisyphus effect’ – a feeling of hopelessness and demotivation.
In his excellent book Do It Tomorrow, Mark Forster provides a provocative and elegant solution to these problems, which transformed my working life. He suggests we create a buffer between incoming demands and our response – by making ‘do it tomorrow’ our default response to all requests. Not ‘tomorrow’ as in ‘tomorrow never comes’, but ‘tomorrow’ as in ‘tomorrow’. Not today or the day after tomorrow, but tomorrow.
For example, here’s Mark’s solution to the never-ending stream of e-mail. In this system, on a typical day you only have to deal with one day’s worth of e-mails – i.e. those that arrived yesterday:
Of course there will be exceptions – sometimes you will receive an e-mail that has to be answered today – e.g. from your boss, demanding an urgent document by 5pm. But these should be the exceptions, rather than the general rule. Mark argues that most tasks are not nearly as urgent as we think they are – ask yourself ‘Will there be a disaster if I don’t answer this until tomorrow?’ and the answer is usually ‘no’.
‘Doing it tomorrow’ has several benefits:
The same principles apply to other communication channels: post, phone calls, text messages, commitments you take on at meetings. They all go into the in-tray for tomorrow. So at the start of every day, you know exactly how much you have to do to keep abreast of your commitments – once you’ve dealt with a day’s worth of e-mail, post, phone messages and verbal requests, you’re free to get on with more interesting things. Like that design you’ve been itching to get back to.
N.B. This only applies to the reactive side of your work, i.e. requests coming in from others. Work initiated by you is a different matter – see my previous post on Ring-fencing your most creative time. Mark Forster suggests that you prioritise your own goals by devoting the first part of the day to a ‘current initiative’ of your own. But be wary of putting all your ideas for new initiatives into the in-tray for tomorrow, especially if you are the type of person who has a lot of ideas – I tried doing this when I first read Mark’s book (not carefully enough) and put my back out by trying to do an absurd amount of work each day!
Mark covers all these objections (and more) in his book, Do It Tomorrow – he also offers many more invaluable suggestions, so if you’re intrigued by the idea of ‘doing it tomorrow’, I highly recommend you get hold of a copy.
Mark Forster’s ‘do it tomorrow’ system works for me, but it may not be right for you. Your work might follow different rhythms. ‘Do it next week’ might work better for you. Another productivity guru, Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Work Week) says it’s possible to manage by only checking e-mail once a week!!!
The key principle is to create a ‘buffer’ between the information and demands that are coming at you, and your response. That way you can get out of reactive mode, avoid the Sisyphus effect and spend more time on the kind of work that really inspires you.
Mark McGuinness | Coaching Creative Professionals
Time Management for Creative People is one of the ways business coach Mark McGuinness helps creative professionals and creative agencies succeed.
For more practical tips and inspiration visit his Wishful Thinking blog. Subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts delivered to you via RSS or e-mail.
This post went live on November 9th, 2007. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
Imprisoned in the ancient Greek underworld as punishment for his earthly crimes, Sisyphus was famously tortured by a never-ending task. He was condemned to roll a huge rock up a hill – only to watch it roll back down and have to start all over again.
Sound familiar?
Let’s have another look at the scenario from the beginning of this series:
So you start the day full of enthusiasm. You’re excited about a new piece of creative work and itching to put your ideas into action. Firing up your computer, the familiar stream of e-mails pours into your inbox, burying the ones you didn’t get round to replying to yesterday. Scanning through the list, your heart sinks – 2 of them look as though they require urgent action. You hit ‘reply’ and start typing a response to one of them… 20 minutes later you ‘come round’ and realise you’ve got sucked into the e-mail zone, and have been sidetracked by interesting links sent by friends, and getting involved in issues that aren’t a priority for you. You minimize the e-mail window and get back to your project…
After 15 minutes you’re really enjoying yourself, getting into your creative flow – when the phone rings. Somebody wants something from you. Something to do with a meeting last week. You rummage through the papers on your desk, searching for your notes. You can’t find them. Suddenly your heart leaps as you lift up a folder and find an important letter you’d forgotten about – it needed an urgent response, several days ago. ‘Hang on, I’ll get back to you’ you tell the person on the phone, ‘I’ll ring you back when I’ve found it’. You put the phone down and pick up the letter – this needs sorting immediately, but you remember why you put it off – it involves several phone calls and hunting through your files for documents you’re not sure you even kept. By now, you’ve only got half an hour before your first meeting and you’ve promised to ring that person back. Your design stares at you reproachfully. The e-mail inbox is pinging away as it fills up – already there are more messages than before you started answering them. Your enthusiasm has nosedived and the day has hardly begun. Creative work seems like a distant dream.
There are two big problems with this way of working:
Whenever you sit down to focus on your own work, you never know when your concentration will be broken – by an e-mail, a phone call, a request from a colleague, or even by yourself, when you suddenly remember something important that you’ve forgotten to do. Almost as bad is as the interruptions is anticipating them – you can never really relax and focus, because you know you could be derailed at any moment.
When I trained in hypnosis one of the things I learned was that if you want to create amnesia, you should keep interrupting people and/or change the subject. The hypnotic explanation is that memory is dependent on your state of mind, so when you change your focus, you’re changing your state of mind – which makes it hard to remember what you were thinking about before. Think of a time when you were chatting to a friend in a restaurant or at a party and someone came over and interrupted you with a question – when they left, you both turned to each other and asked ‘What were we talking about?’.
The bottom line is that interruptions destroy your concentration. And loss of concentration = loss of creative work. If you’re not careful, you can end up in permanent ‘reactive mode’ – spending your time responding to others’ demands and all the things you ‘have’ to do instead of the one thing you really wanted to do today.
Let’s face it, the interruptions aren’t going away anytime soon. If they did, it would be a bad thing – it would mean you had no clients, colleagues, customers or collaborators. Obvious short-term fixes are to close your e-mail application, switch your phone onto answerphone mode and put a ‘do not disturb’ notice on your office door – as recommended in my previous post on how to Ring-fence your most creative time. But you can’t do this all the time – and it doesn’t solve your second big problem…
The ‘Sisyphus effect’ is the result of endless to-do lists, which in turn are created by a constant stream of incoming demands. We start the day full of enthusiasm, but by the end of it, we’ve taken on so many new commitments that the to-do list is longer than when we started.
Productivity expert Mark Forster makes an excellent and (to me) surprising point about motivation:
What is the best way to motivate yourself for your daily work? Obviously, enjoying your work and having a clear vision are very important, but I don’t believe they are the most important things for keeping going during the daily grind. On the contrary, I believe that what gives us the most energy is the feeling of being totally on top of our work. If you are totally on top of something you have the energy to do it even if you don’t particularly like the work.
I hadn’t thought about it like that before, but on examining my own experience, I think he’s right – when I’m faced with a limited number of things to do in a day, even if they aren’t all particularly exciting, I generally feel motivated enough to get through them. But if I’m faced with a vaguely-defined, open-ended list of tasks, I can feel a sense of hopelessness and my energy drops. I can even find myself paralysed by inaction when faced with 3 or 4 really exciting pieces of work, if I don’t think there’s time to do them all.
Faced with the twin problems of unpredictable interruptions and the Sisyphus effect of never-ending tasks, you need to give yourself room to breathe, keep a clear head and stay focused on what you want to achieve. In short, you need to install a buffer between others’ demands and your response. Otherwise you’ll end up in permanently anxious and unproductive ‘reaction mode’.
On the other hand, you need to find a way of fulfilling your commitments and giving others what they need from you within a reasonable timescale. Otherwise you’ll quickly gain a reputation for unreliability and pay the penalty.
How can you manage this? I’ll present one solution in my next post – a surprising and counter-intuitive idea that has transformed my own working life…
Mark McGuinness | Coaching Creative Professionals
Time Management for Creative People is one of the ways business coach Mark McGuinness helps creative professionals and creative agencies succeed.
For more practical tips and inspiration visit his Wishful Thinking blog. Subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts delivered to you via RSS or e-mail.
This post went live on November 2nd, 2007. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
We’ve looked at the importance of prioritising ‘urgent but not important’ work. But how do you actually do this, and maintain the laser-like focus required for concentrated creative work, in the midst of all the demands and distractions of your working life?
In my last post, I talked about my decision to get up early to write, before the onslaught of phone calls and other distractions. Apart from the lack of external interruptions, I write first thing in the morning because (once I’m up) that’s the time of day when I’m most focused and alert. I experience a greater mental clarity in the first couple of hours of the working day than at any other time. As a writer, that quality of attention is my most valuable asset, so I’ve learned to guard it carefully. If I start ploughing into e-mails, reading blog feeds or doing mundane tasks such as accounts, then I’m squandering my most precious resource.
Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope puts me to shame with his habit of getting up at 5.30 to write his novels before breakfast. But early morning isn’t the most creative time for everyone. We all have our own daily rhythms of alertness and rest. ProBlogger Darren Rowse says that 10am to 12pm are his “golden hours” for “thinking creatively and getting things done”. Fellow blogger and author of The Four Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss writes blog posts in two phases, at different times of day:
Separate brainstorming (idea generation) from synthesis (putting it all into a flowing post). I generally note down 10-15 potential points for a post between 10-10:30am with a double espresso, select 4-5 I like and put them in a tentative order from 10:30-10:45am, then I’ll let them marinate until 12am-4am, when I’ll drink yerba mate tea, craft a few examples to match the points, then start composing. It’s important to identify your ideal circadian schedule and pre-writing warm-up for consistent and reliable results.
Writer Maya Angelou makes a similar distinction between time for writing the first draft and for revising it:
I get up about five… I get in my car and drive off to a hotel room: I can’t write in my house, I take a hotel room and ask them to take everything off the walls so there’s me, the Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus and some good, dry sherry and I’m at work by 6.30. I write on the bed lying down – one elbow is darker than the other, really black from leaning on it – and I write in longhand on yellow pads. Once into it, all disbelief is suspended, it’s beautiful…
After dinner I re-read what I’ve written… if April is the cruellest month, then eight o’clock at night is the cruellest hour because that’s when I start to edit and all that pretty stuff I’ve written gets axed out.
(From Creators on Creating, Ed. Frank Barron, Alfonso Montuori, Anthea Barron)
Maya Angelou’s writing habits might seem eccentric, but they actually make complete sense. Writing in a hotel room effectively separates her writing time from the rest of her life, eliminating distractions and ensuring that she can enter a highly creative state of mind whenever she wants to.
My first professional training was in hypnotherapy, which taught me how sensitive the nervous system is to ‘triggers’ in our environment. The more intense the original emotion and the more unique the trigger, the stronger the emotional reaction will be. For example, if you think of a song you used to play with your first boyfriend/girlfriend, you will probably start to feel some of the emotions you felt with him/her without even hearing the recording. Supposing the song were Bowie’s ‘Moonage Daydream’, you might get something of the same nostalgic/romantic feeling by listening to other glam rock songs, but not as strongly as whenever you hear the opening chords of ‘Moonage Daydream’ itself.
Looking at Angelou’s account, she obviously experiences strong emotions whenever she is writing. And by confining her writing to a special place and time, she has trained her nervous system to associate her creative state with unique combination of different triggers – the early morning drive, the hotel room, blank walls, the Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus, dry sherry, lying on the bed and yellow paper. No wonder she is in the ‘zone’ soon after entering the room!
Looked at from this perspective, many of the supposed eccentricities of creative people seem perfectly logical and reasonable. Here is Stephen Spender describing the working habits of himself and his fellow poets:
Schiller liked to have a smell of rotten apples, concealed beneath his desk, under his nose when he was composing poetry. Walter de la Mare has told me that he must smoke when writing. Auden drinks endless cups of tea. Coffee is my own addiction, besides smoking a great deal, which I hardly ever do except when I am writing.
(from Creativity, ed. P.E. Vernon)
Can you see how each of the poets is using a particular stimulus to trigger his creative state?
Maybe you have a special place you go to for focused creative work – a secluded office, a particular chair, a seat in your favourite café. Or you may have a favourite notebook, pen, software application or make of computer – using other tools doesn’t feel quite right. Once you get into the habit of using these triggers, they form a kind of ritual, or process of self-hypnosis if you like, to help you reach that state of focused absorption Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘creative flow’.
I don’t go as far as Maya Angelou, but I do have a morning ritual to help me get into the right frame of mind for writing. A cup of tea first, then filter coffee. Tea goes in the blue china ‘Maneki Neko’ mug. Coffee in a different cup, covered in Japanese calligraphy, from Kyoto (a city with wonderful associations for me). If I’m drafting poetry, the Mac is banished from the desk. I write on sheets of A4 with a black 0.5mm Muji pen. For other writing, I use the Mac and switch on Isolator to black out the whole screen except the window I am writing in.
Even if you have to work in the middle of an office, there are things you can do to minimise distractions and interruptions. Switch off your mobile phone. Put the landline on answerphone. Close your e-mail application. If the office noise is distracting, try listening to music on your headphones. Set up a signal (e.g. a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on your desk) to let your colleagues know they will interrupt you at their peril. Keep a notepad open and write down any tasks to do with other projects that occur to you while you are working. You can then consult the pad and get on with them after you have finished. (Writing them down will get them off your mind and leave you free to focus – more on this later in the series.)
Finally, if you find yourself starting to procrastinate, here’s an excellent tip from Mark Forster. Say to yourself: ‘I’m not really going to start working on this piece, I’ll just open up the file and look at it…’
Mark McGuinness | Coaching Creative Professionals
Time Management for Creative People is one of the ways business coach Mark McGuinness helps creative professionals and creative agencies succeed.
For more practical tips and inspiration visit his Wishful Thinking blog. Subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts delivered to you via RSS or e-mail.
This post went live on October 26th, 2007. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
A couple of years ago, I was facing a brick wall. I was in the second year of a part-time Masters degree that was essential for my business. I was invited to edit an issue of Magma, one of the top poetry magazines in the UK – as a poet, this was a chance I couldn’t turn down. I was also getting married, which took a fair amount of preparation too – and that was one opportunity I was definitely not turning down! Meanwhile, I somehow had to keep my business going, keep my clients happy and fund all these extra-curricular activities.
As if that weren’t enough, I discovered this new phenomenon called blogging – or rather, discovered that people were using it to spread their ideas and promote their businesses, rather than just to write about their cat’s breakfast menu. It looked like a perfect medium for me – I loved writing, I had ideas I wanted to get into circulation, and I loved connecting with new people. But where was I going to find the time?
I’d already made a reluctant deal with myself to put my poetry-writing ‘on-hold’ until the end of the MA (on condition that I resumed afterwards, which I’m now doing with pleasure). But I was still faced with the seemingly impossible task of finding quality, focused time, away from interruptions, to write my essays, read poetry submissions with the care they deserved, and start a blog. After scanning my diary and surveying the tasks in hand, I was faced with a depressing conclusion.
I was going to have to get up early.
There was simply no other time in my schedule – or not the quiet, uninterrupted time I needed for my work, without the intrusion of phone calls, e-mails, meetings and classes. I had never considered myself one of nature’s early risers, and working from home much of the time had allowed me the luxury of avoiding early starts for commuting. On a good day I’d be up by 7.30, on a bad day it was closer to 8.30. Still time to get a reasonable amount of work done by starting at 9.00 – but I was faced with an unreasonable amount of work, so drastic action was called for.
My new start time became 6.30am. If you want to know how I managed this, read Steve Pavlina’s excellent post How to become an early riser. Here, I’m more concerned with the effect – since making the change, I’ve edited a postbag of 2,500 poems into a Magma issue 34, achieved a distinction in my Masters, and created the Wishful Thinking blog which has transformed my business and opened up many new creative avenues for me to explore. I’ve also written some poems I’m pleased with (at the moment, anyway) and which are gradually making it into publication. Most importantly of all, I made it to the wedding on time!
I’m not listing the above to blow my own trumpet, but to illustrate the value of ring-fencing time for your own creative work, in the midst of more urgent demands. It would have been easy for me to justify turning down the poetry magazine because I was too busy. It would have been even easier to put off starting the blog until I had more time. I could even have reasoned my way into stopping or deferring the Masters. But the thing is, there will always be something ‘urgent’ taking my attention away from my own creative initiatives. Yet when I look back over the last couple of years, the time when I’ve created most value, for myself and my clients, has been those first hours of the day I’ve spent writing blog posts, essays, seminars and poems. It’s the creative wellspring that feeds into all the coaching, training, presenting and consulting I do when I’m face-to-face with clients.
Enough about me. How can you find time to achieve your creative ambitions?
In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey classifies work tasks according to whether they are important or urgent.
Covey points out that many of us spend too much time on tasks that are urgent and important (the red square in the diagram) – in other words, staving off emergencies by rushing around to solve problems or responding to others’ demands at short notice. Sometimes this is unavoidable – ‘deadline magic’ can spur us on to feats of creative production we wouldn’t otherwise attempt. This can be an exciting and productive experience – but it’s up to you whether you want to work like this most of the time. The example of the computer games industry – where extended ‘crunch’ times can mean endless overtime to meet a deadline – suggests that prolonged deadline magic can turn into deadline misery, with a significant impact on morale and efficiency.
Covey’s solution is to prioritise work that is important but not urgent (the blue square in the diagram). Though this is hard to do on any given day, it is the only way to ensure you are making progress towards your own goals and dreams, instead of merely reacting to what other people throw at you. And over time, the more you are dealing with important things before they become urgent, the fewer ‘urgent and important’ tasks you will have to deal with.
The most obvious way to do this is to work on your own projects first every day, even if it’s only for half an hour. Whatever interruptions come along later, you will at least have the satisfaction of having made some progress towards your own goals.
It’s obviously not just a question of time – you also need to ring-fence your attention so that you can devote your full attention to your creative work, without being knocked off course by distractions. The next post will look at how some highly creative people have achieved this, and what you can learn from them.
Mark McGuinness | Coaching Creative Professionals
Time Management for Creative People is one of the ways business coach Mark McGuinness helps creative professionals and creative agencies succeed.
For more practical tips and inspiration visit his Wishful Thinking blog. Subscribe to the feed to have the latest posts delivered to you via RSS or e-mail.
This post went live on October 19th, 2007. You can follow responses via our comments feed. To keep up with BoDo, subscribe for updates by email, the BoDo feed and/or sign up for our Newsletter.
Powered By - Zookoda
Do you have business questions or tips to share? Contact BoDo
