Time Management for Creative People

Get Things Off Your Mind

So you are sitting at your desk, trying to focus on a piece of creative work – but it is hard to concentrate; something is nagging at your attention. Suddenly it pops into your mind – you have forgotten something urgent! Or even worse, you get a phone call or an email out of the blue demanding to know why you have not 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 often enough, you get used to constant low-level anxiety.  Scanning your memory, your desk, your e-mails, your post-its, your scattered to-do lists – as you worry that you have forgotten something important. When you agree to do something, you may write it down – but can you be 100 percent sure you will notice the note in time to do it? Or if you are out and about and make a commitment, how can you be sure you will remember to put it on your to-do list when you return to the office? Wherever you go, whatever you are doing, somewhere at the back of your mind, you wonder whether you have forgotten something vital that could blow up in your face at any moment.

How about this alternative?

What if you could dedicate 100 percent of your attention to whatever was at hand, at your own choosing, with no distraction?

It is a condition of working, doing, and being in which the mind is clear…

Most people give more or less attention to things than they deserve simply because they do not operate with a mind like water.

No, it is 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 actual 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 was not 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 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 work pressures?

Set Up Buckets to Capture Your Commitments

Buckets are physical or virtual containers where you capture essential information, demands, and commitments so they cannot 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:

• A plastic in-tray for incoming letters, business cards, papers, meeting notes, scribbled to-do lists, etc.
• My e-mail inbox
  
• The inbox on iGTD – the software I use to manage my to-do lists
  
• My two answerphones (one mobile, one landline)
• The Drafts folder on my mobile phone – I always carry my phone with me, so if I have an idea or make a commitment when I am out and about, I write a text message to myself and save it in the drafts folder.
  

Review Your Commitments

So you are 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?

There is no point in capturing all those to-do items unless you will 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 it is up to you, but here are a few principles to remember.

Why Should You Review?

1. First, and most obviously, do the tasks on your to-do lists!
   
   
2. If you do not review the lists regularly, you will soon stop trusting them and will be unable to use them to get things off your mind.
   
   
3. Think about how you are going to approach your work. It is tempting to get going first thing in the morning, so you feel like you are getting things done – but whenever I do this, my day is always less productive and more stressful than on days where I take 10 minutes to review my commitments and decide how I am going to tackle them.
   
   
4. It helps you step back and see the big picture of your work, weigh priorities, and make decisions about your next steps. 
   
   
5. Whenever you review your upcoming work and are confident you can complete it, it will be a weight off your mind, and your energy level will rise. If you review and find that you are not confident of getting it all done, then the review will be even more valuable – better to find out now than later on!
   
   

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