Efficient Time Management

Why You Need to be Organised to be Creative

"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." Gustave Flaubert

So you start the day full of enthusiasm. You are excited about a new piece of creative work and itching to put your ideas into action. Firing up your computer, the familiar stream of emails pours into your inbox, burying the ones you did not reply to yesterday. Scanning through the list, your heart sinks – two 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 realize you have got sucked into the email zone and have been sidetracked by interesting links sent by friends, as well as writing replies about issues that are not a priority for you. You minimize the email window and get back to your project…

After 15 minutes, you enjoy 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 cannot find them. Suddenly your heart leaps as you lift up a folder and find an important letter you had forgotten about – it needed an urgent response several days ago. "Hang on, I will get back to you," you tell the person on the phone, "I will ring you back when I have 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 are not sure you even kept. By now, you have only got half an hour before your first meeting and promised to ring that person back. Your design stares at you reproachfully. The email 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.

Is this a familiar scenario for you? Swap the design software for a word processor, and I have been there a hundred times. In an ideal world, we would put all our time and energy into creative work, but the realities of modern work often seem to be conspiring against us. And in lots of ways, the scenario is getting worse. The wonderful thing about modern technology is the amount of communication and information-sharing it facilitates. And the awful thing about modern technology is the amount of communication and information-sharing it facilitates. We are deluged with new information and connections via telephones, webcams, instant messengers, email, websites, blogs, newsletters, wikis, and social networking technology. The list gets longer every year. And with Blackberry and the mobile internet, you can have data and demands coming at you 24/7. No wonder people are starting to run workshops on digital stress.

All of which is bad enough, whatever your line of work. But if you are a professional artist or creative, it is even more damaging. Concentration is essential for creative work – certain stages of the creative process require a single-minded focus on the task at hand. When in the zone, we experience creative flow – the almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has identified as characteristic of high-level creative performance. Interruptions, multi-tasking, and the anxiety that comes from trying to juggle multiple commitments – are in danger of eroding the focused concentration that is vital for your creativity.

If you are worried about the effect of all those interruptions, frustrations and distractions on your creative work, this e-book is for you. Over the next seven chapters I will offer you some principles and practical methods for maintaining your creative focus under pressure and for managing the stream of information and demands so that it informs and stimulates your creativity instead of drowning it out.

And that means being organized.

There, I have said it. Organization, structure, discipline, and habit – these often seen as threats to creativity. Not to mention corporate-sounding phrases such as time management or workflow. We like to think of creativity as a space for untrammeled imagination, free from all constraints. Yet while freedom, rule-breaking, and inspiration are undoubtedly essential to the creative process, the popular image of creativity overlooks another aspect: examine the life of any great artist, and you will find evidence of hard work, discipline, and a hard-won knowledge of the rules and conventions of their medium. Choreographer Twyla Tharp, who directed the opera and dance scenes for the film Amadeus, has this to say about the film's portrait of Mozart:

This passage is taken from Tharp's book The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life, in which she argues that routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more. It is an inspiring, challenging, and practical book that deserves a space on the shelf of anyone who takes their creative work seriously.

I am not suggesting that all artists and creatives need to be organized in a way that would satisfy a corporate boss. You might get up at noon and work at home in your dressing gown, in a pigsty of a living room. You might check into a different hotel room daily and work on the bed. Your creative process and working habits might look like total chaos to an outsider, but if they work for you, that is all that matters. And there will be some method in the madness – patterns in your daily activities that are vital to your creativity. These are the things you need to do to keep your imagination alive – whether it is sitting at a desk by 6 am, using the same pen, notebook, or computer, hitch-hiking across America, putting rotten apples in your desk so that the scent wafts into your nostrils as you work, or sitting in your favorite café with a glass of absinthe.

In this e-book, I will offer some suggestions for keeping the tide of external demands at bay and helping you to develop a genuinely creative routine and rhythm to your working day. I will not offer you a rigid system or any best practice nonsense – just some principles and suggestions to try and adapt as you see fit. As well as drawing on my experience and study of the creative process, I will refer to some well-known time-management systems and suggest what I think they have to offer creative professionals.

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Source: Mark McGuinness, https://learn.saylor.org/pluginfile.php/490995/mod_resource/content/1/TimeManagementforCreativePeople.pdf
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 2.0 License.

Prioritise Important But Not Urgent Work

A couple of years ago, I faced a brick wall. I was in the second year of a part-time Master's degree 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 could not turn down. I was also getting married, which took a fair amount of preparation too – and that was one opportunity I was 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 were not enough, I discovered this new phenomenon called blogging – or instead, 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 had 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 afterward, which I am 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, I faced 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, emails, 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 would 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 6.30 am. If you want to know how I managed this, read Steve Pavlina's excellent post on becoming an early riser. Here, I am more concerned with the effect. Since making the change, I have edited a postbag of 2,500 poems into Magma issue 34, achieved a distinction in my Master's, and created the Wishful Thinking blog, which has transformed my business and opened many new creative avenues for me to explore. I have also written some poems I am pleased with (at the moment, anyway) and am gradually making it into publication. Most importantly of all, I made it to the wedding on time!

I am 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 to justify turning down the poetry magazine because I was too busy. It would have been easier to start the blog until I had more time. I could even have reasoned my way into stopping or deferring the Masters degree. 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 I have created the most value for myself and my clients has been those first hours of the day I have spent writing blog posts, essays, seminars, and poems. It is the creative wellspring that feeds into all the coaching, training, presenting and consulting I do when I am face-to-face with clients.

Enough about me. How can you find time to achieve your creative ambitions?

Prioritise Work That is Important but Not Urgent

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 would not otherwise attempt. This can be an exciting and productive experience – but it is 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 prioritize 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 toward your own goals and dreams instead of merely reacting to what other people throw at you. And over time, the more you deal with important things before they become urgent, the fewer urgent and essential 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 is only for half an hour. Whatever interruptions come along later, you will at least have the satisfaction of having made some progress toward your own goals.

It is 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 chapter will examine how some highly creative people have achieved this and what you can learn from them.

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Ring-Fence Your Most Creative Time

We have looked at the importance of prioritizing important but not urgent work. But how do you 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?

Pick Your Most Creative Time of Day

In my last chapter, I discussed 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 am up) that is the time of day when I am most focused and alert. I experience greater mental clarity during 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 have learned to guard it carefully. If I start plowing into emails, reading blog feeds, or doing mundane tasks such as accounts, I am 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 is not the most creative time for everyone. We all have our own daily rhythms of alertness and rest. ProBlogger Darren Rowse says that 10 am to 12 pm are his "golden hours" for "thinking creatively and getting things done." Fellow blogger and Mark McGuinness, 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 10-10:30 am with a double espresso, select 4-5 I like, and put them in a tentative order from 10:30-10:45 am, then I will let them marinate until 12:00-4:00 am, when I will drink tea, craft a few examples to match the points, then start composing. It is important to identify your ideal circadian schedule and pre-writing warm-up for consistent and reliable results.

The Four-Hour Work Week Blog

Writer Maya Angelou makes a similar distinction between the time for writing the first draft and for revising it:

Ring-Fence Your Attention – Get Yourself in the Right State of Mind

Maya Angelou's writing habits might seem eccentric, but they 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. 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 was 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."

Looking at Angelou's account, she 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!

Looking at 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:

Can you see how each poet uses a particular stimulus to trigger his creativity?

Maybe you have a special place for focused creative work – a private office, a particular chair, or a seat in your favorite café. Or you may have a favorite notebook, pen, software application, or make of computer – using other tools does not 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 do not go as far as Maya Angelou, but I 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 beautiful associations for me). If I am 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 minimize distractions and interruptions. Switch off your mobile phone and ringer. Close your email 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 in Chapter 6.)

Finally, if you are starting to procrastinate, here is an excellent tip from Mark Forster. Say to yourself: I am not really going to start working on this piece, I will just open up the file and look at it…

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Avoid the Sisyphus Effect of Endless To-do Lists

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 massive 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 first chapter:

So you start the day full of enthusiasm. You are excited about a new piece of creative work and itching to put your ideas into action. Firing up your computer, the familiar stream of emails pours into your inbox, burying the ones you did not reply to yesterday. Scanning through the list, your heart sinks – two 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 around and realize you have got sucked into the email zone, have been sidetracked by interesting links sent by friends, and getting involved in issues that are not a priority for you. You minimize the email window and get back to your project…

After 15 minutes, you enjoy 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 cannot find them. Suddenly your heart leaps as you lift up a folder and find an important letter you had forgotten about – it needed an urgent response several days ago. "Hang on, I will get back to you," you tell the person on the phone, "I will ring you back when I have 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 are not sure you even kept. By now, you have only got half an hour before your first meeting and promised to ring that person back. Your design stares at you reproachfully. The email 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:

1. You Are at the Mercy of Interruptions

Whenever you sit down to focus on your own work, you never know when your concentration will be broken – by an email, a phone call, a request from a colleague, or even by yourself, when you suddenly remember something important that you have forgotten to do. Almost as bad 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 depends on your state of mind, so when you change your focus, you are changing your mind – making 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 are 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 are not 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 email application, switch your phone onto answerphone mode and put a do not disturb notice on your office door – as recommended in my previous chapter on how to Ring-fence your most creative time. But you cannot do this all the time – and it does not solve your second big problem…

2. The Sisyphus Effect – A Never-Ending To-do List

The Sisyphus effect results from endless to-do lists, which are created by a constant stream of incoming demands. We start the day full of enthusiasm, but by the end of it, we have 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:

I had not thought about it like that before. Still, on examining my own experience, I think he is right. When faced with a few things to do in a day, even if they are not all inspiring, I feel motivated enough to get through them. But if I face a vaguely-defined, open-ended list of tasks, I can feel hopeless, and my energy drops. I can even be paralyzed by inaction when faced with three or four fascinating pieces of work if I do not think there is time to do them all.

You Need to Give Yourself Room to Breathe!

Faced with the twin problems of unpredictable interruptions and the Sisyphus effect of neverending 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 will 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 will quickly gain a reputation for unreliability and pay the penalty.

How can you manage this? I will present one solution in the next chapter – a surprising and counter-intuitive idea that has transformed my own working life…

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Get Things Done by Putting Them Off Until Tomorrow

In the last chapter, 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 book Do It Tomorrow, Mark Forster provides a provocative and elegant solution to these problems, transforming my working life. He suggests creating 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 is Mark's solution to the never-ending stream of emails. In this system, on a typical day, you only have to deal with one day's worth of emails – i.e., those that arrived yesterday:

1. Suppose you received 40 emails yesterday (once you have weeded out all the spam) – the first thing you do is move these 40 emails into a folder marked action. These are the only emails you are going to deal with today.
   
2. Sit down and answer them all in one batch. Or, at most, two or three concentrated bursts of effort.
   
3. Any emails that arrive in your inbox are collecting there for tomorrow – whatever you do, do not get caught up in responding to them, or you will find yourself back in Sisyphus' shoes, facing an endless task!
   

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