Time Management for Creative People

This article emphasizes the challenges creative people face in corralling their thoughts and ideas into productive activities. The chapters explain how to use to-do lists and prioritize commitments. McGuiness suggests several tools for keeping track of daily activities. Complete the questions at the end of each chapter to help assess your planning abilities.

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!

When Should You Review?

In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen suggests that you review your to-do lists as often as needed 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:

  • Gather and process all your stuff

  • Review your system

  • Update your lists

  • Get clean, clear, current, and complete
I will honestly say I do not do the review every week. Some weeks simply feel too busy; others, I am so caught up in what I am doing that stopping to review seems unnecessary. But whenever I make time for it, I always feel better – the review gives me a clear sense of where I am and what I am doing. I always find something important that is in danger of slipping through the cracks. After finishing the review, I am full of renewed enthusiasm for my work. So maybe I will do it this week after all…


How Should You Review?

In his book, David Allen gives detailed instructions on performing a weekly review. But it is 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 is what I usually do:

  1. Empty all my buckets.
  2. Review my diary.
  3. Review my to-do lists, deleting anything I have done or am not going to do.
  4. Decide on my priorities – which projects do I want to move forward in the next week? How will I find time for them?
  5. Back up my computer and blogs.
It is 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 is 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 are in town, etc. . .

I use iGTD to manage most of my lists – it is designed for the Getting Things Done system and allows me to assign tasks to projects (e.g. Blog ideas) and contexts (e.g., phone calls or emails). When I empty my buckets, I transfer tasks from meetings, answerphone messages, notes, etc., to iGTD. There is no need to do this for e-mails, as the e-mails themselves remind me of the tasks – I am not finished until the inbox is empty.

Reading through that last paragraph, I realize how geeky I must sound! Well, I will let my friends be the judge of that. The system probably sounds like a lot of work, but I hardly notice it anymore. It took a while to get used to this way of working, but now it works so well for me that I take it for granted. Dealing with tasks this way has almost become automatic, leaving my mind free to think about more exciting 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 are not careful, you can spend so long reviewing and tweaking your system that you never get around to doing the things on your list… I have found the time I have invested in investigating these systems and changing my working habits has been repaid many times over. I hope this ebook helps make your working life more productive, enjoyable, and creative.

In my final chapter, I will point to some helpful books, software, and websites to help you fine-tune your own personal organization system.


Questions


  1.  How often do you review your commitments? Daily? Weekly? Never?

  2. What difference does it make when you make time to review?

  3. What difference does it make when you are too busy to review?

  4. How do you review? Any tips you would like to share?