PRDV005: Time and Stress Management

"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.

Questions

Source: Mark McGuinness, https://learn.saylor.org/pluginfile.php/490995/mod_resource/content/1/TimeManagementforCreativePeople.pdf
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