Time management for creative people

Photo by Roadsidepictures

Mark McGuinness has collected a bunch of his best posts into one free ebook and has some additional time management  resources here. I found the book filled with valuable time management insights. Given the pressures leaders have on their time, Mark’s time management practices are extremely useful. I case you don’t want to read the entire book here is a summary of the 7 common practices….

1. Why you need to be organised to be creative

Choreographer Twyla Tharp, author of the book "The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life", which I’ve previously reviewed here, directed the opera and dance scenes for the film Amadeus, has this to say about the film’s portrait of Mozart and the importance of being organised and disciplined….

"The film Amadeus dramatizes and romanticizes the divine origins of creative genius. Antonio Salieri, representing the talented hack, is cursed to live in the time of Mozart, the gifted and undisciplined genius who writes as though touched by the hand of God… Of course this is hogwash. There are no ‘natural’ geniuses… No-one worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose… As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, “People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.”

Twyla goes on in her book to argue that "routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more".

Have you structured you day to be productive?

2. Prioritise work that is ‘important but not urgent’

This practice comes from Stephen Covey’s popular book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" where he 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  – 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. ….. Covey’s solution is to prioritise work that is important but not urgent… 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.

What percentage of you day is focus in urgent thing vs. the important things? Are you focused enough on completing the important things first?

3. Ring-fence your most creative time

Pick your most creative time of day….. then ring fence it for your most creative work. Mark provide this example of how Tim Ferriss author of The Four Hour Work Week writes blog posts, in two phases and 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." – The Four Hour Work Week Blog

Do you know when you’re most creative? How are you using this time?

4. Avoid the ‘Sisyphus effect’ of endless to-do lists

Mark points out how endless to do lists and interruptions overwhelm us and sap our time and energy….

"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…… 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’."

I think we often under estimate the cost of interruptions, previously I posted on a study by Study by Time Magazine…

Researchers studying a random sample of office workers and found they got an average of just 11 minutes clear time to a project before being distracted by an e-mail, phone call or verbal interruption from a manager or colleague.

It also found interruptions now took up an average of 2.1 hours of every working day, or 28 per cent of the average person’s nine-to-five schedule, including the time to recover your train of thought following an interruption.

It took an average of 25 minutes to return to a task after being disturbed, according to the magazine.

How often do you get interrupted a day? How much productive time does this sap from your day? Are you diligently protecting your most productive from unnecessary interruptions?

5. Get things done by putting them off till tomorrow

This practice is about slowing down our response and so that we can response by being smart and not by working harder….

"In his excellent book Do It Tomorrow, Mark Forster….. 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."

6. Get things off your mind

The practice is about having a trusted system that you can rely on to remind you of the important things that need to get done, rather than wasting your mental and emotional energy keeping track of your commitments. This allows you to commit 100% to the task at hand…..!

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

Set up ‘buckets’ to capture your commitments, to do lists arranged by your work context so that you do consume valuable mental and emotional energy trying to remember the things you have to get done….

7. Review your commitments

Reviewing your commitments help to keep things off your mind so you can focus……. Mark suggests that you need to review your commitments…

1. First, and most obviously, to make sure you actually do the tasks on your to-do lists!
2. If you don’t review the lists regularly, you’ll soon stop trusting them and won’t be able to use them to get things off your mind.
3. To think about how you’re going to approach your work. It’s tempting to ‘get going’ first thing in the morning, so you feel like you’re 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’m going to tackle them.
4. It helps you step back and see the ‘big picture’ of your work, weigh up priorities and make decisions about your next steps.

Overall I thought this is a great list of time management practices….. So which two of these practices are you going to implement over the next 21 days?

Related posts:

1. Tips for Becoming a Highly Creative Person
2. The Best Times to Be Creative
3. How interruptions drain productivity
4. How to Multi-Task Productively
5. Creative geniuses….

Tagged as: Creativity, Getting Things Done, Innovation