Organizing Creative Professionals: Sorted

Paper Ninja Workshop: Early bird discount ends tomorrow!

If you've been thinking about attending the Paper Ninja workshop on July 31, now's the time to register, because the early bird discount ends at midnight Tuesday night.

After that, the price will be $79, which is still a pretty good deal considering the time and money you'll save once you no longer have to wrangle piles on your desk. But for today and tomorrow, the price is only $59. What could you do with the $20 you'd save?

Designers:
Join PSDThemes—and get a coffee & donut

Writers:
Get two Moleskine notebooks

Music lovers:
Get live albums from Donny Hathaway and Bill Withers

Bloggers:
Get "31 Days to a Better Blog" by Problogger's Darren Rowse

Anybody:
Donate to a charity
Take a buddy out for a beer
Get yourself 4.3 lattes
Humiliate your pet for the 4th of July
Or just save $20!

(Note: None of the links are affiliates.)

Whatever you decide to do with the $20 you save, be sure to save it in the first place by registering for Paper Ninja today or tomorrow!

Taming Time: The big picture

In this series, we've talked a lot about how to measure time, save time and manage time, but it can be easy to get lost in the "how" and lose sight of the "why." I know I'm guilty of planning epic strategies to save time when I could have saved the most time of all by asking "Is this really worth doing?"

Charlie Gilkey at Productive Flourishing wrote a great post a couple of months ago about putting the time you save to good use, not just plowing your "time savings" back into the accomplishment of more tasks of questionable merit.

If you've read this far in the series, I imagine you're interested in time management (I could be wrong; you could just love the typeface). So why do you want to change your relationship with time?

To get more work done, in a timely manner. I think this is one of the big motivators: the sense that there just isn't enough time in the day to meet all your obligations. And perhaps there's enough untapped time resources in your schedule that a few tweaks can up your productivity drastically. But you might need to attack the "demand" side as well as the "supply" side and start paring down your workload where you can.

To get more free time to spend with family, friends, pets and/or yourself. Another biggie, and honestly, I think this has more genuine motivation than the "get more work done" reason. "Get more work done" is a "have to," while "more time with loved ones" is a "want to," and "want to" gets a lot more excitement going. And if this is your reason for trying to manage time, you can start using your creativity to figure out ways to work your time management so those gains can be invested into your personal life.

To feel more in control of time. Boy, do I get this one. Sometimes I have weeks where I feel like I wasn't even running on a treadmill, but that the treadmill just ran over me. For me, the feeling of being on top of things that I get from working my to-do list, prioritizing my activities, working in my best time zones, etc., helps my overall well-being, and I think it helps me do better work, too.

Because they ain't making more time. I can't really elaborate on this one.

What about you? Why are you interested in managing your time, and what big picture is in your mind when you think about time? Let me know in the comments!

Taming Time: Unexpected time management resources

If you've been reading this series thus far, you know that there are some standard tools for time management: a calendar/planner, a to-do list and a stopwatch or timer. But there are a few more resources you might not have thought of that can help you get more done in less time.

1. Other people. Building your network isn't just a good idea for increasing your opportunities; it can also help you save time. The more people you know—and the more types of people you know—the more resources you have for information and assistance. You could look up some obscure point of law, or you could call your buddy the lawyer and ask about it. Similarly, you could learn how to use a piece of software and design a flyer, or you could hire (or trade services with) a designer you know.

2. Your phone. No, I'm not talking about smartphone productivity apps, although I'm sure there are hundreds of them out there and quite a few of them are useful. What I'm talking about is using your phone instead of email or travel. If you need a quick bit of info, just call someone. And before you go anywhere, call first to confirm. As awesome as the 21st-century phone technology is, its 19th-century use can save you an awful lot of time.

3. A puppy.

4. The words "Sorry, but I can't." Much has been written about the value of "NO," but that's a word that comes kinda hard to creative folks who try to say "yes" to as much as possible in life. So buffer it, if you need to. Add in an apology, shift the fault to some nebulous force that simply won't allow you to do something, do whatever you need to do to say "no," but say it. "No" is best applied when you're already operating at maximum capacity, when you get a funny feeling about a project or when you know you need to spend some time taking care of yourself.

5. The words "Could I get an extension?" When you're in dire straits deadline-wise, you might have to take the not-quite-nuclear option here. (The nuclear option would be failing spectacularly, and that's no option at all.) You might have a harder time asking for a deadline extension than you have telling someone "no," and there's no guarantee of a good response to this question, but sometimes people will surprise you. Better to ask for an extension than to do mediocre work or endanger your health (or both).

6. Your willingness to learn new tactics and repeat them until they become habits. All of the tips and strategies I've outlined in this series will be as useless as the pet rock unless they're implemented on a consistent basis. What truly makes these things useful and meaningful is what you do with them.

Have I overlooked anything? What are some things you use in your life to manage time that don't fall under the typical "time management tool" header? Let me know in the comments!

Taming Time: Chronic lateness

Be honest: when was the last time you had your pick of seats at an event, or could report what the initial comments at a meeting were? More to the point, when was the last time your first words weren't "Sorry I'm late!"?

One of the stereotypes of creative people is that we're always late, and it's one of those cliches that has an uncomfortable root in truth. But I like to think that we don't tend to chronic lateness because we're deliberately being inconsiderate but because we don't have that great a grasp of time.

I know I'm guilty of the sort of magical thinking that leads people to believe things like "I've got plenty of time to finish this post, take a shower, get dressed, let the dog out, scarf down a quick dinner, drive 25 miles and find a parking place. Plenty of time. So much time, in fact, that I can do a couple of things after I finish this post." And you know where that leads.

The costs of chronic lateness can really add up. On a professional level, you're alienating current and potential clients and looking way amateur. On a financial level, you're getting speeding tickets. On a personal level, you're annoying the crap out of your friends and family. And on a physical level, the stress that inevitably results from your chronic-lateness-caused rushing is doing horrible things to your body.

So how can you stop, or at least reduce, your chronic lateness?

Learn how long it takes to do stuff. (Yes, this is the same suggestion for reducing procrastination. I wonder why that is...) Does it really take 25 minutes to drive to class, like I thought it did? Or does it actually take between 33 and 40 minutes, which are the low and high scores when I actually timed it last month? (Answer: the second.)

Go with the higher estimate, then set an alarm. Now that I know I need up to 40 minutes to get to class, I know to set an alarm for 6:08:30. Why such an odd time? Because class starts at 7, but I want to allow time to unpack my bag, get a drink of water, etc. So I'll need to leave no later than 6:10. If the alarm goes off at 6:10, my wacked-out thinking will figure that it'll take me a bit of time to stop what I'm doing and hit the road, so then I'm already late, so why bother. That additional 90 seconds is time to stop, put my stuff away and get going. Any more than 90 seconds, and I'll be tempted to do something.

Make a friend of being a little bit early. You might notice that in the above estimate, I might wind up getting to class a whole 7 minutes early. This might seem like wasted time, but it's easy enough to find a use for that little packet of minutes: bring along a book, play a game on my beloved iPod touch, connect with my classmates, do some deep breathing in the car, walk around a bit before sitting in class for 3 hours. Instead of thinking of these tactics as ways to kill time, celebrate them for what they really are: rewards for being early and unstressed.

Don't set your clocks ahead. This never works because you'll always be thinking, "The clock says 6:15 but I know it's really 6:08, so I have (say it with me) plenty of time to..." You can't outsmart yourself.

What other tactics have you learned for combatting chronic lateness? Talk to me in the comments!

Taming Time: Procrastination

Honestly, I could spend a whole month writing only about procrastination (and maybe I will; hey, December's posts aren't going to write themselves!). But for right now, I'm just going to touch on the topic and suggest a few time management strategies to deal with procrastination.

1. Find the value in every task. When what you're doing supports your goals and values, it's a lot easier to get up the juice to do it. Try to find what each particular task is adding to your life, and if it isn't adding much of anything? Outsource it or delete it.

2. Learn how much you can reasonably ask of yourself. The more impossible your to-do list looks, the less enthusiastic you're going to be about tackling it. Asking too much of yourself is essentially setting yourself up for failure, and why would you want to do that?

3. Learn how long it actually takes to do things. Sometimes, we overload ourselves because we have an unrealistic idea of how long it takes to do something. This is where an unobtrusive timer is invaluable: when you start doing something, start your timer in stopwatch mode and then put it somewhere out of your sightline. Once you're done, note how long it took you to do that task. Repeat the process the next few times you do that task so the "I'm being timed" factor is reduced and you have a realistic estimate of how long that task truly takes. I'm a repeat offender when it comes to this one, so I'll be doing this step right along with you.

4. Bribe yourself to start early. "I've got 15 days to do this, and it'll only take a couple of hours (see above); why start now?" That is the voice of procrastination talking. Give yourself a reason to start a project early: a bribe of some sort. Whatever kind of reward works for you, bestow it upon yourself when you start a project early.

5. Eat Ye Olde Frogge. Self-help author Brian Tracy has this great concept for overcoming the worst task in your day: if you know you've got to eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning, so everything after that tastes a whole lot better. Combining the frog-eating with a reward can help you overcome that initial inertia that makes procrastination so easy.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think I need to devote several weeks to writing about procrastination in-depth. But for now, what sort of time-management tactics do you use to get around procrastination? Let me know in the comments!

Taming Time: Batching and zoning

Okay, we've talked about knowing your best times for working, and creating a weekly to-do list. Now it all comes together when you batch your tasks and zone them for the appropriate energy level. That probably sounds like something Keanu Reeves would have said in Point Break, but there's a time-management science to batching and zoning, I promise.

One of the basic premises of organization is "put like with like." Batching means you group similar tasks together. If you need to contact many people individually via email about a project, for the love of Pete, don't send those emails throughout the day. You'll break your momentum when you decide to start writing an email, then you'll break it again when you're done with that email and decide to go back to what you were doing.

Instead, spend an hour doing nothing but sending emails to those people, maintaining your focus on the project and on the act of verbal communication. Similarly, if you have a bunch of errands to run, batch them all together, then start with the errand that's farthest away from you and work your way back to your home base.

You can also batch entire days on projects or on themes. If you're a freelancer, you might want to spend all day Tuesday, for example, focusing on marketing. Consider setting aside specific days to work with clients, even telling new clients "I'm available Wednesday through Friday" so you can keep the other days free for completing projects and running your business.

Once you've grouped your to-dos into batches (activity-based and/or project-based), it's time to take out your calendar and consider what you've learned about yourself and when you're at your best. It's time to do some zoning.

Identify your best time on your calendar (consider sketching a little box around it) and put the most difficult batch of stuff for that day in that time slot. Going back to the email example, if composing emails is a struggle for you, put that task in your best time zone. If calling people is a chore, that goes in your best zone. If you need to do some spectacularly creative work on a project, that definitely goes in your best zone.

What goes in your lower-energy zones? Stuff you could do in your sleep, stuff that needs to get done but isn't terribly important, doctor/dentist/hair appointments—everything else in your day, basically. To the extent possible, don't put this stuff in your best zones. It would be like putting high-octane fuel in a Yugo.

So remember: know what you need and want to do, know when your best times are, then batch and zone. And hang ten.

Have any of you tried the batching/zoning method? How's it been for you? If you're considering trying the method, or you're not sure about it, let me know what you're thinking in the comments!

Taming Time: Your to-do list(s)

"Stuff is like a gas; it expands to fill the space available." —George Carlin

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." —"Parkinson's Law" (named for British naval historian Cyril Parkinson)

You've got plenty of stuff to do, and you probably have a list sitting on your desk somewhere right now spelling out what you need to do by the time the day ends. But how many of the items on that list are contributing to the quality of your work and your life, and how many are there because you have this vague feeling you need to do them?

It's easy to get lost in minor tasks, the stuff that Stephen Covey would put in the "urgent but not important" quadrant, or even the dreaded "not important, not urgent" square. If you work in a company with several layers of management, your entire day might fall into those categories. But as we've discussed earlier this month, your time is a finite resource, and so is your energy. Are you getting the most out of those resources?

What I'd like to suggest may be a bit daunting and even, ironically, time-consuming, but it's a pretty important step in directing your time: make The Big List. You know, the 5-, 10-, 30-year goals. What do you want your life to look like in 20 years, that sort of thing. It's a lot to chew on, I know, but those years are going to pass no matter what, like waves on an ocean. Why not know where you'd like to point your boat on those waves?

After you've made The Big List—well, first of all, give yourself a high-five and a treat, because that was some heavy lifting you just did. Then, think about breaking that list down into 5-year units, 1-year units and eventually quarterly and monthly units. (Then have another high-five and a treat, because, again, major work done.)

Of course, our lives aren't composed solely of what we want to accomplish. There's also a bunch of stuff we're "signed up" to do, in the form of family obligations, commitments to friends and colleagues, expectations from bosses and/or clients, self-care and care of our physical surroundings—really, that's kind of the bulk of our lives.

Make a separate list of all the stuff described in the above paragraph, plus anything of that nature I've left out, in the form of a monthly task list. Feel free to designate the daily/weekly stuff accordingly; no need to list it multiple times. Now, add in your monthly Big List items, and give everything a reasonable deadline.

Now, freak out for a minute or two, because chances are that list is insane. But recognize that that list represents all the stuff you've been keeping in your head in the form of "got to remember to..." items or items you do by rote now. That's everything you try to do in a month, and it's probably a lot. How can it be whittled down?

One of the best and simplest organizational principles is: "Eliminate what you can, and manage the rest." Is there anything you can eliminate from your list? Anything you're doing that just isn't adding any value to your life? Perhaps it can be delegated, automated or outsourced—and remember, what you're buying when you outsource isn't just the completion of the task, it's time, which is pretty damn valuable.

Once you've got your monthly list down to the essential tasks, see if they need to be broken down further. A task like "blog" is really pretty useless. But a task like "Create outline for to-do list post" is much better: it's one action that can be performed in one sitting.

Now you're ready for the final step: the weekly to-do session. I like to do this on Friday evenings, planning out the week that starts on Monday. You might prefer a Monday-morning list session or Sunday night. All that matters is that you spend some time (no more than 30 minutes) planning out how your use of time in the coming week will further what you want and need to accomplish.

Make a list of your tasks for the coming week, and please remember to be realistic. A week with 60 to-do items in it is a week destined for failure, unless each item takes a maximum of 5 minutes. Later this week, we'll talk about the best way to group these items, but just creating the weekly to-do list is a huge step in taming time.

Have any of you made The Big List and integrated it with your have-to-do lists? What's your experience been like? Let me know in the comments!

Taming Time: When are you at your best?

All hours are not created equal. Just ask a night person who's had to do something, and do it well, at 7 a.m. Some folks shine in the morning, while others sparkle in the afternoon and still others shimmer at night. And I haven't heard any success stories of one type changing itself to another, so it's probably wisest to figure out when you're at your best, and then work with that.

How can you tell when your best time is? Well, you probably have a general idea right now. If the phrase "6:15 in the morning" makes you cringe instinctively, you're probably not a morning person, and if "1:15 in the morning" makes you yawn just to hear it, you're probably not a night owl. But what about the afternoon person, arguably the most elusive of the three types?

The best way to get a concrete idea of your best hours is simply to track how you feel every hour for a few days. (Yes, it sounds a bit tedious. If it helps, think of yourself as a spy conducting recon ... on yourself. "3 p.m. Subject is yawning, energy seems to be waning. Could be good time for an attack.")

Charlie Gilkey at Productive Flourishing has taken the tracking concept to a spectacular level, with his "heatmapping" plan. Charlie and I have very different ideas about the desirability of heat. I prefer to think of the hours between 9 and noon as my coolest, freshest time; who the hell wants to work when they're hot? ;-)

Once you've gotten a feel for when your energy is highest and your mental powers are at their peak, you have an additional challenge, sort of: owning it. Now that you know you're useless before 11 a.m. but absolutely golden between 2 and 5 p.m., you can start taking steps to shape your workday to maximize your good hours and minimize your not-so-good hours.

What you shouldn't do is try to change your best times. If you're a morning person, I'd urge you not to apply for bartending jobs. If you're an evening person, reconsider taking a paper route. Instead, do what you can within your circumstances to adapt your day to your time style. Remember: don't fight yourself; you'll never win.

Taming Time: An introduction, what's infinite, and what isn't

Oh yes, it's another month with a theme. Since the longest day of the year occurs in June, I thought it would be good to talk about time. This month, we'll be talking about concepts that are a little abstract and maybe a bit on the "woo" side (such as this post), but we'll also be talking about concrete things like how to reduce your chronic lateness.

See, like this clock. Abstract yet concrete (well, steel, at least).

I recently participated in a conference call about organizing creative people, and the difficulty of asking creatives to pare down their projects was one of the key issues. Most creative people have several projects sitting around, waiting to be finished—or started. (Don't ask me about my plans to make my own makeup organizing roll-up thing. It's a sore spot.)

Thing is, after a while, your "unfinished project" area starts to look like this:

Flickr image by thebeadedlily

What you can't see is the unacknowledged demands on your time all the projects are making. It doesn't feel like they're stealing your time because you haven't really set a time for them, just "one of these days." And while that day is on its way, you've picked up a few more projects you want to do, because after all, you can't just let an idea go by, can you? You've got to grab those things while you can because you never know when the next idea will come by!

If that paragraph sounds at all like you, I need to tell you something, and I'm going to try to say it as gently as possible: my beloved reader, you couldn't be more wrong.

Ideas, inspiration and opportunities are infinite ... as long as you believe they are. If you think your creativity is limited, your creative flow is going to be blocked so only a few ideas make it through. (I told you this post was "woo.")

Conversely, if you think creativity fills and surrounds you like the air you breathe, not only is your creative flow increased, but it becomes much easier to pick up the ideas around you. You've heard that saying, "Whether you think you can or you can't, you're probably right"? That applies here too.

What's finite? Your space and time. Unless there's a wormhole in your studio somewhere, you've got a limited amount of space to work with, and you need some space that's free of stuff in which you can work.

Similarly, unless you know something pretty major that the rest of us don't, your time is limited as well. I don't just mean that in the "you're mortal" sense, I mean that in the "there's only so many hours in the day, week, month and year" sense. And unlike space, you can't rent more time.

So I've got a challenge for you: look through your unfinished projects and decide which of them are important enough to make a claim on your precious time. Give yourself a deadline of 6 months to a year to finish those projects (and schedule it on your calendar). Then let the rest of them go, trusting that there will be other ideas that come along. And they'll need to be scheduled, too.

Which projects are important enough to win a spot on your schedule, and which are you willing to let go? Let me know in the comments!