Time Management Tuesday: Summer Reading Finale

I've spent about six weeks discussing Manage Your Day-to-Day, a book of essays on working with creativity edited by Joceyln K. Glei. I got a lot out of this book for two reasons.

• It deals with issues I've been studying and thinking about for a year and a half as part of my Time Management Tuesday Project.
• Metrics and  using social media mindfully certainly relate to ideas I've been writing about here.
• Renewal relates to the Unit System
• Even what are new concepts/terms for me, such as creative vs. reactive work, can be applied to what I do as a writer.
• I liked the short essay format. I've read a number of nonfiction books this last half year on subjects connected in some way to managing time or writing. Many of them were bloated with narrative sections that went on far too long or didn't seem to illustrate the point being made. The essay format used in Manage Your Day-to-Day eliminates that. The writers stick to one specific idea in each essay and don't meander. Yes, some essays were better than others, either because the material was of greater interest to me or I felt the writing was better. But that's the beauty of a book of essays. You can pick and choose, not read everything, and still get complete reading experiences because essays are complete narratives.

I purchased this book as an eBook for Kindle, so it was incredibly affordable. This is an example of eBooks providing opportunities for discovering new writers and concepts because of their lower cost.

Time Management Tuesday: Summer Reading--Spending Time On Any Kind Of Creativity

I  know that many people probably perceive focusing on managing time as very noncreative. What about art? What about literature and music and those fields that are, I think, rather stereotypically considered creative? Shouldn't we be focusing on something like that?

I have a very practical attitude toward creativity. Creativity is simply the act of making something that did not exist before. Whether we're talking painting a landscape or baking a cake or writing a novel or building a house, we are talking creativity. Making something that did not exist before takes time. Big, big connection between time and creativity, in my humble opinion.

Manage Your Day-to-Day 's section on creativity includes an essay by Todd Henry called Creating for You, and You Alone. Now, remember, Manage Your Day-to-Day doesn't deal specifically with writers or artists but with all types of "creatives," people who need to come up with something that didn't exist before as part of their work This particular essay deals with people who work creatively in their jobs, but need to stay on a particular creative task. Exercising other aspects of their creativity is difficult for them, though doing so might be good for their day job, in addition to anything else they want to do with their lives.

Why am I interested in this essay when I write here for writers who presumably create for themselves all the time? Well, actually, we don't. Many writers have traditional day jobs that require creativity of them quite apart from the creative work they want to do for publication. Creating for themselves has to happen in addition to that. I also know writers who do work-for-hire, writing specific nonfiction books, for instance, for a particular publisher or writing volumes for series fiction. Earlier this year I met an illustrator who had "auditioned" for and won a rather nice assignment illustrating some children's books for a known cable chef. She expects to be tied up with that job for two years. For  many working writers and illustrators, this really is an issue.

Todd writes about what he calls "Unnecessary Creation," which he believes "is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind." He's talking about creative acts--making something, anything, that didn't exist  before--that are unrelated to an individual's work. "...something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights." In other words, creativity spurs creativity.

He suggests creating a list of creative projects to work on in spare time, (I know. What's that?) then setting aside a specific time each week or day (Hell, I'd be happy with time each month) to make progress on it. The point of Unnecessary Creation is that any kind of creativity has value. For those writers I know who are trying to get to other types of creative work, that might be what goes into their spare time set asides. Or maybe not. Maybe simply engaging in any creative act will unleash the insights they need to get to the Unnecessary Creation they really want to move on. Creativity encourages creativity.

In the month or two since I read Todd's essay, I've been posting pictures of my Unnecessary Creations at my personal Facebook page.

Time Management Tuesday: Summer Reading--Renewal

Today's discussion of Manage Your Day-to-Day involves Tony Schwartz's essay, Building Renewal Into Your Day. It was particularly interesting for me, because what he's talking about in his piece is similar to what we call here at OC the Unit System.

Breaking Your Work Day Into Units Or Intervals

Schwartz says that "the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity" but that "we can influence the way we manage our energy." We can do this by recognizing that humans follow an ultradian rhythm.
At the end of ninety minutes, "we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level." Then we need to renew. At his blog, Schwartz recently referred to the work pattern he suggests--90 minutes of work, followed by a break--as "mental intervals." He also compared this work pattern to interval training, an excellent analogy, I think.

Over and over again I'm coming upon variations of the Unit System. I don't think the number of minutes in your unit or interval (90, 45, or even 20) is that important, so long as you focus your attention on work for a preplanned period of time and then take a break. It helps us to take advantage of the scientific knowledge of what we're physically and mentally capable of doing and provides an external support for willpower.

The Impact Of Lack Of Sleep

Schwartz also writes about what fatigue does to work effort and quality, saying "...even very small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our cognitive capacity."  This was intriguing for me, because I've just started reading a productivity guide for writers that described being too tired to write as merely an excuse. In the event that people truly are dealing with fatigue, they might be better advised to find a way to deal with that renewal issue.

Time Management Tuesday: Beginning Our Summer Reading With Creative Vs. Reactive Work

Summer reading...a seasonal joy. Today we begin a discussion of one of my summer reading books, Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei. Glei is the editor-in-chief for a website called 99U, which tries to provide a " "missing curriculum" for making ideas happen." 99U is related to another website, Behance, a "platform to showcase and discover photography, graphic design, illustration, and fashion." Thank you for that, Wikipedia, because while I could get the gist of what was going on at Behance, I like to have things written out for me, and I couldn't find a clear statement of purpose at the Behance site.

Okay, back to Manage Your Day-to-Day: Neither this book, nor 99U, deal specifically with writers. However, they do both deal with "creatives" and share a premise that the creative world tends to focus on idea generation, not so much on idea execution. Manage Your Day-to-Day is a series of short essays by and interviews with people working in creative fields. All the chapters deal with idea execution. Glei says in her preface, "Our goal was to come at the problems and struggles of...work from as many angles as  possible."

What do we need to execute ideas? We need to manage time. Over the past year and a half, we have been coming at the problems and struggles of managing time from as many angles as possible here at Original Content. Some of the ideas in Manage Your Day-to-Day are angles we can try to apply to time.

For instance, in the essay Laying the Groundwork for an Effective Routine Mark McGuinness talks about "reactive work," work that involves "responding to incoming demands and answering questions framed by other people." Reactive work, he says, takes time away from creative work.

Now, I believe McGuinness is writing primarily about people working in traditional offices or within organizations in which they are expected to interact regularly with other employees, report to others, and/or have others report to them. Interaction is hugely time consuming and tends to snowball into more work. Most writers work by themselves. Little interaction, little reactive work. Right?

But how much time are we truly spending on creative work these days? Promoting ourselves and specific works and long-term marketing in general cuts into creative work. Marketing and promotion has become our reactive work. We publish a book, and we have to react to that with contacting sites and bloggers to whom we must react still more, if they react to us. A RFP for a conference workshop arrives, we react to it. An inquiry comes in regarding an appearance at a school, we react to it. Last week I happened to see a write-up on a literary journal. I dropped everything and reacted to it by doing a quick revision of a short story and submitting it. As reactive work goes, that's not bad, but it wasn't the creative work I was expecting to do that day.

McGuinness says, "The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities..."  

Blocking off a chunk of time could mean saving a unit or two every day for creative work. Another way to block time is to think of a week as a unit and saving the early part of it for the creative work and letting the reactive stuff wait. I've been suffering from reactive marketing creep, myself, and found that I was going weeks and months without real writing because so much time was going into promoting Saving the Planet & Stuff. I've started trying to limit Mondays and Tuesdays to writing and Fridays for marketing.

There are two issues to consider here: One is putting creative work before reactive work, of course, but the other is to first train yourself to identify reactive vs. creative work. If  what we're doing is reactive, should it be our top priority?