Time Management II
on January 21st, 2009When these articles were first published some years back, I got mail from people who expressed concern that I was working too hard. One wrote me an extremely silly and impassioned letter that if I didn’t take more time with my personal life, I would be lonely and sad in the end, with nothing but a stack of comics for comfort. Since my articles had absolutely nothing to say about my personal life, I can’t imagine how anyone could have drawn any conclusions about how I conduct it, but one thing’s for sure, I got the distinct impression my concerned correspondent was hoping to provide some personal comfort. What a treat.
And just for the record, I don’t have very many comics in my house, so maybe I will have to settle for my Lord of the Rings collection. That Boromir figure from Sideshow WETA is looking pretty good to me right now…
From foreign climes, I received a slew of posts about how Americans are obsessed with being #1 (because my one article is evidence of the behaviors of 300 million people, and if they are teaching reasoning and rhetoric in the schools from whence these posters come, I saw no evidence of same), and nobody but NOBODY works (or should work) as hard as what I describe in these posts.
Considering the short work weeks in some places, people who actually want to work hard probably do seem aberrant to those who consider a 35 hour work week too much to bear. If I were required to only work 35 hours a week, I would be gnawing at my own leg in frustration.
So, for those who think that no one but NO ONE would REALLY want to work this hard…um…well, yes they do, and if you had any imagination at all, you might actually be able to dig down deep into that creative well of yours and imagine people who are different than you are.
People you’ve never heard of whose work goes nowhere don’t, which is why they are on message boards complaining about how hard other people work. Other people working makes them feel bad.
Obsessed is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated. I have no idea who said that first, but I am pinching it here.
The interesting thing is, creators who love their work don’t always feel like they are working. They feel compelled to create. It makes them feel GOOD.
When I can’t work, or am not in The Zone, I feel awful. I rarely (if ever) feel genuine depression, but when I am not able to work, my energy level plummets (or vice versa). I don’t find a 40 hour work week enables me to get what I want out of my time. I like a 55-60 hour week, and find that comfortable.
I gotta have my Gotta.
If you don’t got The Gotta, as Stephen King calls it, then maybe you ought to be considering another profession. Those who’ve got The Gotta don’t doubt for one minute that creating is wonderful, and they wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.
If you don’t got The Gotta, there are a lot of other people out there who have it in abundance, and they are going to be out there plugging away 100 times harder than you. They are getting the gallery exhibits, and the contracts, and the book deals, and the assignments.
And the ones left behind are complaining that other people work too hard.
Boo hoo.
That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with dabbling, or doing art on the side, or enjoying a weekend painting session. But if you are taking a step forward to be a pro, be aware that the habits of the dabbler won’t do. Period.
If you want to be a part time creator, you will likely get part time results. Being a full time creator who actually makes a living at it requires the investment of effort and focus, and the realization that you will be compelled to create and produce EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO GUARANTEE OF MATERIAL REWARD.
Decide what you want for yourself.
Sitting around and complaining that people who work harder than you get more than you do in return makes you look like an idiot who can’t do simple math.
No investment = no return.
NUMBER TWO:
Save time with others:
When it comes to managing your time, your best friends can be your worst enemies. Establish boundaries. Set strict limits for what, where, when and who will enter your studio and take up your time.
I once had a very good professional friend who would call several times a week and spend as much as four hours a whack on the phone. This woman was a writer. She was a constant deadline problem for her editors and it was no wonder since her entire life seemed to be spent on the phone. Even begging her to restrict her calls to an hour a week had no effect. Everyone marveled at why this smart and talented woman couldn’t seem to get any work done. However, I knew that her endlessly chatty phone habits were the real problem.
This woman didn’t need friends. She needed therapy. And what was worse, everyone in her orbit found that their own work suffered, too. For hours a week, she called to discuss her problems and stories that never got written.
Consequently, no one else she knew could get any work done either. Her demands for attention were endless and if she heard my pen or pencil moving across the paper while she was talking to me, she became furious that I wasn’t paying close attention to her every utterance. Frankly, I couldn’t afford to lose the hours of time a week she demanded. A monster of neurosis, she finally found herself unwelcome at nearly every publisher, and her career floundered.
She wasn’t the only person I knew who didn’t have a clue when to get lost. Many friends and acquaintances used to show up without invitation, wanting to have lunch, get coffee, or go to a movie.
It’s not so easy to say no to someone who is standing at your door telling you that you work too much and you need to take time to smell the roses. As someone with a rose garden, I found that hilarious. I also found it disrespectful.
Finally, I had to get tough. I simply stopped returning the calls of people who didn’t hear me say no the first time. I put a large fish eye lens viewer on my front door and anyone uninvited no longer gets in. I even resorted to hanging a big “Go Away!” sign on the front door in real deadline crises. Extreme? Not if you know the freelancer life and how people often fail to respect your wishes for solitude so the work can get done. It’s not likely that you could go to your friend’s offices and hang out there for hours at a time, sipping coffee and watching the television while they work. They shouldn’t be doing it at your workplace either.
UPDATE: Moving out to the country has really put a damper on this problem because I now live hours away from everyone who used to show up on my doorstep.
But that didn’t put a complete stop to it.
“Bob”, after many frustrating months (nay, years) of trying to convince the guy that I really didn’t have two hours a day three days a week to hang out and have lunches and coffees, continued to be a problem.
Even after I moved a SEVEN HOUR TRIP AWAY, Bob would just show the hell up. Sometimes he decided he was “just in the neighborhood” and needed to drop by and check out something on my computer. Several times a week.
This didn’t last long, and I no longer speak to Bob at all, but it takes a special brand of hysterical paralogia to declare “I”m just in the neighborhood, let’s have lunch” when your neighborhood is seven hours away.
I take full responsibility for not being more firm and establishing stronger boundaries early on. And I have only had a few people pull this behavior over the years. But once I let them cross the line, they did not want to give up that advantage. They pushed those boundaries back at every opportunity. Why give up territory they had conquered? “Colleen doesn’t let anyone else just drop in…but she let’s ME drop in!”
No one does it anymore, because after years of trying to be nice about it all, the only thing I proved to people was that I couldn’t say no, and if they wanted to show up, I might be testy about it, but I’d open the door.
Finally, I stopped opening the door and started telling people that I did not care if they had made a seven hour round trip and were just “in the neighborhood”, I was not available. Sorry, no time for lunch today, I have an assignment due at Fedex in four hours.
Boundaries don’t make you a bad friend. Violating them does. Consider ANY OTHER JOB IN THE WORLD where buddies would be encouraged to just drop in and hang out. There isn’t one. But few respect the boundaries creators set on their time, because they don’t think that we have real jobs. Often even other creators don’t respect these rules, and several of my biggest problems have been with other pros.
In the case of the woman writer I outline in the article, her career is long dead. I don’t think she has had a professional gig in at least 7 years, and no one I know has any idea what happened to her. I haven’t spoken to her since 1994, but when she was around, she drained time, money and energy.
Worse yet, I let her.
It took me years to put my foot down and put a stop to it. But not before the situation devolved into disaster. Money is time, and time is money, and this relationship cost me a fortune.
In the early 1990′s, there were no cell phone calling plans, no long distance bundles. You paid through the nose for long distance. And my friend lived 500 miles away.
I was getting plenty of work in the early 1990′s, but was not rich. My friend was doing much worse, so would sometimes call and ask if I would call back to save her money, or she would leave messages on my answering machine asking me to call back.
These long distance calls added up. A lot. They finally reached – oh, lord, I am very embarrassed to write this – about $500 a month. This was at a time when my average income before expenses and taxes was as low as $32,000 a year. Ouch.
PLEADING and BEGGING to restrict the calls to one hour a week did not work. Not returning the calls did not work. At least she began putting the calls on her own bill, but STILL she was calling for an average of eight hours every single solitary week. It was exhausting, demoralizing, and expensive. It was hurting my work, and my wallet. I was having trouble paying other bills because the phone bills were too damn high.
This is not healthy behavior.
When I finally broke friends with her in 1994, what an amazing thing to see my income go straight up, and my expenses drop like a stone! And one sad day, I sat down with a calculator and realized that the phone calls over the years (not counting other hand-outs and costs) had added up to in excess of $20,000.
Wow, that’s rather expensive. THERAPY would have been cheaper.
I felt like a bad friend for years because I really didn’t want to spend all that time on the phone with someone who was driving me nuts and costing me a fortune, but I did it anyway. Wouldn’t I be a bad friend not to listen to my friend’s problems?
Well, sometimes when someone is drowning, they grab on and drown you, too. And sometimes you’ve got to choose whether or not you want to drown with them, especially when you are dealing with someone who won’t save themselves when they are perfectly capable of doing so.
Time to let go.
I sure as hell wish I had let go before I had spent more than $20,000 on phone calls.
Does this mean I never talk to friends on the phone? Does this mean I never have buddies over? Does this mean a friend can’t call with their problems? Of course that’s not what it means.
But NONE of my friends abuse the privilege, and I sure as heck hope I don’t either.
In fact, some of my pro buddies and I set up phone call marathons where we know we will be up all night working on something that doesn’t require our full attention, like simple (yet time-consuming) inking tasks. Jeff Smith and I are phone buddies, and we’ve yakked as long as eight hours a stretch. We will call and set up a date and schedule it because we can encourage each other, and keep each other awake during long hours of tedious and not particularly challenging work.
But when no one has time to talk, there are no tearful declarations that someone is a bad friend because they have a deadline on Tuesday, and they don’t have an hour to yak with you. Most of my pro friends and I don’t speak more than once a month or so, and that is fine. They are friends, not umbilical cords. I don’t expect them to blow a deadline just because I want to blather about something.
Now that long distance phone bundles make calling cheap, money’s no longer a problem. But I’m amazed at people who seem to have ready cash to eat out and go to to Starbucks and hang about with friends for hours several days every week, but complain at the same time they don’t have health insurance, or money for other essentials, or time to make deadlines.
“Bob” was a prime example. He lived at Starbucks and ate out at least three times or more a week, but once spent more than an hour writhing about on my living room floor convinced he was having a heart attack, while refusing to let me call an ambulance.
He didn’t have health insurance. I lived five minutes from a hospital, and no hospital can refuse someone care, and yet he was worried about the bill enough that he was ready to die on my floor rather than actually see a doctor. No, I am not kidding.
Why he drove – yes, drove his car to my house in the middle of the night – instead of to his own home, or his mom’s house, or even to the care of his wife, was unfathomable to me.
And because I am good at basic math, I sat down one day and calculated for this brain trust just how he could afford health insurance.
He paid a minimum of $20 a week at Starbucks for coffees and treats, and EASILY spent more than $50 a week eating in restaurants. That adds up to a whopping $280-$300 a month AT LEAST. I KNOW he really spent more than that dining out (hundreds more, which is not speculation, but his admission.)
At the time (more than a decade ago) I paid $136 a month for health insurance through a self employed persons insurance plan. I only pay $200 a month now with Blue Cross Blue Shield. And half that is a tax deduction. So cut out the money you save in tax, and drop about $20 more a month. So, at the time, my health insurance cost me out of pocket only $116 a month. Easily affordable, even when you aren’t making big money, and readily affordable to those who can spend that at Starbucks alone every month.
But his priority was hanging out and socializing in coffee shops instead of his health. Just cutting back on dining out, and he’d have had more time to get work done, and to increase his income, especially if he wasn’t losing at least a full day’s work a week socializing. And I’m betting if he weren’t so neurotic about work and money, partly caused by wasting money and lack of professional focus, he’d get more jobs done, too.
After I finally blew my top and told him I was calling an ambulance RIGHT NOW, he got himself off the floor and left under his own power. An amazing recovery. He went to a doctor the next day.
It turns out Bob was not having a heart attack at all. He was having a muscle spasm. Due to stress. Over money.
Money to hang out and yak in coffee shops, but no money for health insurance. Time to waste, but no time to do work.
Sheesh.
Bottom line, the person who pays the most when you don’t write that book, or create that comic, or paint that painting is you. If you would rather fritter away your time hanging out in coffee shops and having cathartic sessions on the phone, go for it.
No one will ever miss what you never created in the first place.
c
There are also those people who want the attention of being a creator, but don’t want to do the work. Chuck Dixon likes to quote Denny O’Neil to the effect that if you’re not happiest sitting alone in the room working on the computer (adjust activity for artists), then you’re in it for the wrong reason.
I’m an extrovert, so I do get energized by spending *some* time with other people. But I try to schedule for specific times, and with people that stimulate me. Those who drain my energy (and there certainly are some) I try to limit access to me. For instance, yesterday evening, I spent time with some friends, and the discussions (not about anything in particular, just fantasy books) got me energized, and so today I did some work on one of my novels. And loved it.
This is a great article! I think a lot of my friends feel that I work too hard, but I tell them over and over that if they were their own bosses, they would probably do the same. (Not to mention the fact that I *enjoy* my work.) I like the feeling of going to bed at night with a feeling of accomplishment at completing my goals, and planning out the following day’s workload. Also, there’s nothing like a deadline to light a fire under my ass, and I love the feeling of finishing earlier than I had expected, and moving on to something new.
“No Investment = No Return”, that is so true and unfortunately it doesn’t sink in for a lot of people. One of the few people I had still talked to from high school is working at Walmart and was complaining to me about how much she hates her job. So I asked where else she has applied and she said “nowhere” because she hasn’t had the time.
I pointed out that she works PART-TIME at Walmart, how did she not have any time? I was unemployed for over a year and a half and as depressing as it was, I made it a point to apply to at least 2-3 places a day, no matter what. I told her to do that and keep at it.
Apparantly what I thought was advice turned out to be (in her mind) that I wasn’t understanding her plight, that I had it “easy”. Yeah, working 40-50 hours a week is “easy”, sure. Pointing out that I got to where I am by being persistent and having a more marketable degree didn’t help matters either.
Needless to say she cut off contact and yet I feel much better now. I don’t feel bad about having a steady paycheck. I work for it. I guess misery loves company.
I like spending time with other people too. But I’m an introvert, and I get exhausted in many other people’s company. I find that if I go out, the rest of the work day is shot. Most people are extroverts, so simply don’t understand that introverts are drained by socializing, as fun as it is.
Being with other creative people usually doesn’t cause this. In fact, when I go to a convention, sometimes I am energized and driven to draw (depending on the show and the nature of the company).
Charlotte Heroes Con is a perfect example.
But I’ve found some people are draining because they seek out creative people and expect us to entertain them. And frankly, some of my old friends were foul weather friends who got off on misery, but were not at all happy when I was doing well.
When you are on a tight deadline, it is so attractive to just saunter out the door to hang with friends. That’s nice. Once a week.
But multiple friends, all of whom want to spend free time with you, and who just show up on the doorstep? Let’s see, if only one does that per day, that’s 2 hours per day, 7 days a week. 14 hours.
For whatever reason, many of my friends actively disliked each other, so simply getting together once a week for pizza was not an option.
I figure at one point I lost between 12 and 20 hours a week to Bob, the woman above, and a slew of other folks who would just show up, including a retailer who would drive a three hour round trip to just “check out the neighborhood for new store locations.” Uh hunh.
Honestly the mixed messages drove me nuts. I swear, I was getting criticized for working too much at the same time I was getting digs for not putting A Distant Soil out fast enough. By the same people.
Like I said, I don’t mind hanging out once in awhile, but these people had no respect for my boundaries. And when I began enforcing the boundaries, the reactions were epic nasty. Sometimes hostile.
Which brings us to Jeremy. A perfect example of what happens when you point something out to someone that ought to be helpful, but gets you a hostile reaction.
I’ve got a long list of people just like your friend, there. They never see that they are part of their own problems. Because that would take effort.
I was told that admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, a concept lost on some. The woman I mentioned earlier spends a lot of time blogging about stuff and out of morbid curiosity I still look now and then at it. She’ll woe about her money problems and yet post pictures and discusses concerts she went to. There’s a connection and she doesn’t quite see it.
After working all week, I usually don’t have much energy to do much of anything. Not much at the movies worth seeing, so I’d rather just stay home. Some say that I should get out more and while they may be right; the company of me, myself and I is affordable and a lot less stressful. Plus I got tired of some friends complaining about their girlfriends and saying how “lucky” I was being single. I felt like it was being rubbed in at times. Either way, a good book will provide more joy than some drunks who still play college drinking games. Speaking of which, I need to finish book one of “A Distant Soil” so I can continue forward, but I don’t like to rush. That’ll be my weekend project.
Bob was the same time of person. Bob, who often had serious money problems, always had cash to travel to Disneyland, buy knicknacks and collectibles, expensive limited edition books, and to dine out every single day. At one point he admitted that for a period of four months, he didn’t eat a single meal in his home.
OK, this I found confusing. You’re broke and buying a lot of crap? Eating out every single day, several times a day?
Bob explained it as a reward for his misery. Because he was having a bad time or working hard, he always talked about how he needed a “treat”.
It’s daffy, but that’s the way he thought.
I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself (not on that scale), but recognizing it as a problem is, as you say, the first step toward recovery.
Basically, people are trying to buy their way out of pain.
In the end, Bob was so broke, I ended up paying for most of the meals out, and loaning him scads of money.
Never got it back, of course.
Haven’t had anything to do with him in at least half a decade, so whatever.
I get out plenty: it’s a quarter mile walk just to get my mail.
“Bottom line, the person who pays the most when you don’t write that book, or create that comic, or paint that painting is you.”
A frustrated and blocked creative person is one of the most destructive forces I think I’ve ever seen.
Did you ever read Stephen Pressfield’s book, The War of Art?
I have not read that, but I will now.
Absolutely true, VT. I think that’s what was happening with my old, unhealthy circle. I was hanging out with a lot of not too successful people who were angry and frustrated with their work. And I think that’s why they didn’t like each other. They were in constant competition with each other, and competed for attention.
“Art and Fear” is another great book.
“Art and Fear†is another great book.
A friend of mine loaned me that book and I’m reading it now. The first few pages alone completely changed my thinking.
I’ll see if the local bookstore’s got Art and Fear.
(Hit submit too soon; go me!)
You can read an excerpt of The War of Art here. It’s a quick read, but it rocked my world. I think I’ve now bought and loaned out eight copies.
While I do have a competitive streak, it doesn’t surface in my art. With that, I don’t want to be the worst student, and I like being the best, but I don’t have to be the best. (Sports are an entirely different story; then I must crush my opponents beneath me and listen to the lamentations of their women. Or their lamentations because they got beat by a girl. Ahem.)
It’s interesting how when one’s miserable about one’s art, one’s miserable about life.
Me? I’m just miserable…
Healthy competition pushes people to excel. Unhealthy competition drags other people down so they don’t get ahead of you.
I think it is right and proper to have a strong sense of goading one another on so everyone does their best. And it’s only natural to feel good if you win a competition. It’s unnatural, in my opinion, to not appreciate it when your friends do well.
Indeed! I hate seeing when people get all queezy when someone else has some achievement. It’s not as if, for instance, I can draw exactly like you and therefore you getting a job instead of me hurts me. My style is nothing like yours (if I were pursuing the professional art route, which I’m not). And there is certainly space for different styles.
Once, a friend of mine made a feature film (admittedly for the Billy Graham people), and an aspiring writer (who for as far as I know has spent 20 years not completeing a play on the missionary Eric Little) complained that Michael got the job “just because he’s lucky”. Mind you… Michael had spent nearly twenty years learning his film craft, working small jobs, making connections, doing the work. So much for “luck”.