More recommended reading from a series I wrote some years ago on TIME MANAGEMENT.
CLICK HERE for previous posts of use to student readers.
PART I:
If there is one thing that creators know how to do, it’s waste time. We’re masters of procrastination. Freelancers working at home can imagine a thousand ways to sink minutes and hours and not accomplish much of anything and still make it to the end of the day feeling like they’ve done their bit of work. It’s easy to delude ourselves since we usually live and work at home alone and there is no boss standing over us cracking the whip.
We have friends and family who drop in any old time, because we don’t have real jobs and they want to free us from the drudge of our drawing boards. That is very nice of them, but many creators don’t have the willpower to just say no to distractions. A coffee break becomes two or three hours out of the day and the next thing you know, you’ve lost eight or ten hours of work in a week just hanging out with your buddies a few times. Do that for a month, and you’ve lost a week’s work, easily.
PART II:
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.
PART III:
Clutter is a kind of visual noise. It is distracting and demoralizing. It will impede your ability to work. An inability to find important documents or file effectively will eat into your work time. Think of that seven hours a week that you are probably wasting struggling with your clutter right now. You can either use that seven hours to create more art or you can have more time to play. It’s your choice. Clean it up or live with it and live less well. That’s all there is to it.
PART IV and V:
Friends can sabotage your goals without having any malicious intent. They may have problems of their own they are dealing with. They may feel left out, or insecure that you may be going in directions they can’t follow. Friendships can end when one person is more successful than the other, not just because the achiever has become a snob, but because the person who can’t also reach their dream goal can’t be happy for you. If not, maybe you need to decide if they are really the kind of friends you should have in your life.
When you are struggling with a tough goal, it is TOO EASY to get distracted, and then to convince yourself that you DESERVE a break today when you have only been working two hours that morning. If you simply can’t say no to people, then cut yourself off from them until you don’t have to face them.
If you have disciplined friends or family you can rely on, tell them you MUST meet that deadline or you MUST face that drawing board, and ask them to please help you stick to your goal, maybe by popping their head in the studio to make sure you’re not zoned out watching a TV show. Get comfortable saying “NO.” and “I’m sorry, I have other plans.”
NEVER share this information with the person who buys you candy when you are on a diet, or the person who wants to distract you with an afternoon at the movies when your editor is breathing down your neck.
