“Here we must runs as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere, you must run twice as fast as that.”
– the Red Queen, in Alice Through The Looking Glass
I’ve never been good with time.
Like most people, I constantly feel like I’m wasting it, or that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done.
In his Victorian children’s book Alice Through The Looking Glass, it seems to me that Lewis Carroll was describing life in the 21st century perfectly. I often feel like I’m running up the down escalator, breathless and harried yet getting nowhere. Or even falling behind.
Does that sound familiar to you, too?
Over the years, I’ve read countless books on productivity, time management, organisation systems. (In case you’re interested, here are the ones I found most helpful for creatives.)
But most productivity systems don’t help with creative work. So my next Useful Little Book for creatives is about time management, and how to do more of the work that really matters to you.
It seems to me that creative work has some unique challenges. I’ve listed ten of the reasons we struggle to manage our time below. But I’d love to know what you think, too.
1. Creative work can be scary and difficult.
That’s what makes it so satisfying, of course, when you get into flow or when it all clicks into place. But most of the time, we’re making it up as we go along. And we’re never sure if we’re doing it right.
There can be a very fine dividing line between method and madness, between innovation and making a mess. We often make work with no guarantee anyone will like it, understand it, or even notice it. No wonder we procrastinate and put off beginning, every day!
2. The workload is often unpredictable.
Our best-laid plans are often hijacked by a new and exciting job coming in, a deadline changing, new promotional opportunities arising, something we thought was finished coming back for more tweaks.
We can always say no, of course. But that’s hard when it involves paying work, or the chance to get our work seen by a new audience.
3. Output is equally unpredictable.
We are not making widgets on a factory production line. Sometimes the work will flow effortlessly. Other times getting a single word, image, riff feels like pushing a giant boulder up a very steep hill.
You can labour for days and produce very little of worth at all. Then suddenly, you’ll see the solution and the whole thing is done in a couple of hours.
4. Resistance is stronger.
Everyone has days when they don’t feel like working. But with creative work, the urge to do anything except create is ever-present. Whether you call it resistance, fear, shame, doubt or just plain procrastination and distraction – it’s a constant companion on any creative journey. Even if we love what we do.
5. Art isn’t always considered a proper job.
Lots of people don’t consider what we do as ‘real’ work. Including, sometimes, ourselves.
So we allow people to interrupt our work, ask us to do chores, assume we’re available for social calls or emergency school pick-ups in the middle of our working day. We sometimes devalue what we do, and find it hard to make time for them – especially the speculative projects that might not immediately bring in money.
6. But we feel it needs to look like work.
So we replicate 9-5 hours, even though we also did a weekend shoot, or an evening performance. Or we’re so busy pantomiming the parts of our job that look like work (the making, the admin, the invoicing), that we neglect the parts that can look more like play (day-dreaming, journalling, reading, researching, looking at inspiring work by others).
Both are important, or we soon get dry and uninspired. Or burn out and stop creating at all.
7. No one is asking us to do this.
Self-directed, personal projects are often the most satisfying work you can do. You need to experiment, to get out of your comfort zone, in order to push your creative practice forward.
But these projects are also the scariest, the least well-defined, and the easiest to put off. Especially when you’re not even sure it will find an audience or a buyer at the end of it all.
8. No one is supervising us.
Even if you do have a deadline, and someone waiting for what you’re creating, they rarely check in until it’s due to be delivered.
If you work in a shop, factory or office, you can’t put off starting all day then work all night to catch up. Or put off a difficult task for weeks on end without any immediate consequences.
Many of us chose to do creative work because we value freedom, independence, flexibility. But without structure and accountability, the work can take over everything. Or we put off the big, important projects far too often, and don’t make progress or get momentum on them.
9. There’s no clear finish line.
It’s hard to know when anything is done. To know when to let go and put it out into the world. You can keep honing, polishing, tweaking, editing, remaking forever.
No idea is ever fully realised. No work of art every truly finished. There is always something more you could add, subtract or change. It’s easy to over-work things and ruin them.
Without the feedback you get from putting work out there, it’s also easy to lose your way.
10. Self-employment can mean you have a terrible boss.
As well as making the creative work, you need to be your own PR marketing department, do the accounts, admin, outreach. Which is a lot, without clear objectives or rewards.
Or with a boss who can be erratic, disorganised. Constantly changing their mind. Harsh, critical, punishing. Nothing you do is ever enough, and they’re always driving you harder. (Or is that just me?)
So what can we do about this?
There is good news, too. Creative work is unpredictable, so you might not be able to predict what you will produce in a day, or a week. Perhaps not even in a month. You don’t need to beat yourself up when you have bad days; it’s part of the process.
But if you show up consistently and do the work, you can predict what you’ll make in three months, a year, a decade. This is how books get written, films get made, a song turns into an album, a sketch turns into a lifetime of art.
There’ are strategies to try for every one of’s a lot you can do to reduce the obstacles above, but they never go away completely. So just keep going. Even on the bad days. Because eventually you’ll get to more good days. And over years of patience and persistence, you’ll amass a body of work you can be proud of.
Now over to you.
Are any of these familiar to you? What are your biggest challenges with time management? And what ways have you found to overcome them?
What do you think?