it’s my under­stand­ing that there are some peo­ple out there that still have a job and have fam­i­lies they like to spend time with. I’ve heard of such peo­ple. But seri­ously, once, I had a day job too. I do have a fam­ily I love to spend time with. So I know a lit­tle bit about how hard it is to find time to do the things you really love while spend­ing a lot of time doing the things you have to do to make every­thing else possible.

Making time is an inter­est­ing turn of phrase. It almost implies that if we just con­cen­trate, we’ll man­i­fest extra min­utes or hours out of noth­ing. The truth is, every day has 24 hours, 1,440 min­utes, 86400 sec­onds. Except for those weird days that don’t because of time changes. We’re not going to be mak­ing any more time. We have to make do with the time we have.

Being a suc­cess­ful cre­ative pro­fes­sional, whether you’re only doing it on the side of a big­ger gig, or you’re a full time free­lancer, requires some unique time man­age­ment. There are a mil­lion meth­ods out there, a mil­lion tools, all about how to man­age your time effec­tively. There’s a rather large pseudo-cult around “Getting Things Done.” I’ve exper­i­mented with it, but I didn’t find that it was the right man­age­ment sys­tem for me. I wanted some­thing a lit­tle more organic, and some­thing that takes into con­sid­er­a­tion that some of us have jobs where we’re actu­ally expected to be on email more than an hour a day.

I’ve yet to hit upon a par­tic­u­lar method­ol­ogy that works for me, but var­i­ous tips and tricks have col­lected in the recesses of my brain in the time I’ve been doing this. Here are some of the strate­gies that work for others:

• The Early Riser: get up before any­one else in the house does, stum­ble to the com­puter, and work before you brain even fully comes online.
• The Late Night Insomniac: wait until every­one else in the house has gone to bed, and then get your work done before stum­bling off to bed.
• The Minutes Stealer: work a lit­tle here, a lit­tle there. Have a daily goal, and squeeze out what time you can in places. This kind of spo­radic approach.
• The Lunch Breaker: most peo­ple with full time jobs get lunch breaks. An hour to yourself–if you don’t have errands that need to be run, and you can prac­tice your cre­ativ­ity with­out spe­cial instru­ments– is valu­able. It’s built right into your day. This some­times means giv­ing up a meal though, which I’m against on prin­ci­ple. You can’t sac­ri­fice your health for pro­duc­tiv­ity. They’re not inter­changable cur­ren­cies in the long run. You’ll get shorted even­tu­ally, some­times badly.
• The Sacrificer: Like to play games with friends? Or do you like to watch a lot of TV? Sacrificers give up TV or video games in order to ded­i­cate that time to their art instead.
• The Vacationer: some peo­ple will take time off from their job, hole up in a room, and pound out a project in a week or two weeks. Believe it or not, some peo­ple can write a novel in that time frame, but I sus­pect they do a lot of plan­ning and research ahead of time, and use the vaca­tion time purely for get­ting words on the page, ink on paper, paint on can­vas, etc.
• The Unemployed: you have all the time in the world! Except now that you don’t have a job get­ting in the way, you have errands to run con­stantly. Errands mul­ti­ply in the absence of a job, it’s ridicu­lous. Being unem­ployed, so far in my expe­ri­ence, doesn’t make it any eas­ier. You still have to fol­low the basic strat­egy, which is this:

All strate­gies involve tak­ing time you already have and retask­ing it to your new purpose.

There may be some peo­ple whose lives are so absolutely full of jobs and fam­ily that they lit­er­ally can­not spare any time for their art, but I doubt there are many of them. Most of us have time some­where in our lives. It’s just a mat­ter of iden­ti­fy­ing the time and com­mit­ting it to the use you desire most.

Do you use a strat­egy to make time for your work that I haven’t men­tioned above? Share it with us in the comments.

Tagged as: creativity, strategies, time, time management