Posts Tagged ‘time management’

The bigger the project, the slower the progress

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

What I’ve been learn­ing a lot lately involves how I man­age my time and how I should set my expec­ta­tions when work­ing on larger scale projects.  This sum­mer, I booked two  large projects with great bud­gets, and I started off believ­ing that I would have both these projects com­pleted by the end of September, leav­ing me with enough money and time to focus on other pur­suits for the rest of the year, should I want to do so.

Oh, how wrong I have been.

I was bas­ing this assump­tion on the idea that these projects would pro­ceed at the same gen­eral pace as my smaller projects with smaller clients.  What I failed to take into account was how much bureau­cracy is involved when work­ing with larger com­pa­nies.  They have larger bud­gets for big­ger projects, but there are more play­ers involved in the design and approval process.  Sometimes their con­tract approval process might take weeks, not days.   And when work­ing with larger, more suc­cess­ful clients, their time is less free to work with you, as their time is often taken up doing what they do so well and sup­port­ing their suc­cess.  It makes sense when you think about it—I just failed to do so.

The result here was that I was ini­tially look­ing at spend­ing con­sid­er­able time between mis­sives and project deliv­er­ables wait­ing on feed­back.  Any time spent wait­ing is money lost, and rather than being fully booked up as I thought, I found myself with time that I needed to fill.  This sent me scram­bling to pick up more projects, but none so big that they would con­flict with the already booked work.

I’ve learned this sum­mer that I need to plan for these larger projects to take even longer than I expect, and I need to be less likely to close myself off to book­ing new projects because of these larger scale projects. There are plenty of gaps to squeeze in the smaller work.

In gen­eral, time man­age­ment, when you’re paid basi­cally for the work you do and not just to show up at some office, is incred­i­bly impor­tant in this busi­ness.  I sus­pect many self-​​employed strug­gle with this part as much as I do.  Do you?  How do you jug­gle the balls to keep the work rolling in reg­u­larly?  I’ve been very lucky that my self-​​employed life has been mostly feast, with very lit­tle famine so far.  I’d like to keep it that way for the fore­see­able future.   Wouldn’t we all?

7 Strategies for Making Time for Your Creative Pursuits

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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.