Aligning time and energy

The seeds of the idea of looking at time started with Charlie Gilkey’s How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Increase Your Productivity. I realized I was scheduling appointments and driving to meetings during my peak creative time on a regular basis. The first change I made was to block out those precious morning hours for my creative work, and do what I could to avoid breaking those hours up in any way.

Knowing what your rhythm is allows you to plan the right tasks for the right times. I think a lot of personal planners miss this and people look at all chunks of time as being equal. All chunks of time are not equal! I can get more done from 0800-1000 on most days than I can from 1600-2000, even though the latter block has twice as much time.

Chris Zydel reminded me  about choice in CREATIVITY TIME BANDITS: Making Wise Choices for a Fulfilling Creative Life. She inspired me to start painting intuitively, to start my days with just putting something down on paper. To give myself space to be the artist I know I am. To send the universe a message by starting my day with the creativity that is most important to me.

When you are choosing how to spend your precious life energy, ask yourself the question, ” What really matters to me at the end of the day or at the end of my life? “

What goes into the creative time slices?

Sonia Simone had an insightful post on time this week, How to Get Any Work Done (When Connecting Is Your Job). What really stood out for me in the post was the concept of the Sacred Two:

I’ve made a commitment to carve out two hours a day, five days a week, for my most important work…….There are other commitments I’ve made that are very important to me. Deadlines to hit, projects promised, email to answer. All of that is important. But it’s not sacred. Those two hours spent on my core projects are sacred.

I see I have not been treating the most important things as sacred. I have been treating the biggest fire, usually someone else’s fire, as the most sacred. Then getting frustrated that I am not getting new products and writing done. I decided to dedicate two hours a day to working on the new product system I am developing.

Days one and two, I made great progress. By day three, I had done the parts that were clear. Now I had to wrestle with the I Don’t Know How To Do It Monster. I was face to face with my own feelings of inadequacy. Wrestling with doubt and up against all my own limitations. No wonder I have been spending so much time on email. Usually I know what to do there. Read-> answer. Concrete, achievable.

I have a pattern of bouncing to something else when I hit a roadblock. This isn’t all bad since it keeps me moving forward. But when I am working on a big new project, it can leave hundreds of tasks at the 60 – 80% completion stage. Usually at a stuck place, so not exactly inspiring or attractive. This also fuels my desire to find answers, which sends me off reading blogs and searching the net for relief. I can fool myself into thinking this is productive, but when I see how much of a pattern it is, I have to reconsider that assessment.

Identifying time to get unstuck

I started exploring alternative ways to think about this to-do list of things that feel overwhelming. When I approached an item from the perspective of solving and completing it, it was often too much. But when I scaled it back to finding something that would simply get it unstuck, it suddenly became doable. If I then kept the discipline to just keep unsticking things with micro-movements, the to-do list started to have more items that are ready for the next steps.

Often finding the thing that would start to make room for a shift didn’t take peak creative time, but could be done in the lower energy time slices. I also found there were things that could be efficiently grouped together, like looking information up on the web. By working across task types rather than working until I am stuck, I’m discovering shifts in the quality of how I am spending time. I don’t need to run away into a distracting activity as often.

Progress Report on Time Tracking

I’m still spending over a day on email, and half a day on social media. I’m very surprised to see how many newsletters I am still receiving. I continue to unsubscribe and set up filters. I’m also getting annoyed by the companies who continue to email after I have unsubscribed . I didn’t see much shifting in actual time spent this week, it was more about becoming more mindful about the quality of the time I am spending.

Have any great insights about how long to work on individual tasks? I’m thinking specifically about working on something until it is stuck versus working on something until it has a stopping place where the next step can be bundled with something else. All other input welcome, the comments on the time posts have been very helpful and giving me encouragement and hope.

It’s been three weeks with the Time Tormentor Tattletale Tool on my computer. I’m peripherally aware of its omnipresence, sitting quietly in the menu bar measuring every action. As it spits out its reports at the end of each week, I spend time looking at the effects of the changes I am making. So far, I am amazed at how much time I am spending, and how difficult it is to shift entrenched patterns of moving through my days.

I consistently spend 35 – 40 hours per week at the keyboard. Its more than I want, since I have a lot of work that is not at the keyboard, so my total working hours are longer than I am effective. I find my eyes and body getting sore and over tired at this pace. Once I am overtired, it is easy to slip into things like mindless surfing.

Walking with email

With my new-found awareness, I expected to see big changes in the second week. Email was the biggest chunk of time spent, and the biggest eye-opener for me with over 9 hours in week one. Week two, it was a few minutes more. I needed to look deeper at where the time was going.

I use Gmail for most of my email, feeding multiple accounts into one. I have some filters set up to keep newsletters and some group emails out of my inbox. This week I decided to get much more diligent about taking the time to assess if I really wanted the information in the newsletter. If I did, I set up a filter to keep it out of my inbox and labeled as a newsletter I could choose to read if and when I have time. If I no longer found the information in a newsletter relevant, I found out how to unsubscribe and did it. In the past I would just hit delete, but I recognized I was doing that so many times a day, that time was adding up.

I had emails from several forums coming into my inbox. I found myself opening them, often to find many of them simply agreeing with a previous one, or adding another kind of “me too” response. I decided to stop the emails, and only read the forums online where I can see the conversations threaded.

Even though I spent investment time setting up filters, I managed to shave off an hour and 20 minutes off email time this week by making these changes. I expect to save even more time next week now that the filters are in place.

Walking with forums

Forums are like email, there is a mix of things that can be totally unproductive jumbled up with real gems. I certainly don’t want to give them up, but I saw that I needed to change the way I was interacting with them. First, I had to stop reading all the postings and be much more strategic. Now I read the opening post, and only follow the details if it is something I can contribute to or am interested in. I am using the mark as read buttons much more than I ever did.

I’ll have to see how it works to have to choose to go to the forums online instead of having emails come to my inbox. I may discover that I don’t miss some of them. Particularly the ones that have become predictable due to the over participation of a select few people. When I really thought about it, some of the forums feel more like indulging in watching soap operas than offering real value.

Being more intentional brought my time in one forum alone down to an hour the second week an hour and a half the third, from four hours the first week.

Walking with social media

Maybe walking isn’t a good descriptor for social media? It might be more like sliding with social media. The slippery slope is always present. Its really easy to fool myself by listening to all the descriptions of people who are using Facebook and Twitter for business purposes to justify my time there. Like it or not, I don’t do any business there. Maybe someday I will learn how to do that, but right now, it does not happen. I do see value in keeping up with network contacts, so there are reasons to participate.

I was surprised to see four hours and 44 minutes on social media the first week. I thought I was being more mindful in week two, popping over for quick visits when I needed a break from something. I was even more surprised to see it still added up to four hours and 40 minutes the second week. For week three, I worked on reducing the number of those quick trips, and got it down to 3 hours and 56 minutes. Still seems high to me. I’ll have to watch it more closely and think more about the value versus the time.

Walking with creative time

Not all of my creative time is on the computer, but I want to increase the time I spend designing in all forms. I have managed to shift all the time I saved on the tasks I want to reduce into design time. I’m working on setting up to sell our photographic and painted images, and there is a lot of file preparation to do that. I’m looking at ways to get things good enough while we test whether there is even any interest in purchasing our images as prints. In the past I would have immeadiately launched into a plan to make the most perfect product I possibly could. Now I realize there is a balance between perfect and marketable. There is a place called good enough. I think. Its still a bit contrary to my Virgo appreciation of perfection.

Walking and watching

So on it goes. Time in dialogue with choice. Priority in relationship to productivity. What else might need to shift? What else can move aside to make space for the things that make a difference? How do you walk with time?

Subscribe to this blog in a reader

Subscribe by Email

follow me on twitter @cmartell