I have been mulling over how to shift the direction for this blog for months. It’s a cornerstone for a whole line of new products, and has desperately needed attention all year. Maybe for two years. Maybe even it’s whole life.

I have lists of ideas, drafts started, and lists of things that need to be changed or maintained. I have sticky notes of titles and topics. Lots of new paintings. A huge archive of photos. All the pieces one would think I need.

What I don’t have is time to get everything I want to do finished. So the lists get longer and longer, making posting more unlikely if I continue to hold onto the belief that I have to meet a certain standard before I can hit publish.

Publishing the Imperfect

For now, as I work myself out from under the mega-mountain of to-dos, I’m committing to publishing anyway. Incomplete, unfinished, but manageable. Accepting what I can do, and what I haven’t made enough space for yet. I have more to say, but I’m out of time for today, so I’m going to hit publish anyway.

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Eight weeks ago, I was spending an average of 8 hours and 50 minutes a week on email. I know because I installed Rescue Time software to keep track of what I was doing on the computer. No more denial. The tattle tale reports put it in black and white. Over 20% of my computer time.

Perhaps the worst part, I felt anxious about my email. I knew if I didn’t keep up with it, it would multiply and become a giant list of to-do’s. It took constant attention to keep it feeling manageable. At the same time, email is my favorite way to communicate. I like being able to read the words (visual, what a surprise), and to be able to reflect and respond when I feel ready. So I felt motivated to find a more comfortable relationship to it.

What was really happening?

One of the reasons I didn’t know I was spending so much time on email before the time tattler program, was I was checking it constantly. I never spent much time, and it seemed like I was pretty efficient, because I would keep the volume under control. I was shocked when I saw how much those minutes added up.

I thought I had systems. I use Gmail, and had filters set up, and use super stars to categorize the emails that are left and need attention. When I really looked at it though, I had short term coping habits. Habits so I would know what to do when things came in. What I wasn’t looking at was systems to manage the overall time over the longer term.

The first thing I had to do was to stop and become more conscious of what I was really doing when I clicked over to the tab in my browser where my email was always open. I realized a lot of my time was spent deleting and processing email newsletters.

Getting email newsletters under control

Unsubscribe: I had a habit of just deleting newsletters instead of taking the time to unsubscribe from the ones I no longer wanted. Right away instead of deleting, I made myself click the unsubscribe links if I no longer wanted the newsletter. It took a month of consistent action to make a significant impact.

Better Labels and Filters: I had some filters set up to keep newsletters out of my inbox, but there were way too many under that label, so it just felt like transferring the problem from the inbox to another place. I made new labels and filters. I now have categories of newsletters. Some are by topic and I have one labeled priority for my favorites, customers and people I know personally.

I took the time to set up a filter every time something came in, reminding myself it was short term slowing for long term gain. I now have over 125 of them. Probably an indicator that I need to continue culling, but I can do it in sections and in off-peak times. It is no longer interrupting me all day long.

Five weeks later, results at last

For the last three weeks, I have averaged 6.5 hours and only 17% of my computer time on email. The best part is I no longer feel compelled to check it constantly just to keep a lid on it. It feels like I am engaging with it on my own terms instead of reacting just to gain a momentary feeling of control. I don’t feel harassed by my inbox anymore.

Are you struggling with the what to do with the individual emails? Recently, Charlie Gilkey came out with Email Triage which is a program that teaches something similar to what works for me. the program gives you a systematic way to approach processing your inbox. It’s not about inbox zero, or any of the other ideas out there that never seem to work for me. It’s a combination of e-book, an audio program to walk you though the process, and reminder cards to print out as support as you are learning. If you are struggling with what to do short term with the emails that come in, I would suggest checking this out. Charlie has made it simple and clear.

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?

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I was reading The Way I Work: Matt Mullenweg in Inc magaine. Matt mentioned one of his favorite programs his company hadn’t made was Rescue Time. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I spend my time, and doing a lot of questioning whether I am doing what I should be. I’m supposed to be the head of a company. Why do I feel like the admin assistant?

At first, I thought the idea of a program monitoring how I spend my time was really creepy. It felt like something companies who don’t trust their employees would use. But when it comes right down to it, I had to admit I was probably playing games in my head about what I am really doing. So I downloaded the Mac version of the program for solopreneurs onto my main computer. Note I said main, I have two others I use that are not being monitored.

Measuring a typical week

Last week was a typical week. Always a long list to things to do, but no super pressing deadlines. Perfect as a baseline for measurement. I did my best to forget the tracking was there. I would notice when I was doing things like aimlessly looking for stupid things online, I would just happen to be on the computer in the living room. The untracking one. But it wasn’t too bad, and when I would notice that is what I was doing I would chuckle to myself and stop.

I would occasionally glance at the dashboard, but knew it wouldn’t be very meaningful until it had enough data. The program has the ability to set up ratings for particular activities. You can tell it what is productive for you and what is distracting. At the end of the week I got my first weekly summary.

OMG, I’m a time disaster!

Eye-opening bordering on shocking it was. 39 hours on the computer alone.

• 9 hours 5 minutes on EMAIL
• 7 hours on blogs and forums (4 hours on Kitchen Table alone, where I have cut way back)
• 5 hours 6 minutes on social networking
• 4 hours 42 minutes writing
• 45 minutes on digital image processing
• 3 hours 2 minutes on news sites
• 44 minutes shopping (for laser toner- not even fun stuff)

How much of this is productive? Good question. Nowhere near enough. I knew I spent a lot of time on email, I had no idea it was an entire day a week.

In addition I had 18 hours of meetings in Portland, with 4.5 hours of driving back and forth. I painted at least a half hour every morning. That’s already over 66 hours of worktime. No phone call time logged or other things I did away from the keyboard.

What should I be doing?

Really good question. One that I’m not entirely sure how to answer. As my business has shifted, I have not yet redefined what the best use of my time is. What really makes a difference? I suspect its not what showed up on my weekly time report.

A couple of weeks ago I was on a group coaching call with Gary Barnes from Max Life International. He talked about productivity as PINO.

• P- productive: time facing customers who can say yes to your offer
• I- indirectly productive time: time that leads you to productive time
• N- Non-productive time: everything else
• O- Other people could do it

Gary suggested we aim for spending 1/3 of our time on each of PIN. Delegate the O. Ok, that makes sense, at least it did until I started to look at my time. Especially when I asked Gary where designing products came in, and he said nonproductive. Really? I’m a designer.

I’ve been trying ever since to figure out what productive time is for me. So far I have:

• Public speaking.
• Writing my newsletter.
• Conversations with customers.

My business is about to change with a new distributor, so suddenly my newsletter and direct customer conversations change. I think. But really I’m not sure. I suspect writing becomes a much bigger part of the equation. Looking at new ways to communicate about visual tools?

I’m not sure looking at time from this perspective works for me. Creation is such a big part of what is really important to me, and this idea doesn’t seem to support that. It certainly is an interesting exercise to look at my actual time through this lens, and realize I am spending most of my time in the non-productive areas. Its probably why I feel like an admin assistant. I’m responding to what comes at me rather than strategically determining what I should be doing.

How else can I look at this?

I’m in the overwhelmed stage of realization. The part where I am seeing some of the problem, before I see the way out. Have any ideas? Stories of what has worked for you? How do you become more strategic in your allocation of time? Any and all suggestions are welcome.

I’m trying to figure out,  am I doing the things that are most important? Tough question.

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