I’ve been carving out time for Art Every Day Month, and really enjoying the variety of creative activities.  This week will be harder. I have a chopped up schedule of meetings all week.

I hear friends who work for other people suggest that it is easier for those of us who run our own companies to take the time to do the things we want to do. Maybe, in the abstract. However, since responsibility for everything comes back to me, I know the price to be paid if I don’t get things done.

Tension between alert and rest

I was thinking about this space of taking time and getting things done as I was coloring this cat in Photoshop. There’s something about the way many cats rest yet remain on the edge of alert that got me contemplating this balance.

I’m still thinking about my creative work as rest, reward, and something I get to do if I finish my chores. Old habits die hard!

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I spent time over the weekend preparing for Art Every Day Month. I scanned a bunch of old sketches I plan to use after working on a computer problem I am having with my system. I sketched out a painting and applied a mask so all I would need to do was pick up a brush in the morning.

I even thought about food. I had leftovers for lunch, I started soaking beans for dinner chili the night before. I fed the cats, ate breakfast and started the beans cooking. I walked into my office/studio, did a quick email check to make sure there was nothing pressing. Walked over to my painting, put down the first layer, and sprinkled it with salt.

There are always distractions

My painting needed to dry before the next layer, and I hadn’t prepared another piece of paper. Often, I work back and forth on multiple paintings just for this reason. This time I walked over to my computer, then the phone rang. Now it’s after noon and I have burnt beans and no painting progress.  Not to mention an expensive stainless pan encrusted with a black mess.

Not leaving time for the unexpected

I tend to fill my schedule full, and I play games with myself to make it not look that way. It’s not that I schedule my time, its that I have todo lists that can’t possibly be completed even if things go well. Then the phone rings and the beans burn, and I don’t have a time cushion. The thing that most often gets put aside is my art.

You can do art in your spare time

I’ve heard this my whole life. From well intentioned people who are concerned for my well being. Mostly those who are terrified if I’m an artist I will starve and become a bag lady on the street. Which may be true. So far I’ve always found ways to avoid it.

Even though I have not embraced this on the surface, I recognize that the message has seeped deeply into my inner core and drives my behavior on a daily basis.  I know I can’t do something full time and do quality work in my exhausted extra moments. It’s clear if I am working for someone else, but slippery when I am the mean boss controlling my own time.

Walking between what I say and what I do

Clearly this is a place with an opportunity for growth. Art Every Day Month gives me a nudge to take more time to create, but ultimately I have to make the commitment to sit down and do it. It’s very much like exercise. I enjoy it when I do it, but play all sorts of games that result in not getting there. One of my success factors is devoting peak creative time to art. Not email. I have to stop allowing my morning hours to get sucked up online.

Art of the day

This is a digital collage created in Photoshop. It’s a combination of a photograph I took of the pumpkin with a scan of a citrosolv melted magazine page.  This is a great example of why I love working digitally, I can melt elements together in ways that aren’t possible using traditional materials. When I work exclusively on the computer my work is much stiffer, so I look to create elements that add more energy to the images.

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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.