Impulse

OK, I lied. I’ve learned a few things in the last year after all — mostly about get­ting cre­ative work done. It’s easy to get dis­tracted by non-creative projects, daunted by the end­less num­ber of inter­est­ing ideas that my brain cooks up, or wast time doing a lit­tle of every­thing, thus not get­ting far on any­thing. Here’s a few things I’ve found that help keep me focused, pro­duc­tive, and happy. Shockingly, or not so shock­ingly if you think about it, they com­pli­ment the meth­ods of the GTD book well.

Evil incan­ta­tions of busi­ness­men
I may have whined a lot about the furi­ous pace of the hol­i­day sea­son, but the truth is, I got a ton of stuff done. I made a list of the projects I wanted to do by the end of the year and got all but one of them done. December was my most pro­duc­tive month of the year. Why? Deadlines and agen­das.
Yech! Deadlines and agen­das are the stuff of busi­ness, not cre­ative work, right? (I cringe just think­ing about it). They really helped, though. Now, I didn’t have an overly-planned sched­ule with mile­stones and every hour of every day sched­uled in advance. I had a sin­gle date. Similarly, my “agenda” wasn’t a detailed plan — writ­ing on Tuesday, pho­tos on Wednesday, etc. It was sim­ply a list of about 7 projects I wanted to get done. Each day I chose what­ever I wanted to work on — as long as it ulti­mately got those projects mov­ing. In the end, it was a nice bal­ance between struc­ture and free­dom.
Having such a short list really helped — I can keep 7 things in my head. I can focus on 7 things. I can get 7 things done. Indeed, the focus I felt trans­lated directly in to moti­va­tion and I got even more excited to plow through my list. It’s soooo much bet­ter than try­ing to “focus” on the 214 items cur­rently in my project list.
Fool’s par­adise
Late last year, I had a clever plan: I’d spend a month blast­ing through all the mun­dane busy­work that had col­lected in my to do lists — upgrad­ing soft­ware, doing account­ing, projects around the house. I’d have a clean slate come the new year, and thus spend the year doing fun, cre­ative projects. I’d have given myself a sunny utopia of cre­ative free­dom.
It sounded good on paper, any­way… Like some night­mare, the more I crossed off my list, the more I ended up adding. Finally, I real­ized the obvi­ous: there will never be an end to the non-creative work I need to get done. The ratio­nal thing (and again, obvi­ous thing) to do is to bal­ance the cre­ative & non-creative. Duhh.
And, of course, there’s the ele­ment of fun: I refuse to have a day with noth­ing fun to do. Life just isn’t enjoy­able oth­er­wise.
What is to be done?
I’ve started a new method­olgy — each month I pick 5 – 7 projects to get done that month. At most half of them are non-creative busy­work that need to get done. At least half of them are fun, cre­ative things. (There’s my bal­ance). If the project’s too big for a month, I break it down until it is. That keeps it real­is­tic. Anything not on my list gets done some other time. Finally, I dou­blecheck that in gen­eral the projects move me in the direc­tion I want to be going. 43 fold­ers rec­om­mends some­thing sim­i­lar. The result: I’m focused, moti­vated, happy. I savor the free­dom of choice over what I do each day, and feel secure know­ing that I’ll get a lit­tle fun stuff done as well as the uncreative-but-necessary. What more could a guy want?
mmmm… A nice glass of vin­tage port and a slice of choco­late torte cake. With rasp­berry sauce, nat­u­rally. I won­der what I have downstairs…

Related posts:

1. Creative progress & rip­ping off JFK
2. Infernal to-do lists
3. Holiday mass hysteria
4. Finding hap­pi­ness
5. The Rat Race, revisited