Several of you here at work.life.creativity. know that I lost my job last month. The economy took it’s toll on the company I was working for. Since I got laid off, I’ve been at home most of the time, when I haven’t been working with BarCamp Nashville 2009 to get it ready for October (which has really been great, since I’ve had the time to focus on it and meet some really rockstar people.)

But now that I’m home all the time, it seems like I have even _less_ time on my hands than I did before. Of course, a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that I have a seven-month-old around whose little finger I am wrapped. So I am not able to get much done between her naps, and naptime gets shorter and shorter. In about six months, she’ll be down to one nap a day.

So I am trying to figure out the best way to manage my time so that I can still get a lot of stuff done. I have freelance gigs to hunt down and work on, fine art to do, and then household duties as well as taking care of my family. I’ve thought about coming up with a sort of block schedule much like a school schedule, where for a blocked off segment of time I work on a designated area of my responsibilities. A few years ago, I read about graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s “Year Without Clients,” where he took a year-long sabbatical from client projects. (Of course, he taught class at SVA like one or two nights a week, but other than that he wasn’t doing anything.) He found that his time was being spent doing chores, and not exploring graphic design problems like he had wanted to during his sabbatical. So he went and made a school-like schedule, where he would, for example, experiment with Photoshop from 9 to 11 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, or visit galleries on Thursday afternoons, and so forth.

It seems that having some sort of structure to work within helps us be more productive and really do what we want to do. So I wonder if taking that sort of approach would help me accomplish what I want to accomplish.

If you work in an unstructured environment, or if you’re at home all the time, how do you make sure you get done what you want to accomplish? Share over in the forums.

Lately, I’ve found myself in a funk, really annoyed and frustrated when I’ve felt ignored or snubbed, sometimes by small things, things that wouldn’t normally bother me. I suppose there are a number of reasons, probably the main one being that I’m not getting a lot of rest these days due to the little bundle that arrived almost six months ago and has a way of taking over our lives. A lack of sleep can result in a short(er) fuse.

After talking to my wife about my frustrations, I came to the realization that I’ve never learned how to create distance between myself and the things people say and do and not take them personally. For me, that’s tough to do. I don’t know why, but I’ve tended to take a lot of things personally, facing life with a chip on my shoulder. Regardless of the reason why I do that, (that’s a whole ‘nother issue altogether) learning how to objectively approach everything is still something I need to learn. My wife tells me that when she worked at a retail store in the mall in high school and college, she learned to not let it bother her when a customer was grouchy toward her, since 99% of the time it wasn’t about her. Said customer was probably having a bad day and was engaging in some “retail therapy” to make things better.

So my question to you is this: how do you go about creating distance between your emotions and what goes on around you? How do you get yourself out of the way? Let me know in the forums.