When I was a child and told my mother I didn’t have time to do something she was asking me to do, she would shoot daggers from her eyes at me and with an uncompromising tone tell me to “make time.”

Even as a child this imperative seemed impossible, but the look on my mother’s face wasn’t one you could argue with, so I would somehow make time to do whatever it was she had asked.

As an adult, the phrase “make time” seems even more absurd. Any adult knows that you can’t create time — you are given 24 hours in a day like everybody else, and that allotment is not negotiable, not flexible.

So we come to terms with the fact that there are a set number of hours in a day; but many of us use that fact as an excuse to not be more productive. We’ve all heard and given the excuse: I really wish I could x, but I just don’t have time.

The truth is you DO have time.

“Making time,” I’ve realized, is about making the most out of the time you have. My mother knew when I told her I didn’t have time for XYZ that if I just managed my time better, I would indeed have time for chores, spending time with friends, and almost anything else conceivable.

The problem is that as adults we tend to measure productivity in blocks of time instead of by results. Just think of a regular work day: when you arrive, you base your work around certain time markers, such as a 10a.m. meeting, lunch, 2:30p.m. mail-out time, and 5p.m. close. You know you should have a certain amount of work done by each time marker and pace yourself around those blocks of time.

That kind of thinking is totally BACKWARDS.

It’s time to start thinking in terms of goals. Time is not a goal, it is a resource, so you can’t base your work on time. Instead you have to start asking questions like:

• Are you making the most of the time you spend working?
• As Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich puts it: “Is the time you spend productivity dense?”
• When you spend time, you are making an investment — what is the return on that investment?

Goals are useful because they give us a motivation to work, which is one of the key components of productivity. Think of the last project you worked on that you loved. Didn’t you find yourself suddenly extraordinarily productive? That’s because you wanted to work, for the sake of completing the work. You probably got more done on that day than you did in a whole week working on a routine project.

Setting goals is easy.

Using goals as a productivity tool isn’t a new strategy — but just because you set a goal doesn’t mean you will meet it. In fact, many people who have set goals (myself included) have done so with little or no change in behavior or productivity.

The reason is specificity. My goals weren’t specific enough to motivate me to meet them, so I didn’t. Another reason is lack of focus; being distracted while setting goals kills them. Lastly, another of the most common goal-killers is the time limit set on them. People often think too long- or short-term for the goals they are setting (mostly too short-term).

Write your goals down. Right now.

Goals should be used to motivate you, so set a goal that makes you want to work. For example, don’t just write “My goal is to finish work by the end of the day.” While time-specific that goal doesn’t give you a fundamental reason to be productive.

Examine your position and ask yourself if it’s where you really want to be. Are you satisfied being a document controller? Or did you have dreams of owning or managing?

Why is this relevant? Because looking to the future gives you a reason to work in the present. If your goal is to be a manager, write that. But not just that. Answer these questions, too:

• Manager of what division?
• How long before you get there?
• How many employees do you manage?
• How many hours a week do you work?
• What’s your salary?
• Who do you work with?
• What do you need to do to get there?

Can you see how being specific in your goal setting can make all the difference? Answering just that last question, for example, will be very helpful for productivity, because it contextualizes your everyday work into an upward-movement framework. If everything you are doing is to help you become a manager, your goal doesn’t need to be “finish work by EOD” because you know you have to finish all your work every day to be promoted.

What are your goals? Saving for a new house? Taking a vacation? Starting a family? Write them down, GET SPECIFIC, make sure to tack the goal up somewhere where you’ll see it every day, and start working toward it. You’ll find that you actually do have time for all those things you thought you didn’t when you are being productive and not wasting the time you do have. So get out there and make some time.

By-line:

Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez @gmail.com.

I’m sure some of you have used time-tracking methods to see how you use your time. I’ve never done that, personally. Sure, I’ve tracked time spent on projects at work my entire professional life, since a designer essentially rents out billable time. But I’ve never done it at home or in my personal life.

A few weeks ago, I read in Matthew Cornell‘s newsletter about the concept of big chunks and little chunks. The main thing I got from it was that some days you feel like you got nothing done because you never did any of the big tasks you wanted to do. But you got a lot of little things done.

Now that my life has changed and I’ve had the biggest role-change ever: I lost my job 2 months ago, my wife went back to work, and I am now a stay-at-home dad who is hunting for freelance design work to do when the baby is sleeping or when the wife is at home. At the end of the day I feel discouraged because I haven’t tackled any of the big projects I’ve been meaning to tackle.

So what I want to do is start keeping a simple log of what I do every day. Just jot down what time I started doing something, whether it’s big or small. It can be something business-related like making follow-up phone calls, or it could be a household chore like sweeping the kitchen.

Have you ever done anything like this? How did it help? What did you find out? Share in this thread in the WLC forums.

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.

For the past 24 years, I have been volunteering with groups that produce computing standards.  We did good things, albeit slowly.  But that’s the nature of these groups – it’s hard to get good help; it’s even harder to get good free help!  Being a fan of productivity, I usually tried to impose some structure and process on the group in the hopes that it would get things done more predictably.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.   There’s a saying in the computer industry – “Managing programmers is like herding cats”.  It’s more or less accurate.

My epiphany about this sort of work came in 1990, when I was charged with “project managing” a collection of these volunteer groups in a formal way.  Now, in retrospect, that was just insane.  These are creative, passionate people who were trying to do their best to develop “standards” for the computer industry.  Most of them are doing it in their free time. Many with no support from their employers at all!  How can you “manage” a group of people that not only doesn’t report to you, they don’t even get compensated or reviewed based upon their performance?

My answer?  You cannot.  The creative process isn’t one that can be managed. It doesn’t work on a schedule.  You can’t say “today you three people will write a symphony” and expect a result that is anything other than noise.  I expect this is true across the board when working with creative people.  It takes as long as it takes.  We will sell no wine before its time.  Just because a saying is trite doesn’t mean it isn’t true!

So, getting back to my epiphany, I realized that my job as a manager wasn’t to try to ‘herd the cats’ so much as to manage the expectations of the people who were waiting for the output (I will spare you extending the metaphor to what cats might output).  Sure, we had schedules; but those schedules were guidelines, not deadlines.  It is important that in work, and in life, we make room for the creative process.  So I would continually update MY managers with progress reports, and in each report change the targets.  Sometimes they got earlier, usually they got later.  I stopped pressuring the creative people to create on a schedule.  As a result, we delivered better, more mature, well thought out products.

So that’s my message for today.  Whether we are talking about your real job, or your real life, or something you do in your free time that is neither work nor life, don’t forget that if a task requires creativity, it almost never gets done “on time”.  The creative process is one that is impossible to predict.  If your boss tells you to write a paper and have it done in an hour, push back a little.  If you are the boss, don’t set unreasonable constraints on creative tasks.  Even if you are doing something as simple as making a bird house with your child, don’t just set aside an hour.  Do it until you are both happy you created something!  And along the way, revel in the knowledge that you are doing it until you get it right, not just until time ran out.

How do you make time for the creative process?  Let’s talk about it in the forums?

“Down among the dancing quanta
Everything exists at once.”
~Transverse City, Warren Zevon

This post was supposed to be done yesterday, but my day sorta got away from me. This got me to thinking about where I am really going with this Empire I am building…

There are those times when life throws us a curve-ball, yet if we have a plan and a system we can get through it. Other times our personal productivity is limited by the way that we are thinking about our lives, our goals, and our future. And obviously, my plan is not as detailed or as flexible as it should be. So I will take some time, after I get back on track, to take a look at where I want to be going.

Take control of your perspective

When our view of the future gets obscured by the events of the day, it is time to pause in our travels and take stock of the situation. This is when my intellectual self needs to “take back the steering wheel” from my emotional self, who was definitely in charge yesterday. I was literally sitting at my desk shaking with excitement and anxiety about what was happening. Today I am thinking about the bigger picture:

• What do I have to do today to be prepared for tomorrow?
• What can I delegate? and when is it due back?
• Why was it so difficult/time-consuming to manage the tasks that derailed my day?
• How can I improve my processes to prevent this from happening again?

What are your thoughts on this? Share in the forum.

I know it’s absurd, but I think there are times when a long list of todos might motivate more than a short one. Why? Well, if you have a long list, you have more motivation to get everything finished on that list. If it’s short, you might say, “Eh, that won’t take long. I’ll do it later.”

Maybe it’s a form of procrastination, since I don’t think it’ll work in the long run to let your list build up till you have enough stress to go and do it all at once.

On the other hand, as anecdotal evidence, I offer you the friends I had in high school who made their best grades during basketball season. I think the increased workload and limited amount of time to study forced them to be more disciplined.

So what’s the best way to do it? Have a short list with a few things to do, or a long list with a lot of things on it?

Of course, I think the ideal way to handle your list is to keep a short, effective list, with things appropriately delegated or deleted, plus high motivation and discipline to accomplish what needs to be done. Be conscious of your own energy level and tolerance for the right list length. I think it requires a bit of experimentation as only you can know what the right “workload” is for you.

If your list is too short, you’ll get bored. Or you’ll get lazy and not do anything. If it is too long, you’ll get discouraged and give up.

Just remember, if you have to put “shave” on your todo list, you’re probably taking it way too seriously.

So what do you think? Discuss amongst yourselves over in the forum.

Will work for attention (photo by Stephen Poff)

We’re all easily distracted. I know I am. Seems like everybody I know has multiple irons in the fire. A lot of our various projects may overlap, and everything cries out for attention. But what happens when many things really do warrant your attention? What ends up happening is you try to pay attention to multiple things at once, and not doing a very good job of it, as neither thing will get the amount of attention required to keep it running efficiently and smoothly.

It’s nothing revolutionary, but I think the trick is to only try to focus on ONE thing at a time. Not two, not three, not five. Just one. If something pops into your head that’s unrelated to whatever you’re working on at the moment, make a note of it, capturing it in such a way that you can review it appropriately later at a specified review time. Make that note quickly so you can stay on task.

This is a problem I see all too often in the workplace: our attention is pulled a million directions, and projects and relationships suffer.

That’s right. Don’t forget your attention to your relationships with people: if you give are distracted when someone is talking to you, that person is likely to come to the conclusion that you don’t value their time or what they have to say. If someone ignores me repeatedly, or disregards me or interrupts me, am I going to think they care about what I have to say? Probably not. In return, I’m probably less likely to pay much attention to them. It’s reciprocal.

Remember: until you respect people’s time and attention, you’re not likely to earn much respect — except by bullying. And that’s not “real” respect.

How have you dealt with harnessing your own time and attention to better focus on important projects and — perhaps more importantly — relationships? And what if you were the person being ignored? How did you deal with that? Share over in the forums.