calendars

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on how to give my Creative Life a shot in the arm and one thing that most authors stress is having a routine. Inevitably, the advice turns toward keeping a calendar. I fucking hate keeping a calendar.

The problem is, most advice centers around the concept of carving out creative time during a busy schedule. The Day Job is the obstacle. I have not had a job since February and there is very little time management advice for someone who has all the time in the world. 

I can hear you “boo-hooing” already – “Do you know what I could get done if I didn’t have a job?!? Do you know how productive I would be? I’d be 90% down with my novel/painting series/comic book in the six months you’ve been unemployed!” It’s not that simple. In fact, many of the same authors will tell you that taking huge chunks of time off, earmarked for your creative project, will not result in your greatest life’s work. Chances are really good that your Art is not the only thing you are neglecting and you will devote time to those other things, but that’s not my point.

I’ve come at this from a few angles to date. I took Jessica Abel’s “Autonomous Creative” course and hated it. The first thing you are asked to do is track your time down to 15-minute intervals to be able to point at time where you are dicking off or you should be working on your creative endeavor. Timekeeping is even worse than time planning to me, especially when you’ve just been dumped by the corporate world. “You mean I’m doing time cards again? For myself? No thanks!”

Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way) will tell you to find the blocks in between your daily events, no matter how small, and capture them. This is what Corporate Job Craig did and it worked great, but only during the blocks of time that my wife was working. When you work an eight hour day, (and you don’t have kids) all the other hours feel like play time. Art was just the “other” thing I did. Today it should be my job and it isn’t and I’m still not quite sure why.

A really good video on the subject of time management I found is from productivity expert Ali Abdaal. What I like about this, and have successfully implemented, is the concept of the “Ideal Week”. What blocks of time do you want to occur every week? Get your calendar app and block those out.

So far, the book with the best advice I’ve found is Austin Kleon’s Keep Going:

“A daily routine will get you through the day and help you make the most of it. “A schedule defends from chaos and whim,” writes Annie Dillard. “It is a net for catching days.” When you don’t know what to do next, your routine tells you. When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it.“

My biggest challenge is I have a lot of projects and none of them have deadlines or are necessarily a priority. When I do have a deadline, say a flyer for one of Jeanna’s shows, every bit of work time is devoted to that until it is completed. When your day is full of empty blocks of time with which you can do anything, and you are your own boss and taskmaster, anything can go anywhere in that daily calendar. The next thing you know, you’ve spent 3 hours in the kitchen, done all of your laundry, watered the plants, taken out the recycling, and put a gallon of mead into a fermenter because who likes an empty fermenter?

When I was first let go from my job, I made daily and weekly checklists. When I got something done, I checked it off. If it didn’t get done, that checklist got duplicated and amended for the next day. It didn’t take long for me to completely forget that I had such a thing going and last I checked I haven’t made one since May. So the habit of honoring that checklist just didn’t stick and my Google Keep is full of incomplete checklists from months ago.

I suspect the problem here was that my checklists were a measure of “completion” and not a measure of “contribution”. Moving forward, I will implement this thusly:

1. Ideal Week – This is a catch-all for the things that never change. These are calendar blocks of true unwavering routine: Making coffees, writing Morning Pages, working out, Monday night meal prep, etc.
   
   
2. My Wife’s Schedule – I don’t have this until Sunday nights, but it’s important for me to know when our “us time” is or how I can be available to help her be successful in her day (coffee, lunch, stress walks, etc.).
   
   
3. Blocks of “Work” – This is the creative time. What am I working on? Easy: What’s on the “contribution” checklist?
   1. Did I put time into one of those checklist items? Check it off.
   2. Didn’t get to all of them? That’s okay, as long as something got some serious contribution from that significant work block of time. This is the Process of creativity (a subject for another time). Stock and Flow.
   3. Tomorrow, duplicate that list, uncheck anything that is not complete, and do it again.
      
      
4. Other Checklist Items – If I have things that are “must do” like laundry or groceries or phone calls or job searches, make that “completion” list and block out time on the calendar. Adjust the “Work” blocks to accommodate them.

There’s no end of other books out there on the habits of successful creatives. The big takeaway from them is there is no “one size fits all” approach for all creative minds. After years of not flexing those muscles, I need to find my own. So let’s see how this goes and I’m sure I’ll have a thing or two to say about what adjustments need to be made.