by Naomi | Dec 7, 2015 | Creative Life
A round peg shoving myself into a square hole. Often, I feel that way. How about you?
So much helpful advice is flying around out there. Everyone, from your plumber to your online business coach, agrees that to be relevant, you need to provide strategies and resources. We tune in, and if you’re like me, you start hopping from one thing to the next. Ooh, you think, this blog post will help me solve my organization problem … oh, and ooh! This podcast will teach me to be fun and catch followers on Instagram … oh, and wow! This online course will teach me to slow down and pay attention to what’s important … and on and on it goes.
I wonder: When was the last time you listened to your OWN advice?
I’ve been struggling with a paradox for the last year or so. I long to help people tap into their creativity by encouraging them to play more, to strive less. And yet, I dread becoming another noisy distraction. I want to amplify YOUR voice, not drown it out with mine. These clashing desires have caused me to fuss about behind the scenes, trying to figure out what to say, what not to say, when to share and when to stay silent.
Recently, I pulled together a group of writer and illustrator friends for a test-run of a marketing mastermind. We called it “marketing” but honestly, I was focused on a deeper issue that I’ve wrangled mentally for as long as I can remember. Let’s call it “life strategy for creatives.” Or, as I think about it: living as an artist.
TIME OUT for a moment. When I use the word “creative” or “artist,” I don’t mean only those people who have paint under their fingernails. I mean anyone who allows creativity to take the lead in their lives, be they stay-at-home parents, entrepreneurs, coffee roasters, chefs, musicians, master gardeners, strategists … you get the idea. If your primary role takes creative thinking and a commitment to your passion, in my book, you’re living as an artist.
TIME IN. Maybe you heard the well-meaning advice sometime along the way too: You can’t make a living doing that! My response was: I’ll have to, because that’s what I’m made to do. Faced with two options–finding a way to live as an artist or starving–I decided to tackle the life strategy issue. Growth happened in small increments, and I still faced huge bumps in the road. I had no idea that I had actually developed an expertise.
So, at our test-run meeting, I looked around the table at my friends, all of who have their own unique processes and none of whom would fit into a square hole. All of them are on their journeys, and none need “fixing,” yet they all desire solutions, too. Like me, they want to live as artists. And that’s when I realized … All that fussing about keeping out of the way was also keeping me from helping. I had a treasure hoard of gifts that I wasn’t sharing.
Hoarding is definitely not my style. So, here’s what I’ve decided.
- I’m going to stop fussing and start sharing.
- I’m going to trust you to make your own choices about when my voice is helpful and when you need to tune me out to make room for your own voice.
- I’m going to allow myself room to be on the journey, too. Sometimes I’ll have practical advice and other times, I may only have a question I’m starting to explore.
- I’m going to believe that showing up authentically, wherever that happens to be, is enough.
If it’s true for me, I bet it’s true for a lot of you, too. What are you fussing over or hoarding? You don’t have to package it up perfectly. Find a way to share, and trust us to approach your ideas with our own creativity.
by Naomi | Nov 10, 2015 | Tools & Apps
Object: Taking Care of the Essentials First with Habit List
What Didn’t Work: Judging my day by an always-moving measuring stick. Running my moment-to-moment work based on whatever happened to be in my inbox in the morning. Making progress on projects that could be finished in a sprint but losing track of the small, daily actions that add up to something.
My Aha! Moment: I realized that while my to-do list was great for many things, it wasn’t the right place for those daily tasks that needed tending daily. Repeating tasks would show up in the midst of everything else (the urgent and not-so urgent) until I was numb to it all.
- I assign tasks to the days they need doing. I order the tasks in the order they need to be done.
- I use the feature that allows me to schedule certain tasks for once a week or once a month, so that they show up on whatever schedule applies.
- I use the list first thing in the morning to tick through the essentials, before digging into email and the many variables of the day.
- Make sure not to include negotiable items in your Habit List. The list needs firm edges. Either it must happen before going on to the next item on the list, or it doesn’t need to. I use another app for those tasks about which I can be more flexible.
- That said, I don’t just have chores on my Habit List. If I did, I’d completely resist the list. Items that I feel are important to my creative health or interpersonal relationships are on the list alongside items such as “floss.”
Take it to the Next Level:
- Treat the Habit List as a process in revision. It’s important to review and see what’s on the list and isn’t getting done. The app tracks how long you’ve missed a task based on your proposed schedule. When something falls behind, ask yourself: Is this not a key activity for this season? Do I need to change something to make it more possible to complete this action?
- Remember that habits can take 30, 60 or even more days to establish. Let yourself be in process, despite of the firm edges of your list. You will learn what’s actually essential, what can be dropped off the list, what obstacles are in your way, and how to be more successful as you go along. Schedule a monthly review to examine whether you need to make changes and to assess your progress.
NOTE: Habit List is the app I use, but there are a lot of similar apps on the market. Choose the one that works best and is most visually appealing to you. The more you like to interact with this app, the more likely you are to use it on a daily basis.
by Naomi | Jun 19, 2015 | Tools & Apps
Object: Understanding how my time is spent, to gain a big picture view (and if needed, adjust) my work-habits.
What Didn’t Work: Trying to put things on the calendar and stick to strict pre-determined time slots. Hopping from one project to another in response to whatever pinged at the moment. Simply hoping I was getting to all of my projects. Only vaguely being able to answer the question: so how long did it take to… (fill in the blank)?
My Aha! Moment: I was listening to Amy Porterfield’s podcast (
Episode 47). In this interesting interview about mindset she interviewed Todd Herman. Todd suggested keeping a chart of $10 work, $100 work, and $1000 work for a week. The challenge was to notice each task you did and record it into one of those columns. I loved the idea of the activity, but wasn’t yet in the place where I could afford to outsource anything. Outsourcing is the ultimate goal of the activity— acknowledging that when you’re the content-maker, creating your content is your greatest contribution, and that perhaps you oughtn’t to be coding HTML so your website works.
I remember thinking, “But I don’t even know which projects I’m spending my time on, let alone the amount of money I’d someday be able to pay someone to do the tasks!” For me, the first problem to tackle was “which project does this task fit into?” I needed to better understand where my hours were going before I could determine where any time-leaks might be. Maybe I was spending 20 hours a week on a project, but on all of the wrong parts of the project. Or maybe I was ignoring certain projects for too long, only returning to them after they had turned into raging problem-fires. I needed a way to track my time.
Enter the
Timely app, a very nice-to-look-at visual time-tracking tool.
- I’ve connected the Timely app with my main calendar, so the app knows what I’m supposed to spend my time on.
- I can create a new task with just a couple easy clicks on my phone or desktop, and start a timer or enter time spent manually.
- I use big categories, such as “admin” or “planning,” and sometimes add a few notes. The main thing for me is to see what I’m doing in broad strokes.
Player’s Notes:
- If my day gets busy and I forget to record some time spent, I record estimates at the end of the day, when I still remember.
- Timely has saved me so much time going back and trying to remember, particularly with invoices. Often, scheduling and hourly billing shifts due to various factors, so having a day-by-day record what actually happened is very helpful.
Take it to the Next Level:
- Review how your time was spent every couple weeks with the Timely reports. Are there trends that point to problems? If so, how can you turn that problem into a question, for which you can then seek a solution?
by Naomi | May 7, 2014 | Creative Life, Tools & Apps
The Getting Things Done (GTD) method offers so much wisdom by way of collecting and organizing the stuff of life. I hope you’ve read the book by now. To get the most out of this post, you’ll want to be familiar with GTD and also with Evernote and Daylite.
If you’re strategizing before you start your GTD collection process, or puzzling through the finer details of the system, you may find these tips about how I’ve structured my system to be helpful.
Collection:
Checklists: I needed checklists to help me move through the collection process each week. I find that the checklists in Evernote are a perfect solution. I have a notebook called “Weekly Review” where I keep my trigger lists (as David Allen refers to them) and also where I keep my horizons document that outlines my vision, goals and areas of focus. Referring to these documents helps me when I’m making sure I truly have collected everything in my head.
Inbox/Outbox: One notorious place of disorder in my life is my car. Because almost half of my work is done out and about, I tend to collect papers, books, notes, and of course, clutter, on my back seats, passenger seat, on the floor and in the trunk. Beyond the inbox on my desk, I have an inbox in my car, and an outbox that I carry back and forth from my office to my car and back to my office each night. That way, those items that I need to address each day can make it into my office inbox, and those that need to go out from my office actually get into my car where I’ll need them.
One Journal: I have started using one journal for everything I jot down outside of my daily reflecting session. All meeting notes, workshop notes, brainstorms, quick thoughts about projects, spontaneous writing, drawings, everything, all goes here. I have an envelope in the front of my journal with stickers and I put a sticker on a page once it has been scanned for any to-do items. That way, I can move all thoughts of relevance into my computer system when I am back at my desk.
Siri: I found out that if you put Daylite on your phone, you can ask Siri to add tasks to your worklist. She’ll add them and they’ll show up in your Daylite on your computer and everywhere else. To make this work, you need to have the calendar CalDAV set up on your phone to sync with your desktop application.
Organization:
Project Support Materials: I wasn’t handling project support materials very well. In fact, I’d often start a project, and then lose the email, document or paper that I’d originally created. It was too much work to search all the places I might have put ideas about a project already in progress, so usually I just started over hoping my good ideas would show up again. Now, I’ve created a paper folder to match every project that is complicated enough to require support material and put it in a drawer file behind my desk. I have the drawers sorted by my big-picture categories (more on setting big-picture categories here.) I also have an Evernote notebook for every single project and when I finish working on a project for the day, I make a note about where I’m leaving things so it is easy to pick back up the next day. I can also keep project related research, emails, drafts of documents, and many other items in these project-specific folders in Evernote, too. I’ve stacked all of these project notebooks in one stack called “Daylite” (the name of my project/task management software. More on that soon)
A NOTE: Since I organize everything by my big picture categories: Core (personal), Connection (reaching out to others) etc, I use these words as the first in naming my notebooks to make the stack easier to navigate. So, one notebook is called Connection: Experimenting with our First SCBWI Agent Day.
A SECOND NOTE: I name my projects in ways that help me remember what my overall goal is with the project in order to remind myself every time I open up the project just what I’m doing and why.
Someday Maybe: I found that Someday Maybe items were the biggest reason I wasn’t able to keep my system clean (as David Allen suggests may happen in his book. You were absolutely right, David!) I realized the problem for me was that I had different kinds of Someday Maybe items, and not all of them should be in my to-do software. So now, I have a notebook stack in Evernote that organizes Someday Maybe notebooks for restaurants, vacations, classes, movies, etc. I also have a list of deferred projects (which Daylite allows me to do) for projects that I’ve started to think through but need to wait on. I also keep materials that come in on various areas of responsibility (marketing, fundraising, etc) in notebooks for those purposes. Then, when I need to explore new ways to market or fundraise, I can pull up those notebooks and explore instead of dealing with every new resource the day it comes into my email.
Processing:
Daylite: I use Daylite to organize my projects and opportunities. I like the system because it allows me to track all the emails and people connected with any given project. I’ve found that tagging for context, such as “Email” or “Office” allows me to track tasks most simply within Daylite. I have lists on my menu bar for each key context. I also use @HOT to keep the most important items in front of my mind, and only allow myself to use the Worklist (or flag in another system) for those items that truly must be done today.
I use “waiting for” as a tag for those items I’m waiting to hear back from others on, and “for later” for the items I don’t need on my active lists. Then, when I created my smart lists for the menu bar, I could tell the system not to include any of these types of items.
Reviewing:
Sketchnoting: I’ve found that reviewing is much more fun when I create a sketchnote to show myself where I am in my overall life. I keep these in a “Review” folder at my desk so that I can see the progress from week to week.
Three Top Projects: Before I complete my review, I write down my top three projects for the week. I always know that life will not go as I expect, but knowing what my top three priorities are for the week helps me remember where to focus when time gets tight.
photo credit: juhansonin via photopin cc
by Naomi | Apr 3, 2014 | Creative Life
It’s been a while since my last balance post. Yes, life has been busy, and yes, posting has fallen off the list of most important to-do’s. I’m not big on excuses so I probably wouldn’t even mention it. However, my delay is an excellent case in point. It’s essential to know what’s important when seeking balance. Wise advisors suggest that one shouldn’t start a blog if they don’t mean to keep it up on a very regular basis. Same with Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and various other social networks. I disagree.
I’d much rather have an irregular interesting post from one of my creative friends than not ever see a post from them. But creatives NEED their offline space and time. They can’t commit to constant online chatter. If we’re being honest, we know it’s nearly impossible to predict when a creative storm is coming on and we’ll need to disengage to hole up in our art spaces and imagine. Would any of us really want our creative friends to feel they should stop in the midst of that most-fabulous flow to post on their blog?? No, of course not. We don’t care that they’ve made a basic commitment to post on Tuesdays. We’re not watching our inboxes to see when they’ll post and fuming about this lack of responsibility on the part of these artists. We just check back later. And would we want them to take down their blog and never post again because it’s impossible for them to keep their implied commitment? No.
The current reality for artists is that we need to be online. The old ways of experiencing art: museums, libraries, etc, are all still around, but there are thousands of new ways, too. Part of being an artist is participating in the conversation. Throughout history, artists have soaked up what’s current and experimented with new mediums in order to innovate. For those reasons and others, most of us want to be online in one way or another. We like hearing about our friends’ successes and sharing an insight here and there. We enjoy having new ways to connect with our audience. We like the inspiration and creativity that comes with all the access we have to our friends, to information, to inspiration. What we don’t want is the guilt.
Guilt is one of the key reasons most creatives feel unbalanced. We carry it around with us and let it fill up all the mental space we need for creativity, thinking about all the things we SHOULD be doing. Guilt makes it impossible to work with a clear mind. Since there are programmers creating apps and social networks and thousands of avenues through which to connect and reach out and share our friends’ successes and put good ideas out into the world, not being able to do it all is a fact, plain and simple. Thus, guilt is the default.
I say, let technology work for you on YOUR schedule. Participate in the conversation when you can, and when you need space, trust your artist friends to pick up where you left off. Believe in the power of community. We’ll help you, and we’ll forgive you, and we’ll come back later. Diving into your creative cave is nothing to feel guilty about. We’ll return, we promise, when you’re ready for us.
All right. Manifesto complete. Now, on the topic of technology… It should work FOR you. In order to keep your life balanced, particularly with so much to juggle, some technological systems are likely to help you keep your life in order. Here are some programs that I like best.
Daylite: This Mac software is one of the most amazing I’ve ever used. The program allows me to organize my projects, appointments, contacts and to-do’s all in one database. Between tagging and linking, one can create a network of connections so that I can see all the emails that have to do with a particular project, all the people involved, all the emails from a particular person, all the tasks that have to be done on email, and more. Using Daylite, I’ve been able to keep my work out of my inbox, and when I do have snatches of time to do work, I can easily order my tasks and get them done rather than spend all my time trying to find them.
Evernote: I use Evernote as my virtual filing cabinet. I scan mail into it, notes from events, use it to collect PDF’s and online research and more. I also use the business feature to connect with my team and make even better use of any of our research time. When I need to find a document or note, I no longer have to search through stacks of paper, but can just search Evernote to find that one thing I thought I found that one time. As long as I know a word that is in the document, Evernote can find it. It’s a fabulously powerful tool.
Journal: I keep a journal with me at all times and keep all meeting notes, journal entries, quick notes and thoughts on paper. I know, it’s not technology, but I tried note-taking on my iPad with all kinds of apps until I realized the apps weren’t the problem. I missed the feel of pen on paper. My brain needs that physical connection. Sometimes simple is better, and you have to go with what works for you.
Also, on the journaling/note-taking front: I’ve been experimenting with info-doodling, so the journal is fun to look at, with images and words all mixed together. I can make more sense of what I wrote at a glance, rather than having to wade through words and more words trying to find that one note. One excellent resource to explore info-doodling is the book, The Doodle Revolution, by Sunni Brown.
Habit List: Habit List is an app that helps create a daily to-do list and keep you up to date on the things you want to do more regularly. I use it to keep track of the social media things I’d like to do daily, every other day, weekly and monthly. Having reminders in this list allows me to know what to do when I have those few moments to get online and be social, to help me make the most of the time I spend.
Yearly Calendar: Also, not technology. I have this paper year-at-a-glance calendar on my desk so I can see what to expect in upcoming months, and also so I can keep track of ongoing and changing goals. Here’s a link for a PDF, if you want one too. Blank Yearly Calendar
I’ll share more tools in upcoming posts, but these are some with which to start. I find that too many tools too quickly is worse than no tools at all. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you. What tools help you maintain balance? What are your thoughts on how artists can revise their relationship with technology and social media to erase guilt and allow creative fresh air?
photo credit: Viewminder via photopin cc
