Five habits that lead to creative freedom
Does it ever feel like you have a never-ending amount of work to do? Like you are always busy and no matter how much you get done, it always feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day?
I work with a lot of creative business owners and they often tell me how busy they are, sometimes, with a sense of pride. Having lots of work on is great, but what if I told you there are people out there working fewer hours and earning more money with a complete sense of freedom. How does that make you feel?
If it was just about working hard, then junior doctors would be the most successful, highly paid individuals in the country, but as most of us know, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’ve been reading books and testing theories about productivity and time management for years and I’ve finally boiled it down to five key principles. But before I get into that, I want you to think about a question;
Why are we so busy?
Now, there are lots of answers to this, but there is one universal truth I want to focus on…
It’s easy
“What? No, it’s not! Being busy is stressful!”
I hear you, but let me just make a suggestion…
In general, being busy is thought of as a good thing. It means we have lots of work on and we are doing well, right? I hear it all the time when people ask me how I am, if I say I’m busy, they always respond with “that’s great, I’m glad things are going well for you!”
The problem is that it’s actually really easy to be busy. There are cat videos to watch, emails to answer, Facebook posts to reply to, Tweets to send out, the list goes on. I coach a lot of creatives and when we really uncover why they are busy and what they are busy with, it usually boils down to one thing;
They are avoiding doing the hard, uncomfortable tasks that will produce the results they really want.
If you are honest with yourself and find this resonates, then don’t worry, there is a solution…
So how do we stop being busy and start being productive?
Hundreds of books have been written on the subject of productivity and having read a lot of them, I’ve realised there are only really five key principles we need to focus on in order to achieve the results we really want and avoid the busy trap. These principles are a combination of techniques that I have learnt from experts such as Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Cal Newport and David Allen to name just a few. They are also principles I have developed through my own trials and tribulations.
Step 1: Define your outcome
Most of the time, we think about all of the things we need to do, rather than the result we actually want. This leads to us being reactive instead of proactive and we get caught up in other people’s priorities. We think about people we have to email or tasks we have to do, but these are often unrelated to the outcomes we are actually trying to achieve.
Firstly we have to know what those outcomes are, then we have to write them down. This is the part most people miss out as they think that by having a vague idea of what they want, it will get them there. In fact, research suggests that less than 30 percent of people write down their goals despite the fact it has been proven to help increase the likelihood of achieving them.
So define your outcomes at the start of each week and focus on a maximum of three things. If you have more than three, you probably haven’t prioritised enough. If you could only get three things done this week, what would they be?
Step 2: Start with the one thing that has the highest chance of creating that outcome
I have just started reading a great book called “the one thing” which has been on my reading list for a while. In the book, Keller and Papsan talk about the difference between high performers and average performers. They suggest that the crucial factor isn’t how smart they are or the resources they have, it’s actually determined by how they spend their time and what they focus on.
The question that is posed in the book is; “What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Tim Ferriss often refers to this as the lead domino. What is the thing that will knock all of the other dominoes down?
Once you have defined this, you must focus on that one task first and keep at it until it’s done. Brian Tracy talks about this concept in his book ‘Eat that Frog’. Tracy says “If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first”. In other words, the most uncomfortable tasks are often also the most important, so get them out of the way first thing.
Step 3: Think big but start small
I often find people are easily overwhelmed by their goals because they bite off way more than they can chew. One of the ways I help people to overcome that is by breaking the goals down into manageable chunks.
The thing that has allowed me to achieve some of my big goals over the last few years is something I call backwards planning. This involves focusing on the outcome and then thinking what would have to happen before that in order for me to reach that result? I keep doing this until I create several milestones that I need to hit. I then break those milestones down into daily and weekly actions to make sure I am doing something every day that is related to that goal, even if it’s just for ten minutes. It’s easy to think that in order to achieve remarkable results we need to take massive action, but lots of small actions repeated on a daily basis are far more likely to get you to your goal and stop you from becoming overwhelmed.
I recently learnt a piece of grade 8 music on the piano, from scratch in less than a year. Before that, I couldn’t play anything above grade one or two. The way I did it was to find a Youtube video where someone had broken the entire piece down into small sections that anyone could play. I then sat at my piano for a minimum of ten minutes every day and set myself the goal to complete the section by the end of the week. Sometimes it felt like I was never going to get there, but I persisted and before I knew it, I could play the whole thing all the way through without stopping.
So once you have defined your goal, ask yourself what the first small step you can take towards the goal is.
Step 4: Categorise tasks based on attention not time
Far too often I see people jumping from one task to another. This is detrimental to our productivity, especially for creatives. If you are working on a design or editing a photo, your most productive state is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as the flow state. This is your zone of complete focus where you lose track of time and feel as though the world around you doesn’t exist.
In order to reach this state, we must be uninterrupted. That means no emails, no cat videos and certainly no Facebook. This can even be relevant when you are working on the same type of work. For example, if I’m writing an article and need to do some research, I will try to make sure I have allocated time for research and allocated time for writing so that I don’t get distracted and taken out of the flow state. I find this works best when I block out my time into three main categories.
1: Communication
2: Administration
3: Deep work
Each category is fairly self-explanatory, but here is a short description of each;
Communication is everything from emails, phone calls, social media and WhatsApp. Any activity where you are communicating with someone else.
Administration is anything that doesn’t take much brain power, but can be time-consuming. I usually do these tasks in the afternoon and they can include things like listing events on my website, reconciling accounts, updating contacts etc.
Deep work (a term coined by Cal Newport) is when we are in the flow state and need high levels of concentration. This could be everything from editing photos, to writing a blog post. It’s most important when you are doing things that require uninterrupted focus. If you can block out time and remove all distractions such as your phone, emails and social media, you will be surprised how much you get done and how productive you feel.
Step 5: Create some accountability and a reward
The final part of the jigsaw which will really get you moving is accountability. I’m currently writing this article at 10 pm on a Sunday night because if I don’t, I have to donate $190 to the NRA, through a website called Stickk. It’s one of the best accountability websites I have found and it makes both myself and my clients achieve their goals on a consistent basis.
Ultimately, the only reason we don’t do what we know we should do (i.e go to the gym) is because we associate more pain or discomfort with the activity than immediate reward. If you want to flip that on its head, get some accountability for your goals which will create more pain for not doing the activity than the pleasure of putting it off.
Just as in step three, start small. Don’t get overwhelmed by all of the steps. Just try incorporating step one into your weekly plan. Maybe you don’t even have a week plan and haven’t started writing your goals down yet, in which case, start there. Complexity is the enemy of execution, so just try one thing from this list to start with and build on that.
Did you find this article valuable? What are your biggest challenges around time management and productivity? Let me know in the comments below.
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