Notes from ‘Manage Your Day-to-Day’

Many of the books I read are digital, but Manage Your Day-to-Day from Jocelyn Glei is one of those physical pieces that’s a work of art in its own right. This short work which kicks off the ‘99U Series’ provides a good chunk of insight from various creatives.

Behance’s founder Scott Belsky start the book off by saying:

No matter where you work or what horrible top-down systems plague your work, your mind and energy are yours and yours alone. You can surrender your day-to-day and the potential of your work to the burdens that surround you. Or, you can audit the way you work and own the responsibility of fixing it.

Truth. Many of the books I’m reading on habits seem to be frustrated with a common mentality that it’s someone else’s fault, and indeed, looking at many of the creative greats leads you to see that they simply made it happen:

How, when, and where you show up is the single most important factor in executing on your ideas. That’s why so many creative visionaries stick to a daily routine. Choreographer Twyla Tharp gets up at the crack of dawn every day and hails a cab to go to the gym — a ritual she calls her “trigger moment.” Painter Ross Bleckner reads the paper, meditates, and then gets to the studio by 8 a.m. so that he can work in the calm quiet of the early morning. Writer Ernest Hemingway wrote five hundred words a day, come hell or high water.

So how do you create a life that allows you to work? Mark McGuinness says it can be as simple as reprioritizing your day:

At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, an array of voice mail messages, and the list of next steps from your last meeting, it’s tempting to “clear the decks” before starting your own work. When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, it will be easier to focus. The trouble with this approach is it means spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities. By the time you settle down to your own work, it could be mid-afternoon, when your energy dips and your brain slows.

…and putting creative time first:

The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off. I used to be a frustrated writer. Making this switch turned me into a productive writer. Now, I start the working day with several hours of writing. I never schedule meetings in the morning, if I can avoid it. So whatever else happens, I always get my most important work done — and looking back, all of my biggest successes have been the result of making this simple change.

…and using a calendar (or timers) to give your day blocks for each type of work:

Set a start time and a finish time for your workday — even if you work alone. Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on. These hard edges keep tasks from taking longer than they need to and encroaching on your other important work. They also help you avoid workaholism, which is far less productive than it looks.

While none of McGuinness’ advice can be considered totally radical, that’s the point. The reason we aren’t creating isn’t because we’re too busy. It’s because we’re too unfocused. Gretchen Rubin picks up where McGuinness leaves off by pointing us to famous figures who made their mark by showing up every day:

Anthony Trollope, the nineteenth-century writer who managed to be a prolific novelist while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Over the long run, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters both productivity and creativity.

This is, in large part, why I’ve been spending every single morning, 7:00 to 8:00, at a coffee shop typing away. My experience entirely mirrors this one:

Frequency keeps the pressure off. If you’re producing just one page, one blog post, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you start to fret about quality. I knew a writer who could hardly bring herself to write. When she did manage to keep herself in front of her laptop for a spate of work, she felt enormous pressure to be brilliant; she evaluated the product of each work session with an uneasy and highly critical eye. She hadn’t done much work, so what she did accomplish had to be extraordinarily good. Because I write every day, no one day’s work seems particularly important. I have good days and I have bad days. Some days, I don’t get much done at all. But that’s okay, because I know I’m working steadily. My consequent lack of anxiety puts me in a more playful frame of mind and allows me to experiment and take risks. If something doesn’t work out, I have plenty of time to try a different approach.

…and I can also attest to this sentiment:

Frequency sparks creativity. You might be thinking, “Having to work frequently, whether or not I feel inspired, will force me to lower my standards.” In my experience, the effect is just the opposite. Often folks achieve their best work by grinding out the product. Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.

Seth Godin contributes a small chapter to further stress the important of routine, emphasizing not only the work but the workplace or routine’s nature:

The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way. There are many ways you can signify to yourself that you are doing your practice. For example, some people wear a white lab coat or a particular pair of glasses, or always work in a specific place — in doing these things, they are professionalizing their art.

If you find yourself following all this advice but still unable to hit your target, you might be the owner of a highly distracted mind. It’s hard to get things done when you can’t control your thoughts (or perhaps more frequently, your obsession with checking social media). A solution? Solitude. Mindfulness. Meditation, as Leo Babauta proposes:

What’s the point of sitting? There is no point — sitting is the point. You’re not doing it to reduce stress, gain enlightenment, or learn more about yourself — though all these things might happen — but to practice just sitting. In doing so, you are practicing being alone, and doing nothing but what you’re doing. This is essential. At first meditation will be uncomfortable, but you’ll get better at it. You’ll learn a lot about yourself, and you’ll get better at being mindful, and being comfortable in solitude. You’ll also learn to watch your thoughts and not be controlled by them. As you do, you’ll have learned a key skill for focus: how to notice the urge to switch tasks and not act on that urge, but just return your attention to the task at hand. This is what you learn in solitude, and it is everything.

…and Christian Jarrett confirms:

Creative minds are highly susceptible to distraction, and our newfound connectivity poses a powerful temptation for all of us to drift off focus.

…and Dan Ariely drives home:

Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to, let’s say, e-mail versus doing something that takes fifty hours. It is very easy for you to see the e-mail. It is not that easy for you to see the thing that takes fifty hours.

So how do you cut yourself off from distraction and get started? Todd Henry suggests something calls ‘unnecessary creation’:

In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron discusses a now well-known practice that she calls “morning pages.” She suggests writing three pages of free-flowing thought first thing in the morning as a way to explore latent ideas, break through the voice of the censor in your head, and get your creative juices flowing. While there is nothing immediately practical or efficient about the exercise, Cameron argues that it’s been the key to unlocking brilliant insights for the many people who have adopted it as a ritual. I’ve seen similar benefits of this kind of “Unnecessary Creation” in the lives of creative professionals across the board. From gardening to painting with watercolors to chipping away at the next great American novel on your weekends, something about engaging in the creative act on our own terms seems to unleash latent passions and insights. I believe Unnecessary Creation is essential for anyone who works with his or her mind.

There’s definitely something to this idea, and one of the reasons why making writing a routine seemed to work so well for me. For a good while there, I wrote every morning, and published very little of it. What I wrote wasn’t always intended to be seen by others. It was intended to unlock something inside of me.

As Scott McDowell says towards the end of the book:

The most successful creative minds consistently lay the groundwork for ideas to germinate and evolve. They are always refining their personal approach to hijacking the brain’s neural pathways, developing a tool kit of tricks to spark the mind like flint on steel.

Words of wisdom. I hope to continually refine my work, developing the skills which I love most.