Time is the currency of productivity. At the end of the day, if we’ve spent it in the right place, we win. If we’ve spent it in the wrong place, we lose. Whenever we fail to do what’s needed, we accumulate a debt that will have to be repaid at some point. After all, our work isn’t going away, and someone has to do it. At the same time, we often obsess unnecessarily about our time because we grow paranoid that we’re constantly losing ground or that we’re somehow going to fall behind and never be able to dig out of work debt. For many creatives, this mind-set results from the fact that they are constantly reacting to the workload rather than giving themselves the space needed to get ahead of it.
This insecurity about time is one of the main things that causes us, even unknowingly, to cram work into every available crevice in our life. We are perpetually thinking, moving pieces around in our head, and problem solving. We feel the pressure to produce, and we know that we need to use our time wisely to do so. But as mentioned earlier in the book, this always-on mind-set unknowingly causes us to forfeit our best work.
Of the five elements of rhythm discussed in this book, time is the most significant pressure point for many creatives. It’s where we feel the biggest crunch, because it’s the most concrete resource that we need to allocate toward our work each day. It’s also the one element that provides the foundation for our practices in each of the other areas. As a result, developing a healthy mind-set toward your time is critical, and not just in terms of how you crank through tasks or how efficiently you conduct meetings. While these things have their place, you need to be just as mindful of what’s not present in your life and how this is affecting your creative capacity as well. Though it’s counterintuitive, the solution to feeling overwhelmed or crunched for time is often not to remove something from your life, but to add something that raises your level of effectiveness in those activities you’re already doing.
All Minutes Are Not Created Equal
There is much advice on how to organize your time to conquer your tasks, but it is mostly predicated on the assumption that your goal is simply to get through the work, with little regard to the quality of that work. But this is simply not the case. As a creative, you are held to account for the quality of your work, not just the quantity.
Each project you take on makes demands of your time. You are forced to make priority calls about where you’re going to spend your hours, and because of the pressure of scarcity, you probably frequently feel like you have one chance to get it right. What we often overlook is that one hour effectively spent can produce better results than five hours spent on a lot of frenetic activity. Breakthroughs can happen in a brief moment, but these kinds of sudden breakthroughs result from a lifestyle of structuring your time according to an effectiveness mind-set rather than an efficiency one.
The Portfolio And The Slot Machine
As creatives, our value to the organization is determined by what we create, not for how much time we spend creating it. We have only so much idea generation time to go around, so we need to get the most out of what we have. It’s counterintuitive, but if we want to increase our productive output, we need to let go of our stranglehold on time. We must learn to spend our time effectively rather than obsessing about efficiency. To spend our time effectively means that we are willing to view our time as a portfolio of investments, not as a slot machine.
We put our money in a slot machine hoping that the next pull of the lever will pay off. The more coins we gamble, the closer we think we’re getting to a jackpot, but the odds of the game remain the same. No matter how many pulls we make, chances are we will nearly always lose our money. This is akin to a creative who is perpetually working in the desperate hope that simply plowing through in an always-on, nonrhythmic manner must eventually produce results. Certainly, some results will be generated—just like small jackpots that keep gamblers pumping coins into the machine—but over time this kind of activity only drains our creative bank account.
An investment mind-set, however, is focused on the long term. We know that we might not see an immediate return on our investment, but we know that we will see significant returns over time if we work the plan. When we build practices into our life that align with the underlying dynamics of the creative process, we will find that our overall capacity to create is growing. We will achieve long-term returns on our investments.
Now, let’s establish idea time and practice with unnecessary creating.
* Source: The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry