When your day turns to mush!
Mush is a weird word isn’t it? It basically means a soft, wet, pulpy mess! Kind of like this picture – albeit a creative one!
Being self-employed, its very easy (when I am not out performing) that my days become nondescript and I get nothing done.
Last year, I joined a wonderful project called Katapult at Subtopia. They offer coaching and a space for creatives here in Stockholm. Through my coaching work I have learnt how to plan out my days in order to get more work done.
Since these exercises are working for me, I wanted to share them in the hope you might find them useful too.
Start thinking of your day in 3 chunks.
Begin by taking an A4 page and sketch out a week giving each day three sections; morning, afternoon and evening.
When we have work to do and we know that we have a full day to do it i.e. one chunk, it’s very easy to keep putting it off as you still have “the whole day” to complete the task right?
By drawing out the calendar above you have now broken the 1 day into 3 smaller chunks.
Now you can determine when in the day you want to complete the task; the morning, afternoon or evening. By being more specific with your daily tasks, you are more likely to do the task in the section of day you planned to.
I use multicoloured post-it notes (as life is so much better in colour) to write down my tasks on and then I arrange them onto the weekly calendar. I should say that I do not write normal daily tasks in my calendar like eating, sleeping etc only my creative and business tasks for each day.
But, I do schedule in “fun” or time off. This helps create balance in the creative working week.
Goals are like guarantees!
Having goals to aim towards gives us a goal. And seeing it visually on a piece of paper like this makes it real. I suggest that when you create your own little task calendar that you put it somewhere you can see it everyday so that you can keep check on it.
Once a task is complete you can rip the post-it- note of your paper sheet. As some tasks might be repeated (to save paper waste) do not throw these post-it-notes away they can be reused next week. For example, magic practice might be a weekly thing you wish to keep.
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I have found my creative life have become so much more productive when I began outlining my goals for the week on paper physically like this above. It’s a fun way to project manage your daily tasks. And it can be as simple or as complicated as you wish to make it.
In business it’s actually called a work breakdown structure (WBS).
By just completing one task per chunk per day I have seen so much more get done in my life compared to when my day was just mush!
Perhaps you might too.
This is really clever! I will absolutely take this to heart.
Nikola, what a great post and so usefull, every young person should learn this. It can be so easy to fall into an unstructured way of live whilst working and just muddle through or panic at the last minute, all my working life in sales or as a photographer I have set myself goals sadley not as structured as yours, yes l have been lucky enough to achieve many of my goals but now I’m thinking I could have done so much better had I used a system like yours. Although I do wonder how you manage to do so much, your life live is so busy, reading your posts can tire me out but maybe I now know the answer, keep up the good work.
I also find that doing what you want to do the least first means that your day immediately brightens once that’s out of the way.