Fight Creative Time Wasting: Tips for Resourceful Time Wasters
Most readers of this blog provide creative services of some kind, largely as designers or as writers. And if you are contemplating a switch to the freelance life, you may be wondering about your own creativity, about your ability to constantly come up with new and better ways to do things for your clients.
While there are many different kinds of freelancers offering many kinds of services, all the freelancers I have known have been able to demonstrate outstanding creativity in at least one aspect of their work:
Avoiding it!
You’ve Got Mail
When you go freelance, you suddenly discover what is really important.
Like the mailbox next to your front door! If you have left a corporate cubicle for a home office, your sensitivity to the things around you is heightened to the point that you can hear inanimate objects speaking to you. Your mailbox whispers, “come out and look to see if I’ve got something for you,” hour after hour. Even though you know when the post arrives, you can’t resist the call, you “just take a moment” to check it now and then . . and then . . and then. And if you are waiting for a check from a client, forget it. You might as well put a chair next to the mailbox and live out there until the mail arrives.
Naturally, if you are working from home , it would be a shame not to keep up with the laundry, maybe just do up those dishes quickly, and it can’t hurt to vacuum occasionally.
If you are not freelancing yet, those kinds of activities might seem to be boring chores. But once you go out on your own, they become endlessly fascinating. Develop that web form? Write that brochure? Dust?
Easy decision.
Pretending to Be Virtuous
Even if you resist tackling these totally irrelevant tasks to avoid your work, you can still waste lots of energy in activities that appear to have something to do with your trade. The trick is simply to move low-priority items you could do anytime up to the top of the list.
Don’t you need a better filing system, so you can be more efficient? Better check your office supplies, perhaps pick up a couple of printer cartridges. Maybe you should catch up on your accounting, so you can get a couple of months’ head start on your taxes.
And those are just the time-wasters you can come up without the aid of modern technology.
Welcome to the Black Hole
If computers can make us more efficient, they are even more powerful tools for inefficiency. You probably learned to check your e-mail way too often long before you went freelance.
Now that your productive time is your source of revenue, it is much easier to be seduced into making little tweaks that might minimally improve your output. Why not defragment your hard drive, update to the latest versions of all your software, search for just the right plug-ins and extensions, and find the perfect way to manage all your files and documents so you can instantly find any item you need?
You also probably don’t have the perfect theme set up in your browser, and you need to customize every menu and tool bar you can find . . . all motivated by your deep desire to get more work done, of course.
What’s the Cure?
Frankly, some people never get past this phase. But while successful freelancers may not be completely free of these afflictions, they eventually learn to manage them, to hold these distractions down to a level where they do a little less damage to their productivity:
- Start with patience. If you are new at freelancing, you are facing a whole new lifestyle and “workstyle.” It takes time to adapt, so don’t expect to apply a heavy dose of “will power” or “self-discipline” and suddenly make everything better.
- Bunch your distractions together. Check mail (e- or other) at specific times, and deal with it in a few set time periods, instead of constantly throughout the day. Get those office supplies, and all those other errands you have discovered, done on a single day in the week, instead of running out the door repeatedly.
- Earn your distractions. Get those software updates only when you complete your work quota for the morning. Recognize these activities as the breaks they are, and use them as rewards.
Generally, outwitting these time wasting maneuvers works better than trying to eliminate them through some kind of brute force effort. And when you have that occasional relapse — as you will – forget all the guilt. Just have a laugh at yourself, and accept time wasters as part of the freelance life.
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Caffeine is your friend.
when i was working 100% from home my house / garage was spotless, the lawn / landscaping looked like professionals did it, my car was waxed and clean inside and out! that has all changed since i took a “day job” and maintain close to the same freelance clients… great read!
How ironic that I read this while I should have been working.
I really should stop making posts on Twitter while I’m working, because I always wind up reading other tweets, and clicking various links within those tweets. That’s how I got here
You mean, I should stop reading blogs about fighting creative time wasting?
The part about the mail box is hilarious!
For me, I found that switching to the gmail web interface really helped with my e-mail checking addiction. I completely removed my email program from my dock, and now I have to go to the site to check it instead of frantically clicking mail every time the little red (1) badge showed up in the dock.
While I do agree that taking time to find a better “this” or organize “that” more efficiently, SOME of those tasks really do save a lot of time in the long run. If you have a faster computer and it is more efficiently organized, you can literally save days of your life and make more money.
Business is definitely all about systems and processes… especially when YOU ARE the business. No accounting department here thanks to freshbooks. No project manager to hire (thanks to basecamp and highrise). No need to be constrained to the office (thanks to google voice).
If I’d never taken the time to “procrastinate” and set those systems up, I’d never be able to take on the workload that I do.
My 2c. Great article though. FUNNY!
- Ben
Great article, not only for freelancers but anyone who finds themselves procrastinating on a regular basis, for whatever reason, especially the “bunch your distractions” and “earn your distractions” points.
The responses are great too XD
Absolutely! Last week I had a deadline on a booklet, and somehow I managed to compose a song in my guitar and another one in my peruvian flute on the last day.
Did I finished on time? You know the answer.
This is so true. I absolutely thought I was the only one to behave in this fashion. But eventually guilt and the reality of less than desired income hit and you quickly realize that you need to get to work! Then after you get your groove and get comfortable, you reward yourself as the article says but be careful because the pull for mindless activity is much stronger than you think.
Lets not forget that if you’re working from say, the couch, you’re all the more likely to watch TV instead of plug away on your laptop. Or take a quick nap. After all, isn’t daytime naps one of the “perks” of working from home?
Guilty as charged, don’t really agree with the tax remark as getting it done ahead of time gives me much needed piece of mind, but everything else is soo true. I find that mapping out a schedule of what I’ll be doing the next day helps down to the minute is good for eliminating idle time.
Thanks for another great post.
That was a nice read, thanks!
My email inbox ACTUALLY does talk to me, and here I was thinking I was unique!
I ended up here… because I was distracted. At least I know I have work to do to become more efficient. I’m here, aren’t I?
I think what’s most effective for me is using set days to do set things. I also decided to go old-school and use a desk calendar for hour-by-hour tasks throughout the day. I make a to-do list for the week and then schedule those “to-dos” into certain slots as if they were meetings. Make me feel accountable to the calendar.
Great post!
The best way is to keep yourself engaged in some interesting activity.Do some physical activity or play your favorite game.
If u got the skills then earn money on the web.
The best way is to keep yourself engaged in some interesting activity.Do some physical activity or play your favorite game.
If u got the skills then earn money on the web.
This is so true in so many ways lol. I work part time mon-thurs and try to do freelance fri-sun, but I hate working on the computer if I look around at my house and it’s a total mess. So most of the time Friday is spent catching up on housework before I get any real work done.
nice to read this one,good to know about the emails and inboxes too,nice one really.
all good ideas I am terrible for pressing refresh on my inbox and flicking my phone on and off. twitter is way to distraction for following the interesting links that keep getting posted. maybe no phones email and twitter would be a start and lots of coffee
As a freelancer Its very easy to lose focus on the projects at hand and land up spending valuable time to conceptualize ideas for future potential work..
As a suggestion it would be much more productive if a designer spent less time on the internet for ideas, inspiration, etc. and focused more on books and sketches.. Use the computer only once your sure of what you want to do.. As its very easy to lose track on the internet..
Thanks for the good article..
Varun
Tell me about it. I think I have to clean my house and garage, mow the lawn make 20 useless drawings an respackle my bathroom sometimes before I do something productive.
So true indeed…i think that i will take my labtop…place it in the draw , lock the damn draw , then swallow the key. This way my bodily functions will regulate my use on the machine….hmmm!
Alright, enough reading. Time to go clean my desk(again).
So true…all of it!
Your article is the perfect description of a procrastinator.