December 10, 2009

If you've ever been interrupted by a phone call or a nosy coworker when you were right in the middle of a creative marathon, you know how such distractions can quickly knock you out of a productive groove. If you want to optimize your time, it’s important to understand (and respect) that different tasks require different modes of thinking.

Paul Graham wrote an enlightening article on the different worlds of what he describes as "management" time and "maker" time. Inevitably, you will spend some of your time doing management-style tasks, such as meetings, conference calls, email, accounting, and errands. Conversely, other portions of your time will be spent doing creative tasks like writing reports or code, or designing and building things.

The problems arise when the two worlds collide. When management tasks invade your space when you're trying to focus on making things, you'll inevitably do a poor job of both tasks.

The solution, then, is to do whatever you can to keep the respective modes segregated. Here are a few tips:

1. Set specified "manager" times.
During the Manager time periods, you're not going to try to create anything. Instead, you're going to focus on correspondence, email, voicemail, meeting with people, and whatever needs to be done that accesses that side of your brain.

This is your time to be in a social environment, to have your phone and your email open, and for it to be okay for you to be distracted by others.

2. Set specified "maker" times.
During the Maker time periods, you shut off email and ignore all but emergency calls. You perhaps set aside a few Pomodoro time blocks and focus on one thing at a time.

During this time, it's appropriate to shut the door, work from home, put on headphones, and/or advise the people around you to wait until later.

3. Funnel meetings into specific blocks.
I know that, in a typical day, I have a lot more distractions in the late afternoon than I do in the morning. As a result, I try to schedule my meetings in the afternoons, allowing my mornings to stay free for creative work.

One of my friends enforces a fairly strict policy of only taking meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays, allowing him to shift gears depending on the day of the week and give his different modes their full attention. In most cases, he notes, people are more than used to having to wait a few days to get a meeting lined up properly with people's schedules.

4. Enforce your own rules.
Nowadays it's easy to be an email and Twitter addict. Before you set aside time to do creative work, you must make yourself ready to turn all of those things off for a stretch of time. You might think that seeing and being ready to respond to any and all correspondence instantly is critical, but in many cases any correspondence you receive during a creative run can wait a few hours.

By simply closing out all of my email, Twitter, and chat programs for a specified block of time, I've found myself able to concentrate and be creative for longer, more productive blocks of time than ever before.

Taking the time to examine how your workflow plays out in a typical day, and how your time gets divvied up helps you better understand where your constraints are, and what needs to be worked on. The more aware you are of where your time goes, the better equipped you'll be to figure out how to use that time more efficiently.

*** This post comes from Tony Bacigalupo, founder of New Work City, a co-working space in New York City, and a partner at Shift 101, a workspace consultancy. Tony’s fieldwork feeds into the knowledgebase of the Behance Team, who run the Behance Creative Network, the 99% productivity think thank, the Action Method project management application, and the Creative Jobs List.

Join the conversation ( 2 )

• Tony Bacigalupo 2 years 1 months and 25 days ago

  

  Looks like the original link to the Paul Graham article didn't make it into the copy; you can find his excellent post here: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

• Jill Fehrenbacher 2 years 2 months and 0 days ago

  

  It's always been a huge challenge to get anything done with the constant flow of re-prioritization that my inbox demands. It often feels like I have a dozen half-finished tasks all open in a different window on my desktop! This isn't the first time I've heard about the benefits of time segregation, but this article makes an especially compelling argument. Management vs maker time is an interesting and extremely basic differentiation, but the point is well taken.