How much do you produce on a daily basis? At the end of the day, when you look over all your accomplishments, is it mostly created work, responsive or passive?
As media artists and content creators, business people and entrepreneurs, content is king. If you are producing, you are moving. You are building a body of work, you are advancing your craft, you are learning. This could be a project that needs to be completed for a client or a personal project. The type of active project matters little, just that you are doing it.
Responsive work is less ideal. Responsive items are things like e-mails, phone calls, IMs. These things are often given heightened priority because they come up suddenly and seem important. And they serve a great purpose, they pull you away from whatever longer term project you are crafting to provide a fix of seemingly advanced importance and urgency. The phone rings..its probably important…so I’ll switch gears and jump on it…at least I can deal with it and get a fix of accomplishment.
Passive is the worst, its checking your social networks, reading news, watching a clip, listening to the views of someone over IM, rechecking your social networks, seeing what everyone is chatting about, more web surfing, oh that looks interesting, let me check this again, let me just pop in to this virtual world, I know I won’t be in there that long, etc. Now many of these items are great for recreation and fun, unfortunately a lot of creative types devote a substantial part of their day to them. Problem is, the production of output goes dramatically down.
The solution? Pear down. Start to trim out as many time wasters as you can. I’m no angel, some of the things I have liked have included Second Life, Twitter and others. Problem is aside from delightful conversations, items like these take mucho precious time. They are better reserved for late night fun than during the day work time. So pear down but stop to look at what you do through the day. Are you producing? Or are you checking your email 20 times per hour and looking for news on the web that may be important. Focus on creating, no matter what you do. Your days will be filled with a better feeling of accomplishment. And building your legacy and empire will develop all the more quickly.
Here are some ideas:
Check e-mail only every 2-4 hours (What if there is something important in there? = How can I get quickly derailed today?)
Turn off a social-whatever that nudges you more than once an hour
Reduce the blogs and news sites you view daily to the 5 that are the most valuable
Turn off your phone ringer, check messages only a few times a day
Focus on creation - don’t multitask - juggling is typically only impressive if you are a circus clown
Final tip for work hours: If you wonder “Hmmm..I wonder what is going on in/on __________ I should do a quick check…” that is a DERAIL…its you hitting the pause button on your body of work, your legacy and your career.
What do you think?
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