Last week I chatted about the necessity of making use of the small intervals of time that come our way and how we need to learn to get at least a portion of our creative work done in those small intervals. I offered two tips, the first having to do with getting in the habit of knowing “where we are” in our work, so that we can turn to it quickly, and the second having to do with choosing projects that lend themselves to being worked on when only small chunks of time are available.
Here are two more.
Pull the plug on easy distractions. We have to break our habit of routinely and reflexively turning to one of our “distraction addictions” to while away those minutes. As a matter of routine, and without thinking about it, people nowadays check their email, browse the news online, turn to Facebook or Twitter, catch up on one or another of their Internet games, or do something else Web-related so as to “get rid of” those few minutes. Until we break that habit, there is little chance that we can make productive use of the fifteen or thirty minutes that become available to us throughout the day.
Remind yourself how little time some big steps take. How long does it take to write a two-line email to someone who might help to grow your business? Typically people hold this to be a huge task because anxiety wells up in them when they think about putting themselves “out there.” But the reality is that the email itself takes hardly a minute or two to write. If you learn to calm yourself, center yourself, and not magnify the risk involved, you could make significant headway every time you found a few minutes at your disposal.
In an ideal world we might find ourselves doing less scrambling. For most of us, however, the reality is that our days are choppy and jagged and that bits of time suddenly arrive—and vanish.
It isn’t that we have to grab every one of those fleeting intervals and make some use of it. By the same token, though, we do want to grab a lot of them—as they may be the only time we have available.
Eric Maisel, Ph.D., is the author of 30 books, among them "Coaching the Artist Within" and "The Van Gogh Blues," and is widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach. His most recent book is Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions. He is a featured contributor to the HuffingtonPost, ArtBistro, and Art Calendar magazine. Visit Dr. Maisel at EricMaisel.com.
