I LOVE MY BELLY MORE THAN ANYTHING That’s what I have learnt this week using this management tool, cooking and eating is what I do most after sleeping (and some days that order sadly gets switched round). This is the weekly Love Your Creativity podcast, the podcast goes into more detail but I know myself sometimes it’s great just to read the highlights, time management and all that so the main points are below
For the last 5 days I have finally got around to using a time management tool that just involves a pen and paper (or a note on your smart phone). I have known about this for years but have never actually got around to doing it. Now that I have, I can report back that when I say ‘I have no time, I am always rushing around’ I know exactly where my time is spent. In my case I spent a lot of time in the kitchen cooking and eating. In fact I have spent over the last 5 days as much time cooking and eating (yes as stated I love food and my belly) as I looking at my emails, sending CV’s out and organising the business of my creativity. I have also spent 3 times more time in organising the business of creativity than on the actual practice of my craft.
So how do you do this? Well you could build a spreadsheet but that is way too anal and focused for me. I just grabbed an old A4 page a day diary and scribbled in old fashion pen what I did during the day. So I wrote the time I woke up, how long I hit the snooze button for, how long it took me to sort out breakfast and morning coffee, feeding the cat. During the day as I changed activities from getting on a tube to cooking again, to travel and time spent on Twitter I just jotted down the time.
Was it perfect? No. However at the end of each day I added it up into the following rough categories and then after 5 days totalled the lot
Travelling
Work on my craft
Getting ready to go out
Cooking/eating
Faffing
Cleaning/feeding cat etc
Emails.CVs out. Printing scripts,
ebay, twitter,
Running
The snooze button
Blog/podcast time
Sleep
Actual time spent on looking at scripts
Rehearsals and time actually in auditions
Phone Calls.
I suggest you try this for 2 weeks, I hate the idea of it but just in 5 days I am already seeing huge anomalies on where I think I spend my time and where I waste time. The snooze button and I have a committed 3 hour relationship over the last 5 days, far more than I spent practising my instruments or my voice outside of singing rehearsals, or indeed on working on text and scripts.
Let me know what you learn.
I hope doing it for a further 9 days will show I am learning to use my precious time better. I have been using my 13.5 hours travel time well, but I am now getting super organised about taking work and scripts etc to read on the tube. I remember Clive Rowe, the fabulous West End star saying to me that he used to sit and go round and round the Circle line to learn a script as there were no distractions, he couldn’t get on the phone or on email etc. So rather than getting upset about your time schedule, see where you can make small positive incremental changes.
AiTunes rating would really help other people find the podcast so if you have a moment I would really appreciate it
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/love-your-creativity-podcast/id633181477
Tracking Your Creative Progress
Here we also look at the weekly tracking where I encourage you to do an end of week think back on what has been done, produced, worked on, booked and paid for creatively. (I don’t mean you are doing ‘creative accounting”!) Whether you are a full time painter or a 40 hours a week office administrator who sings on the side, this is to encourage you to keep creating and make the world a better place, one song, poem, piece of art at a time.
I also have written a mini tracking tune for you to sing along to while you track.Time To Track by Marysia Trembecka
Plus I did a Podcast in detail on tracking and its advantages.
The following is what we need to track[...]
