Photo by Arlindo71

Well it’s been a busy month so far on Wishful Thinking and Business of Design Online - my e-book about Time Management for Creative People has been downloaded nearly 20,000 times and has attracted some great reviews and feedback.

A big thank you to everyone who has downloaded, forwarded, linked, commented or e-mailed to say they have found it useful. It’s been fantastic to see the book featured on some of my favourite blogs such as Copyblogger and Lifehacker, and Brian Wallace at Nowsourcing made the front page of Digg with his post about the e-book.

I’ve also enjoyed following the incoming links to new blogs and discovering people applying and adapting the ideas to their own situation. There’s not space to link to them all here, but have a look through the Technorati links pages for my post about the e-book and the ones on Business of Design Online.

If you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to download the e-book and share it with anyone who might find it useful.

My series on Time Management for Creative People is now available to download as a free e-book. It’s subtitled ‘Manage the Mundane - Create the Extraordinary’ as it’s designed to help you maintain your creative focus while dealing with your other commitments.

It’s published under a Creative Commons licence which means you are welcome to share it on a noncommercial basis with anyone you think would like it, as long as you keep it intact with my name on it. (N.B. the images are licensed from istockphoto, so you should obtain a licence from them if you want to use them in other contexts - photographer credits are on p.2)

A big thank you to Cat Morley and Neil Tortorella for prompting me to write the material and hosting it as a series on Business of Design Online. The final post in the series, on time management Resources, is up on BoDo now.

I hope you find the e-book useful - let me know your experiences in the comments or via e-mail.

Review your commitments is the penultimate post in my series on Time Management for Creative People on Business of Design Online.

The final post will appear this coming Friday - when the whole series will be available as a free e-book.

Get Things Off Your Mind is the next post in my series on Time Management for Creative People on Business of Design Online.

If you’ve ever forgotten an important commitment, or wish you could keep better track of your to-do lists, have a look at the post - it introduces David Allen’s concept of ‘buckets’ to help you get things off your mind and focus on what you are doing in the present. After all, our brains have more interesting things to do than remember stuff.

Get Things Done by Putting Them Off Till Tomorrow is the latest post in my series on Time Management for Creative People, for Business of Design Online.

‘Tomorrow’ has been humorously described as the greatest labour-saving device ever invented - but if you want to know how it can save you time and preserve your creativity (as well as your sanity), have a read of my post.

This post was inspired by Mark Forster’s work - I highly recommend his blog and his book Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management.

If you’ve ever had one of those days where your to-do list is longer by the evening than it was in the morning, this post is for you: Avoid the ‘Sisyphus Effect’ of Endless To-do Lists. It’s the latest in my guest series on Time Management for Creative People at Business of Design Online.

Let’s face it, Sisyphus may have had a hard time of it but at least he didn’t have to deal with e-mail.

Another entertaining post from Cat Morley about putting my Time Management for Creative People series into action. This time she’s talking about the dangers of distraction:

For instance, I get thirsty.

Yes, I know. We all get thirsty so please bear with me …

I head for the kitchen where the watercooler is. By the patio door. So far, so good. But today, I took a right turn out the door to answer a buzzing dryer. Half hour disappears. I have clothes folded, a new lot in the washer and dryer. And the mail read.

(note to self: turn off buzzer)

Or how about making a cuppa.

Once more, I head for the kitchen. I glance outside. A plant needs rescuing. The next hour? Spent repotting plants, pointing a hose at the green and enjoying cool water on my feet.

(is there such a thing as mid-life ADD?)

As a writer, I find this painfully funny. It reminds me of one of my favourite quotations, from novelist Kingsley Amis: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

There are basically two kinds of distractions, the ones we create ourselves and the ones provided for us by other people. My latest time management post offers some suggestions on how to Ring-fence Your Most Creative Time. I’ll continue the theme this coming Friday on Business Of Design Online, where I focus specifically on the endless list of incoming demands that threaten to take away our creative concentration.

Time management with a dash of hypnosis - Ring-Fence Your Most Creative Time is the next post in my guest series on Time Management for Creative People at Business of Design Online. This one incorporates some of the principles and techniques I learned from my original professional training, as a hypnotherapist.

It offers some (ahem) suggestions on how you can find and maintain your creative focus in the midst of all the demands of a hectic schedule.

If you find you can only do your best creative work in hotel rooms or with the smell of rotten apples wafting into your nostrils, fear not - you’re in good company. Head over to Business of Design Online to find out why.

Cat Morley has written another honest and interesting post about her experience of putting my Time Management for Creative People series into action.

She starts of by describing an island paradise where there wasn’t much to do in the way of entertainment and not a lot in the way of interruptions - so she found it fairly easy to get a lot of work done.

Apparently Bangkok is a little livelier:

Then what if you moved to one of the most exciting cities on earth. Bangkok. And what if there was no more live in help. And what if there was live music, easier amazon.com shipping, (some) bookstores, shops to drool over, Quiz Nights, a massage house in every neighbourhood, a new culture to discover and so much more. And what if all of this was available not by flying to another country, but by walking out the front door and hopping into a tuk tuk, or taxi, or by riding the sky train or the BTS.

How much work would you accomplish?

From personal experience, I can tell you, not a lot. Not without learning additional time management skills.

I think this is the crux of the problem for many creative professionals - we are attracted to busy, exciting cities that stimulate our imagination and provide networks of clients and collaborators; but the flpside of an always-on, always-connected lifestyle is that all those interruptions and distractions can play havoc with your creative focus.

I’m pleased that Cat is experimenting with a way of ring-fencing her creative time without following my own solution (getting up early) to the letter. Everyone’s different, so in this series I’m trying to offer general principles that people can take and adapt to their own talents and routines.

The next post in the series will appear this Friday on Business of Design Online. I’m looking forward to hearing what Cat makes of it next week…

The next post in my series on Time Management for Creative People is up on Business of Design Online - Prioritise Work That Is ‘Important But Not Urgent’.

So if you’ve ever wondered where I find the time to write this blog, head over to BoDo and find out.