Cat Morley who commissioned my series on Time Management for Creative People, has started blogging about her experience of putting the ideas into action. Her first post is Why We Need to Be Organised to Be Creative.

My posts are going out on Fridays and she’s promising to answer my questions the following Monday. I have to say I’m really looking forward to following it, I love seeing what people make of my questions. A while ago I did a documentary where the client kept a video diary between sessions, which was fascinating to watch, this gives me a similar feeling.

Here’s one question and Cat’s reply:

What effect does feeling muddled and disorganised have on your creativity?

When I’m not in control I stagnate. I lose sight of what should be important, at times wasting time on what’s not important - the fiddly side projects.

Today I worked without a to-do list and found myself jumping up from my work to do chores, going off into a different projects (emails, answering blog conversations, cleaning my desktop) and making excuses. I’m not saying the emails and blog conversations are not important. They are. But in their own time.

Amen to that, sister. That sense of constant interruption, of never being able to settle and focus properly, was one of the reasons I investigated time management, and a prime reason for sharing what I found in this series. It’s bad enough to have that feeling whatever your job is, but if you’re a professional artist or creative then it’s robbing you of your most valuable (and enjoyable) resource - your attention.

The next post comes out this Friday on Business of Design Online. Here are the post titles for the whole series:

October 11: Why you need to be organised to be creative

October 19: Prioritise work that is ‘important but not urgent’

October 26: Ring-fence your most creative time

November 2: Avoid the ‘Sisyphus effect’ of endless to-do lists/p>

November 9: Get things done by putting them off till tomorrow

November 16: Get things off your mind

November 23: Review your commitments

November 30: Resources to help you get things done

Thanks for sharing, Cat.

One of the projects I’ve been working on behind the scenes is a guest series on Time Management for Creative People for Business of Design Online.

OK, on the face of it time management isn’t the most inspiring topic - but my experience of working with clients suggests that it’s becoming more and more important for creative professionals. With the explosion of communications technology and the pressures of modern work, it’s becoming very difficult to manage all the demands coming our way, let alone to find time for focused creative work.

This became obvious to me a couple of years ago, when I realised I was finding it hard to keep up with all my commitments, and was feeling stressed by trying to keep track of it all, let alone get it all done. What was most frustrating was feeling my concentration being shredded by interruptions, demands and distractions from so many different sources - online and offline - and realising this was having a serious impact on my creativity.

So I started investigating different systems of time management and trying to relate them to what I knew about the creative process. This series for BoDo is a distillation of what I’ve learned through experimenting with my own working routine. I’ve also been working with clients on the same issues, and incorporated their feedback into the material for the series.

The tagline for the series - Manage the mundane, create the extraordinary - encapsulates what I believe is the main benefit of time management for creative people: the ability to deal with day-to-day ’stuff’ efficiently and get it off your mind, so that you can focus on the seriously interesting business of creative work.

Thanks to Cat and Neil of BoDo for inviting me to write the series - over the past few months they have built their site into a rich and authoritative source of information on all aspects of the business of working as a designer. Although it focuses on designers, most of the material is relevant to any form of creative profession, so I would encourage you to have a good look through the archives.

The series will appear every Friday for the next 7 weeks on BoDo. I hope you find it useful (and even inspiring!) - please share your responses and experiences in the comments.

Excellent piece by D Keith Robinson on Graphic Define about Getting Things Done and Creativity.

If you’re not familiar with Getting Things Done, it’s a personal organisation system devised by David Allen - yes I know, it doesn’t sound very inspiring, but the basic idea is that when you’ve got a system that takes care of all the mundane stuff you have to deal with day-to-day, you can free up your mind for more interesting and important things.

I’ve been using the GTD system since last summer (at Antonio’s suggestion) and I definitely think it’s made me more creative as well as more productive. Like most of us, I’ve got loads of information and commitments to manage, and the GTD system means I can deal with it without having to make much effort to remember things, or worry that I’ve forgotten something important. Which frees up a lot of mental space, and makes it much easier to concentrate on the task in hand - creative or otherwise.

Keith’s article makes some interesting comparisons between GTD and the creative process - he also lists some good introductory GTD resources at the end of the article. And there are lots of other good articles for professional creatives on the Graphic Define site.

If you’re intrigued by GTD David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity” tells you how to do it. The bad news is it takes a fair bit of time and effort to get started - block off a spare weekend for the initial review. The good news is it could change your life - and your creativity.

I recently came across these notepads for creative meetings from Behance (via PSFK). They are designed to make creative people more productive by providing highlighted spaces for you to record agreed ‘next actions’ during meetings. There are also spaces for noting your ‘prep/focus’ for a meeting, as well as general notes.

So what? You might think. Do I really need a special notepad to do that for me? Well logically you probably don’t - but in the middle of a meeting/discussion/argument, when ideas are flying thick and fast, it’s easy for agreed actions to get lost in the thickets of scribbled notes. I’ve printed off the sampler and found that the highlighted ‘Action steps’ slots make it blatantly obvious afterwards what you’ve agreed to do. Let’s face it, creative projects can get pretty complicated, so I’m glad of anything that makes things a bit more obvious and easy.

Have a look at the pads for yourself - no, they’re not paying me to write this, and you can download a free PDF sample. The Behance site also includes an outline of their Action Method for processing action steps and meeting notes. If you’re a hardcore Getting Things Done fan, it should probably slot quite easily into your GTD system.

Behance also have a section featuring creative professionals who make ideas happen so if that’s you you might like to let them know.