This post describes three methods I’ve found to be extremely useful in creating a more productive workspace. By “workspace” I’m referring to your work environment – whether that be at home, at the office, or busking in front of a subway station.

1 . Use a dry erase board to track important things.

One of the more recent things I’ve been doing is using a dry erase board to keep a running log of various things that are going on.

Right now, my dry erase board currently has notes on a future blog post topic that I’m going to be writing. Because I’m doing a lot of prep work for the post (personal trials, research, etc.), I want to keep all of that information in front of me. Whenever I look off to the side, I immediately see my notes and I stay on track – cool, huh? I also have a magnet on the board that has one of my favorite quotes every from Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have!”

You can use a whiteboard to track a lot of different things, such as:

• Your goals - A lot of people use them for daily, weekly, and monthly goals. I’ve done this before, and I do love it – there’s something about always seeing your goals in front of you that spurs you towards action. If you always have your goals fresh in your mind, you have no excuse to procrastinate on something else!
• Quotas that need to be met - “Make ten sales phone calls” would be an example of a quota. When you finish with a phone call, put a tally mark by the quota. Personally, I also love making the tally marks while I’m filling up my quotas. Perhaps because the action of making those marks makes the quota feel much more tangible and realistic; it makes it feel more achievable.
• Dates, times, and reminders – This one should be fairly obvious. You wouldn’t want to miss a date, an appointment, or an important doing, right?

2. Keep your goals in front of you at all times.

The more you work, the more you realize that a thousand things can occur during a day that completely knock you off of course. Also, appearing busy doesn’t always necessarily mean that you’re getting anything valuable accomplished. Don’t try to fool me.

There are lots of ways you can keep your goals in front of you. Some people love and advocate putting up pictures around your house/office/place of work that adequately (and beyond) describe the goal that you’re after. For example, somebody who’s looking at shedding those pre-holiday pounds and wishing to gain some muscle might put up some pictures of people with toned up bodies without an ounce of fat on them. A variation of this theme is typing out, in large print, your goals and aspirations and printing out and using those instead of pictures.

You can do similar things on your computer as well. Change your screensaver to your goals. Change your background picture to a picture of your aspirations. There are programs out there that can act like Sticky Notes on your desktop – perhaps you wanna write a few of your goals down and stick them up on top of your background, as a constant reminder when all of your windows are minimized. (Just what you wanna see before you turn off your computer for lunch – “Don’t eat that slice of cake!” )

There’s really no reason you shouldn’t be reviewing your goals like this every single day. It might sound silly in practice, but it works. Without guidance, most people tend to falter. The pull of everything else going on around you is too great; there are too many things to become distracted by. If you don’t keep an eye on your goals, you’re going to get knocked off balance.

3. Let your desk and office space reflect who you are.

The biggest mistake when it comes to workspace productivity is trying to make everybody’s desk look homogenous. If you’re not exactly like everyone else, don’t try to be like everyone else!

Some people work well with lots of piles and clutter scattered all around their desk and office space with no rhyme or reason. To you, it may look like they’re about to skip town, buy a small trailer out in the boondocks, and live happily ever after with 20 stray cats. To them, it may be a highly efficient way of organizing materials that they need to constantly use. If you tried to use their organizational method, it’d drive you mad. If they tried to use your organizational method, they’d be booking their train ticket out of town faster than you can say “Here, kitty!”

Currently, my desk looks like something straight out of The Devil Wears Prada, and I couldn’t be happier. I have a small lamp which I use at night ’cause I don’t like working in super bright light at night. On the left side of my computer, I have a stack of personal development books I’m currently reading, reviewing, and taking notes on, as well as some other books which I’m reading for fun and information purposes. In the upper right hand side of my desk, I have a layout of some magazines (yes, just like Miranda!) that I flip through occasionally throughout the day. I like reading magazines because they’re often a great source of ideas for this blog, and they’re something very relaxing about perusing through a magazine that you enjoy. I also have a small notebook on top of my books that I use to take notes in. And of course, my laptop and mouse is right in front of me.

That’s it. There’s nothing else on the desk. There’s nothing directly in front of the computer; it’s empty space. There are no pictures of anything or anybody; there isn’t an inbox of any sort to collect random junk that gets thrown at me throughout the day; there’s no plant or decoration adorning the desk at all. In other words, my desk is clean, neat, and absolutely perfect!

You may not be like this. You may need to have a thousand folders strewn across the desk because the nature of your job requires you to constantly flip back and forth between one project and another. Or maybe you’re just passive aggressive with a hidden agenda against us neat freaks.

The point is simply this: let your workspace reflect who you are. Don’t be afraid to radically change your desk to look like somebody else’s if you think that another layout is going to get you better results. The end result is to become more productive – experimentation is your friend.

Now go make some changes!

This article is biased towards the creative fields (I’m a musician with experience, after all) but the ideas and insights can be applied to any field where there’s a low standard for entry with lots of people vying for the same outcome.

This article takes some of the fabulous ideas from Steve Pavlina’s newsletter about the same topic, but with fresh ideas and my own perspective added to the mix. He mentions a lot of great insights, but there’s a lot that can be said and contributed to this topic.

Let’s begin!

So what’s a slush pile?

Ah, the dreaded slush pile. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

The “slush pile” – as described by Steve Pavlina – is where all enterers to a crowded, creative field first wind up. It’s the enormous group of wannabes, beginners, and dabblers who wish to make it big in a creative field, such as music, acting, or writing. They all have varying levels of skill, talent, ambition, and so on, but they all would like to leave a mark and become successful in their respective field.

Most people give up while still wading around in the slush pile. They don’t make much progress, so they abandon their hope and move on to something else. “I’ve been at this for so long!” they whine to the nearest person within hearing distance. “Why can’t I get a big break?! Why are so many people passing me by?! Life isn’t fair!”

YouTube, for all intensive purposes, is a video slush pile. It may let you live out your hopes and dreams for a bright future through online video, but with hours upon hours of video being uploaded per minute, do you really have the opportunity to stand out? Perhaps. If you continue to operate how everybody else operates, you really won’t stand a chance. The internet is inundated with videos of countless singers and actors wanting to get their chance in the spotlight. The odds that a talent scout are going to stumble upon your YouTube channel, watch a video, and contact you to be signed to an agency are pretty low indeed. I’d say they’re so low that I wouldn’t bother with YouTube if that’s your only strategy.

Facebook fan pages, MySpace artist profiles, and twitter accounts are all virtual slush piles too. The internet is overloaded with businesses, musicians, and celebrities trying to reach out to the greatest audience possible. As a result, these three things are not as innovative as they once were. A Facebook fan page two years ago would have been clever. A Facebook fan page now… not so much. Simply owning a Facebook fan page is like buying a billboard on a highway. Does it make much of a difference in the long run? Not really. And let’s not get started on the people who still love MySpace artist profiles.

Anyone can pick up a guitar, profess that they have a love of music, and start strumming away. But there’s an incredible difference (and chasm) between being able to play a few pretty songs on a musical instrument and developing the skill set to share a valuable musical skill with everybody.

Stop railing against the system.

You see this with people who are mired in the slush pile. They don’t want to get out of the pile quite yet because they still think they can make strides and break through to the next level… but they don’t see a true way they can do this. Instead of diligently working on their breakthrough, they start endlessly whining about how the system is inherently unfair to everybody.

“Why isn’t anybody watching my YouTube video? I spent so much time crafting this perfect viral video that I skipped eating for three days!”

Please don’t be like these people. Otherwise I’m going to have to ask you to leave the slush pile once and for all. Or I’ll buy a pair of ear plugs just to use when you’re around.

The pile is only unfair to those who think it’s unfair. You can’t get ahead by cursing the system to Hades and back. The system exists for a reason – many people have used it, and many more people have gotten it to work for them. It’s like if you started a brand new blog and then whined that there are no amazing posts. The only way to get more posts is to write them yourself, ding dong.

A lot of people like to choose YouTube as their choice punching bag when it comes to systems they dislike. YouTube is somewhat democratic in the way that it lets you choose which videos you want to watch, and it also gives you a wide way to share those videos. More interestingly, part of YouTube’s uniqueness and appeal is that anybody can create a video of any quality and put it online for the world to see. In a perfect world (and YouTube’s likely ideal), the best videos would be sifted from the mediocre ones and would be seen by many people on the basis of how wonderful they are. But this isn’t how it works.

And so that’s when people who perceive that they are more talented than other video makers start rattling up a big brouhaha over the unfairness of the YouTube system. “My video is better than hers!” “I’m much more talented than him!” “Our mini-movie was funnier than theirs!” becomes their pathetic battle cry. I can already feel my ears starting to bleed.

If this is you: FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS GOOD AND HOLY, STOP.

Sometimes the systems we get to work with aren’t ideal. They may be extremely close, such as with YouTube, Facebook, twitter, and the like. But they aren’t perfect.

You’ll never get ahead and move out of the slush pile until you accept the fact that yes, some people are going to have lucky breaks, and no, maybe you won’t ever get that lucky break that you dream of like Justin Bieber serendipitously did. The sooner you come to terms with reality, the better. Only then can you move on to actively working yourself out of the slush pile.

Whining about how awful you think the situation is will never make the situation any better. And let’s face it – the only people who are going to agree with you are the people who are in the same situation. The people who’ve moved on to greener pastures are going to look at you while pointing and laughing. Not exactly a position where you want to be, is it?

Build up your strengths.

The slush pile is full people on various walks of life. Thus, they all have a varying degree of skill and talent.

This isn’t such a bad thing. When everybody possesses a different skill level, you can see where you stand against other people aspiring to have a similar career to what you’d like. (I don’t advocate turning your comparisons into this huge competition where you feel like you have to best every single person you run into, as that only gets you deeper into the pile. But knowing where to stand allows you to figure out what specific skills you can work on.)

However, when entry to a field is so ridiculously low that all you have to do is literally show up, certain people are going to automatically be weeded out. It’s like watching a really terrible singer on American Idol. There’s a certain baseline that all of the contestants generally have to meet before they can go from being someone who auditioned to an actual contestant on the show. The people who are tone deaf, cannot carry a tune, are woefully unprepared, and don’t look the part are not going to make it through to the next round. If you decide to go into a field and you notice that you belong into this latter group, you know you need to start working. Hard.

Across the board, there are similar patterns in every single creative field. For example, blogging has the same way of weeding out people like American Idol does, albeit in a different fashion. There are lots of “okay, eh, I sorta like what I read there” bloggers, but there are very few “Wow, this dramatically changed my life! I must share this with other people as soon as I calm myself…” bloggers. It’s difficult to go from being the former to being the latter. That’s what happens when there isn’t any entry level requirements. To be a blogger, you simply have to open up a blog. You can do that for free at lots of different sites. It takes no time and no effort. To craft amazing posts that get shared all around the world… well, that’s a different story. That’s a skill that can be learned.

The people who have the skills and talents that their field requires are the people who are going to succeed. The people who don’t are going to falter and drop out.

Unfortunately, building up skills and talents takes time. Being able to play Christmas carols on the piano when your family comes over for the holidays is pretty simple. You could probably do it with less than six months of piano lessons if you were dedicated. Performing a beautiful Chopin nocturne that’s technically and musically brilliant, however, is not easy. It’s rather difficult.

If you’re a musician, an actor, a blogger, or anything that requires you to consistently produce creative value on a regular basis, you must build up your skills. Find out what you’re amazing at, and make those talents shine bright. You don’t have to be the best at everything. But you need to excel in something that can produce value to other people. You can’t get around it in any other way.

If you’re a personal development blogger, learn how to craft your posts to produce the most value and most emotional impact to people. If you’re a singer, find the genre that you love the best and nail it down.

Build a platform for yourself and your works.

Once you know what you’re amazing at and you’ve built it up to a level where you can start producing real value from it, you can begin building a platform to get you out of the slush pile. Use everything you have to create a great platform for yourself that separates you from the crowd of people who are already clamoring for attention.

There are two ways you can go about building up a platform for your works: through the front door, and through the backdoor.

Building up a platform through the front door means putting yourself into the slush pile, but seriously differentiating yourself from everyone else. For example, say you’re an aspiring director. If you’re amazing at creating videos, perhaps YouTube would be the best place for you to showcase your talent. This method works

Building up a platform through the backdoor means you completely evade the slush pile and you work yourself into your field through a completely different, unique route. If you’re great at building web traffic, maybe you want to start a website on how to create movies, directed at amateurs, and gradually build up your traffic while showcasing your own skills. Eventually you’ll be so networked that other people are going to come in contact with your works that they’ll want to work with you.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. If you notice other people getting similar results that you want, feel free to use what’s working for them for yourself. Now, don’t copy them. That’s not nice. (And remember, lightning never strikes in the same place twice.) However, if you’re a blogger and you notice someone creating blog posts that seem to resonate with their audience, why don’t you try a similar style? If you’re an opera singer and you love the tone of a particular singer, why not try something in the same vein for yourself? If you’re a pop song writer and you love Lady Gaga… well, maybe you should find someone less famous to get inspiration from, copycat.

Me and the Slush Pile – My Tale

As readers of this blog know, I play the piano. A couple of years ago, I wanted to begin to do more piano accompanying and performing, but I wasn’t sure how to break into the field.

Musical careers are unique ones; you don’t necessarily need college degrees to become successful (just look at any pop star), but as I mentioned before, there’s a certain baseline of talent that’s required before you can start earning decent income from your abilities. Because there’s no formal training involved, ability levels range wildly – from people who just piddle around on the keyboard to people who can play Beethoven sonatas in their sleep. Now that’s talent.

I quickly realized that while “being the best pianist” was an interesting goal that was motivating, it was a useless goal for me. Being the best pianist at what? At classical music? At accompanying? At teaching other people? At jazz improvisation? It was such a big, vague goal that I could spin my wheels forever towards an end result that I didn’t care much for. Piano playing has so many subsets that you can take lifetimes exploring each route individually and still never be finished fully investigating what you chose. I needed something more specific.

At the time, I realized I was in some kind of slush pile, but I didn’t have a name for it. All I knew was that I needed a real way of differentiating myself from the others.

After some thinking, I figured my best way to escape this slush pile was to make myself so different that other people would hire me because I offered skills that nobody else had. If the baseline was low, I just had to figure out what kinds of things they couldn’t do, and then do them myself.

Yes, this was hard. It was probably the toughest way I could have went about making myself stand out. When you go against the grain and you do everything that nobody else wants to do, you’re signing yourself up for a lot of difficult work.

Fast forward today, a few years later, and I’m pretty well networked in this area. All the accompanists know each other, and when one of us can’t perform at an event, we just call up another person who’d be most likely to fill in.

* * * * *

If the slush pile didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be such a high demand for great, unique creative talent. It doesn’t exist to beat you down and make you feel like you can never aspire to a creative career. It’s there to serve you. The systems are in place to give you the greatest chance to get your works out there. It’s up to you to make that happen.

Don’t fear the slush pile, because you’ll never have to step foot in it again.

]]> http://www.refocusedliving.com/2010/12/how-to-avoid-the-slush-pile/feed/ 0 http://www.refocusedliving.com/2010/12/make-little-decisions-immediately/ http://www.refocusedliving.com/2010/12/make-little-decisions-immediately/#comments Fri, 17 Dec 2010 10:00:38 +0000 Aleksander http://www.refocusedliving.com/?p=740 What if you have a lot of things you can possibly do, but you aren’t totally sure of what you truly want to be doing?

For example, say that you’re a blogger. You can easily think of 10 different topics you’d like to write about, but you can’t really pinpoint the exact topic that you want to create into a post. What do you do?

Honestly? Just pick something!

Pick something. Pick anything. Stop debating. Just do it!

Don’t stand in front of the fridge debating what to eat for dinner. Just pick the best healthiest thing that sounds amazing to you, and chow down! Don’t stare at a stack of books mulling over what you want to read; just pick a book from the pile and read that first page. Can’t decide on what exercises to do? Well… maybe you can procrastinate on that for a day, like everyone else.

I’ve found out that little indecisions get in the way of life. They clog up my own mental RAM. For example, it’s no secret that I love writing for my blog. If I’m too busy debating what topic I want to write about, I’m not actually getting any work done. Ideas by themselves don’t provide value to my readers. But picking an idea, writing it up into an insightful blog post, and sharing it with people online gets the value out there. A little indecision like “what topic should I write about today?” can waste my time and put me in a worse position for tomorrow.

Likewise, procrastinating on eating makes me cranky. You don’t wanna deal with me when I’m cranky.

I’ve also noticed that even when I give myself a time limit to decide on what to do, I’m worse off than what I was. Thinking about my decisions for 10 minutes vs. 5 minutes vs. even 1 minute doesn’t lead to any better decisions than if I were simply to pick something right at that immediate second. It’s almost like I intuitively “know” what I should be doing.

Little decisions that are consciously put off for no good reason also invariably leads to procrastination. In this case, it’s not so much that procrastination is caused by analysis paralysis, but that it’s caused by one thing you should have done not being done at all. Because on action was taken, your motivation decreases. When motivation decreases, it’s harder to get it back up to previous levels.

So, what should you be doing right now? Right, you wanna read another blog post by me.

Unless, of course, you’re me. For some reason, even on projects I “know” I should be completing, I just can’t get myself to move forward. For example, who really wants to clean out a shelf in their closet? Just looking at the mess makes me want to sprint in the other direction faster than a lion chasing dinner on an African plain. First I’d have to actually go to the closet, then start pulling stuff out… then organizing all of said stuff… then putting everything in new places… ugh, it’s one big mess. And it’s boring, too.

Part of the problem that I (and many other people) have is that when we look at an unpleasant task or project, it shifts into this daunting, irritating mess. We all know that when we look at things in a negative light, it causes us to start labeling those things with negative assumptions. So, it doesn’t matter if the task is “clean out the entire closet” or “clean out two shelves in the closet” or “clean half a shelf in the closet,” the task still looks unpleasant.

How did I get around this problem?

The easiest thing I have found that helps me get around this problem is to do one simple task. One, simple, dirt easy task. Complete one task that’s so simple that it’d be foolish and silly for you to say “No, that’s too much work! I can’t do that.”

One simple task, that’s all it takes!

“One task?” you ask, “that’s all I need to do?” Yep. Here are some examples of doing one task on something that you might procrastinate with:

• Instead of checking all 150 emails in your inbox, check just one.
• Have a blog post you want to write, but you can’t figure out where to start? Type just one sentence – no more, no less.
• Want to start a new book but don’t have time for it? Read the first line of the first chapter, then put the book down.

I like to refer to these simple tasks as “mini-actions” – they’re things that are so obnoxiously simple, they’re like miniature action steps. It’s not quite doing an entire action step, but doing a very small sliver of one.

Write one bar of music. Put one book back on the bookshelf. Place one dish from the dishwasher back where it belongs. Simple simple simple.

Doing one mini-action step overcomes any inertia that might have built up from procrastination or analysis paralysis. Can’t figure out where to start? Do one simple thing that couldn’t possibly be any simpler. Your project looks too large that it scares you? Figure out the easiest task to do that’ll take the least amount of time and complete it.

The great thing about this method is that once you do one thing, you’ll feel compelled to do some more. Since one little task is already done, why not try another? And then another? You break the pattern that was holding you back all along.

What’s going to be your next simple task you’ll complete? Ah, that’s right. You’re going to read the first sentence of another one of my blog posts.

How you phrase a goal and how you aim for it’s achievement can freshen up an otherwise boring goal. Things like these can boost motivation, keep you focused on completion, and give yourself a great challenge that’s not too tough, but not too easy either.

So how can you set fresher goals – goals that make you feel like you want to take inspired action immediately? Here are three simple ways.

1. Give yourself self-imposed constraints as a way to freshen creative thinking.

Occasionally you’ll set a goal that looks great on paper, but you drag yourself through the completion process. “Write a 1,000 motivational post on goal setting” sounds like an awesome, valuable goal; finishing the post and hitting “Publish” with a completed version is a different story.

Part of the reason motivation dissipates in these cases is because your heart rejects goals that seem uninspired. Your mind might say “Yes, I want to complete an amazing post on goal setting!” but your heart might say “Hold up. Something’s not right here. Intellectually, I know that this a fabulous idea… but where’s the passion behind the idea? I don’t totally agree with this goal.” This can be an incredibly frustrating issue to confront.

A great trick to use to get around this problem is to give your goal a creative constraint that forces you to think outside the box. For example, if the aforementioned goal is something you want to accomplish but you don’t find it in your heart to lift your fingers to type the post, why not make the goal interesting? Instead of simply typing 1,000 words, perhaps the constraint is that you’re not allowed to use any words with the letter “s” in them. Or maybe the constraint you choose is that you cannot use more than one of the same word in the entire post.

The goal here isn’t to give yourself massive constraints to the point that the goal is no longer enjoyable to reach. (No pun intended!) On the same side of that coin, you also don’t want to give yourself constraints that make it impossible to reach your goal – there’s absolutely no reason to self-handicap yourself. Instead, the idea is to add some spice and variety to a goal that’s desperately lacking in excitement.

Maybe the goal you set was too easy for you. It’s no fun to continue after goals that don’t give you a challenge, that don’t tug at your heart strings, that don’t give your mind a much needed workout. Constraints add in a wonderful way to truly test your abilities – constraints push your goals to the limits without pushing you over the brink.

2. Plan the goal out as much as humanly possible, and then set a fast tempo towards completion.

At first glance, this advice might seem like standard goal setting advice. “Work faster!” is something you see and hear in every goal setting blog post, guide, book, and speech. However, there’s a subtle difference here that I want to address.

Most people understand that you have a starting point for a goal (where you’re currently at) and a definite ending point (where you want to eventually be) and a time span for achieving that goal (everything that goes on in the middle). They also understand that goal setting also requires a bit of planning (how you are going to get through that middle section unscathed) and critical thinking so you don’t get stuck along the way.

And… that’s pretty much as far as people get. They fail at adequately planning through the rough middle section, and so when they hear the phrase “work faster!” they push on the gas and tailspin out of control. Somehow these people wind up in an even worse spot than they previously were in. Whoops!

A way to get around this is to give serious consideration to not only the goal you want to achieve, but also the goal setting process itself. You need to give critical thought to the steps it’s going to take you to get from Point A to Point B. Sometimes there’s not much to think about. At other times you may be sitting around creating pages of plans in order to be as best prepared as possible. Whatever the case may be, dump all of your thoughts onto paper and organize them in the most coherent manner possible. Completely plan out your goal from beginning to end with as much thought as possible – create that step by step plan.

Once you’ve created that plan and you know with a 95% assurance that you can achieve your goal by working your plan, then set a quick tempo and get moving! Now, notice I didn’t say “Work faster!” – I said, “set a quick tempo.” This is something that Donald Trump mentions in one of his books. He writes that he moves with a fast tempo (in other words, a fast speed) that requires everybody else to keep up with him… implying that if they don’t, they’re going to quickly fall behind.

A fast tempo or speed doesn’t necessarily mean you work haphazardly. And it doesn’t mean you breeze through tasks like a machine and create subpar work. If you reach your goal but only do a half-great job, you’ll wind up with a nagging feeling that you could have done much better. Instead, set a quick speed. Work quickly, but not stupidly. When one task is done, take a break, and immediately move on to the next step that you’ve previously planned out.

Speed is important when it comes to goal achievement. When you work at a slower tempo than what you could possibly work at, you’re unable to build momentum. One success inspires you to have another success, and so on. You can’t achieve this rapid pacing without moving quickly and intelligently through your plan.

With a step by step plan on how to achieve your goal and a brisk pacing, you’re feel as if your goal is fresh and brand new. It won’t stay stagnant in your mind and you’ll feel as if your goal is being accomplished every day, right before your very eyes.

3. Take your time to craft exciting goals. Let your goal ideas incubate for a little before you create an action plan and take action.

Have you ever gotten really excited over something that sounds like an awesome idea at the moment? You probably started diving right into your idea without much forethought… and, of course, the next day you hit a roadblock when the high motivation you had for your idea fizzled out.

Lackluster goals often act as a mask over what we truly desire. Sometimes when we begin thinking about what a goal means to us, we realize we never wanted that goal in the first place. Because these dull goals look good on the outside at first glance, you’re prone to falling in the trap of starting them before you even know what you’re doing. (For example… do you remember that awesome looking bag of potato chips sitting on the kitchen counter? I bet you promised yourself you were only going to eat one chip. )

When you think of an idea that you believe would make a great goal, let it sit in your mind for a bit. Think about the idea for a couple of days. Spend some time thinking about if the idea is a goal that aligns up with your values and missions in life. You might find that goals that appear fresh to you are the ones that you can truly stand behind at the end of the day; these goals are the ones that you put a massive amount of thought into what the end results are going to look like.

* * * * *

Setting fresher goals isn’t something that’s difficult, but it does take a bit of thought. You’ll never want to go back to setting boring goals ever again.

Timeboxing 101

Timeboxing is a relatively simple thing to learn. First, you take a task that you have, and then you figure out how long it’s going to take you to complete the task. You try your best to finish your task in that amount of time, trying not to go over your time limit by any amount.

For example, say you wanted to write a 500 word blog post on the joys of time management. You decide that this task would take you about 45 minutes to complete (meaning: write the post, edit it, and hit publish). You slot out some time to work on this task (say, from 2 to 2:45 in the afternoon) and off you go!

When you’re timeboxing up tasks, a general rule of thumb is to only use time amounts up to an hour. If you have a large task to complete, break it up into small tasks. Bigger projects can always be sliced up into smaller projects, which can be completed in a smaller amount of time. And always remember, the end result of timeboxing is a completed project.

The Greatness of Timeboxing

Almost all of the main reasons timeboxing is such a fabulous time management tool is that it helps you overcome very simple problems.

• It stops you from being a perfectionist. Limiting yourself to X amount of time to work on a task halts the need to constantly edit a work when it’s completed.
• It forces you to work on the meat of the project. If you only have an hour to complete something, your energy is going to be focused on getting real work done. You won’t succumb as often to distractions. You also won’t be paying attention to the bells and whistles of your work – stuff that really doesn’t matter.
• It forces you to ship a finished product. Perhaps the greatest benefit of timeboxing is the fact that the end goal is the completion of something. This is especially beneficial to creative people – because they would have finished a creative project, they’re able to immediately ship it out the door and into the hands of other people who are hungry for their work. Creative people hate deadlines because they feel like it stifles their creativity – but if they don’t have anything to show for their creativity, what good are their crafts?

The Perils of Timeboxing

Of course, all time management techniques have a few downsides that you may want to consider. Some of these downsides for timeboxing include the following.

• Not adequately estimating the time it’ll take you to finish a task. Timeboxing works best when you can guess how much time you’ll need to complete a task within a reasonable margin of error. Trying to condense a 4 hour project into 1 hour might cripple your end results. Sometimes it’s best to slightly overestimate the time needed to complete something, so you can give yourself a little breathing room.
• Trying to squeeze large creative projects into a small amount of time. Some creative work is going to take you a bit of time to do. Examples of this include cooking a gourmet meal, composing a song, or writing a very large blog post. There are just too many steps to complete before you can ship a final product. Fortunately, this can be remedied by simply breaking up your project into a series of smaller projects, as noted above.

Is timeboxing right for you?

Timeboxing success depends on how you implement the technique and what kind of personality you have. All people can be successful with it, however.

If you’re a naturally creative person, timeboxing might feel like it’s a restrictive constraint that does no good. You may feel as if it stifles your creativity. On the other hand, like I mentioned above, very creative people tend to not produce much real value in the eyes of other people because they’re constantly refining their works to an outrageous standard.  If nothing gets into the hands of other people, how can you share your value? This time management skill fixes that problem by forcing you to accept that a finished product is better than no product at all.

On the flip side of the coin, if you’re a naturally left brained person, timeboxing might feel like it fits extremely well into how you naturally think. Limiting the amount of time you take with a task forces you to complete it well in a short amount of time. That feels like a natural extension of your “no nonsense, let’s finish the task and get it over with” personality.

Like everything in personal development, time management skills are something that you develop over time. These techniques are something you can constantly tweak and experiment with in order to become more productive… and this includes timeboxing.

Asking specific questions is a lot like goal setting in a miniature way. When you set a goal that’s sharp and focused, you’re able to see past the finish line. The steps you need to take to cross that line become clear. If your goal is “I want to set better goals,” you’ll never get there. At best, you’ll be able to take a few random stabs in the dark and you may achieve some limited results that result in a few clearer goals. However, if you rewrote that goal as “I’m reading one new goal setting book and finding and applying five tips and tricks that I can immediately apply to my goal setting,” it’s clear to see what results you want to see after the goal is completed. It even lends itself to implying how you’re going to achieve the goal.

Because everybody loves music, I’m going to give you a musical example to illustrate this topic further. Don’t worry if you don’t have a musical bone in your body or you can’t play the piano – you’ll still understand and appreciate the message coming across.

Bad: “How come I can’t play this passage?”

I shouldn’t even need to give an explanation for why this is a bad question. This question is the farthest question from being clear. You get a few brownie points for being in the general ballpark (piano playing) and at least asking a question about something you’re having trouble with (can’t play something). If you asked this question to any piano teacher worth their weight in Mozart sheet music, they’ll immediately ask you to clarify.

Better: “Why do my fingers start to get tangled when I get to these measures, even though I’ve practiced this passage for hours on end?”

Okay, this is a little bit better. Now we know what the problem is (finger dexterity at a specific area in the music) and a piano teacher can start giving you methods to fix your problem. But you’re still not telling us your issue in a specific, focused way. While this question is leaps and bounds ahead of the former question, there are still some clarity issues that need to be resolved.

Best: “When I get to measures 34 to 36, I become finger tied as I’m not quite sure which fingers to use to achieve the most smooth playing in this passage while still sounding quiet and mysterious.”

The above question is like a piano teacher’s version of heaven. Now it’s clear what your main problem is (not sure of which fingers to use to play certain notes) and where the problem is located at (measures 34 to 36), and you’re also telling me what characteristics you want the final solution to have (must be able to also sound smooth, quiet, and mysterious).

The more crystal clear your questions are, the better results you’re going to have in the long run. Asking a vague question will almost always result in a vague answer. It’s like somebody asking you to identify a tall, thin object in thick fog. What you’re looking at could be a tree, a telephone pole, or even a lighthouse, but because you’re vision is cloudy, you’ll never quite know for sure. Remove the fog from your mind by being more precise. You want to be able to ask your questions to yourself or other people and be able to get an answer back that’s going to totally work for you, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

At the end of the day, the best questions always lead themselves to solutions, as you probably have guessed. A well crafted question leads itself to a beautifully sculpted answer. When you can see the answer to your question emerging in front of you, you no longer feel stuck; when you no longer feel stuck because you now know exactly what to do, you’re more likely to take immediate action. Action leads to a motivational increase – feeling motivated always feels good, which then leads you to asking better questions.

Lame questions are… well, lame! Don’t ask lame questions, and if you need any help… just ask around.

Where’d all that inspiration go? It was like it seeped through the page I was note taking on. You know… “poof!” All gone!

Then I realized something that blessed my writing life. Whenever I’d be sketching out my ideas, I’d always pretend to be speaking to an audience. When I’d take notes on time management, in reality I’d be “lecturing” about time management to an imaginary crowd. This wasn’t too weird to me; I love extemporaneous speaking and spur of the moment improvising. Speaking seemed to be a natural way to organize my thoughts. The problem always began when I got to the computer. Now that I was no longer “speaking” to a crowd, I’d have to type out what I thought I said. The structure that seemed so spontaneous and witty at the time now felt contrived and forced. What to do?

Eventually, I came upon the answer. And it was ridiculously simple – do as much speaking about the topic immediately before writing as possible.

No, I don’t record myself speaking and try to transcribe my mumbles. (I’d be here all day!) I simply verbalize my next few paragraphs as if I’m addressing a question from a crowd of people, and then I sit at my computer and type out my thoughts.

When you’re explaining a topic to somebody else, you’re forced to automatically arrange your thoughts in a somewhat logical way (unless you’re randomly verbalizing your thoughts.) If you’re explaining an exact process to somebody, where D is the end goal, you’re going to have to talk about A, B, and C first, in that order. You could try to work backwards, from D to C to B to A, or in a different order, but that could cause some confusion. You want your explanations to be as coherent as possible.

When I try to write without speaking through my thoughts first, I tend to not be entirely clear on which direction I want to take my writing in. When you’re writing up a blog post or typing in a word processor, it’s very easy to write a sentence or two and then stop because you’re thinking of the perfect way to structure your next sentence. Or perhaps you stopped because you want to decide where to take your thoughts from there. Unfortunately, because of the thousands of ways you could do each of those things, analysis paralysis becomes a full blown issue – especially for me, and for those of you out there who feels like each word you write has to be the absolute perfect word for that sentence.

Also, when I’m pretending I’m talking to somebody who’s genuinely interested in what I have to say, it feels like my words are a bridge to a true connection. The writing becomes clearer and more interesting because I feel as if I’m writing to you – the reader – personally. I’m writing for a human being, somebody who’s going to be reading this post and applying the wisdom in it to achieve fantastic results. These kinds of feelings are very hard to achieve when I write using an outline or my expansive note collection. An outline might work well when writing a research paper. It’s not so useful when writing for an individual person.

It’s also worth mentioning that sometimes you’ll get an amazing idea away from the computer, but still want explore and elaborate on. In these cases, take as many notes as you want, but once you get home lecture about the notes you took. Use your notes to guide you, but only as a outline. Then write down your spoken thoughts accordingly.

If you’re having trouble editing your written works, try speaking what you’ve written out loud. If it sounds odd when you hear it, chances are your readers are going to find it bizarre as well. (As a side note, edits should make your piece sound like a conversation between you and the reader. If any part of your work sounds mechanical and clunky, try rewriting it as if you were chatting with your best friend.)

Who would have ever known that your five year old self’s imaginary friend was going to come back one day to help you out?