Refocused Living

Last night I read Steve Pavlina’s fabulous post on making great plans, then failing to execute those plans. While the post itself didn’t have any new insights for me – it kinda confirmed what I already knew about myself – it really got me thinking about how it took me so long to create a planning (and execution) method that works perfectly for me.

I’m one of those rare people who love to create plans for everything. If you can name any area in your life that you can have control over, I guarantee you that I have created a mission on how to improve that aspect of my life at some point. (Okay, so maybe I’m a little bit nutty in that respect, but that’s okay. )

Day to day planning is what I focus on now. To me, having a productive day is incredibly important. If I go to bed with a lackluster feeling, I’m almost certain to wake up in the morning carrying over some residual emotions from that. Or vice versa – a great day yesterday means a great start today. Planning has a lot to do with these feelings, obviously.

At first, I would plan out my days as if I was a productivity robot, able to burst through tasks effortlessly with a little time to spare. Back to back objectives with a little breathing room made up my schedules. I would think to myself, “this is what it means to be productive. This is what it means to schedule your time wisely.” Of course, I now know that life doesn’t work like that.

Something would always happen that would tear my plans to shreds. The task at hand would be completed way before my estimated time… not necessarily a bad thing. Or worse, the task at hand would take up way too much time, sometimes several hours more than I would have guessed. This happened way too often than not, and it often pushed other necessary, urgent tasks to the next day. While that would be okay once in a while, the cumulative effect wasn’t too pretty. I began to feel burnt out and stressed to the max.

Is it human nature to think that we’re more efficient workers than we really are? I’d like to think so. We all want to believe we’re great at barreling through tasks at a breakneck speed, able to conquer anything that we put in front of ourselves. The real world and our lives don’t work like this, however. We’re not perfect machines; we’re human beings. We plan for computers, but we behave like primates.

After these realizations, I began to plan in a different way. I had to be more flexible, more conscious in the realization that I can’t possibly execute my plans perfectly if I tried to box myself in a tight schedule day in and day out.

With a little trial and error, I worked out two planning guidelines that I use to allocate time to activities:

1. Only assign time amounts to those activities where time is the only requirement. There are certain things that I do that merely require I put in the necessary time. Piano practice is one of these. No matter if I choose to practice for one hour or three hours, I need to simply put in the time. Results will happen regardless, as long as I’m focused on the task at hand.
2. Schedule wide open spaces for activities that are creativity based. I love writing these blog posts and sharing my ideas with the world. Sometimes words flow effortlessly and I can create an inspired post at an incredible speed. At other times I decide to go at a slower pace, deliberately crafting my sentences and carefully choosing how I want to convey my message. These are the activities that I choose not to assign a time to.

Before I started planning like this, I would assume every task would be a #1 task. Somehow my brain thought that any objective could be assigned an allotted time amount and I would be able to finish that objective within that time frame. How wrong I was!

It’s true that some tasks will only require you to pump in the time. Running on the treadmill at the gym for 30 minutes will never, ever take 29 minutes or 31 minutes. Always 30. In order to knock off that exercise goal, all you have to do is put in the time. Easy. The same goes for any activity where time is the main measurable aspect of accomplishment, such as practicing a musical instrumental or studying.

But what about creative endeavors? It took me a while to realize that not all creative pursuits are made equal. There are instances where it’s fairly easy to finish up a project within a short amount of time. There are other even greater instances where more time is needed then you’d think. Countless times I’ve started writing blog posts that I think will only take me an hour to write and edit, but wind up being over 3 to 4 hours (or more) start to finish. Note that there’s nothing wrong with this – just the fact that it can and does happen.

Looking at planning through the nature of the tasks helped me create better plans that I can actually carry out. Try this method of planning out yourself. Plan for the human being that’s going to be carrying out your schedule – yourself.

Questions to ask yourself: Think of one of your current goal. Are you having trouble breaking up that goal into manageable chunks of time? What if you set aside one afternoon and freely worked on a section of that goal, without a time limit? Would you get more work or less work done? Why or why not?

A major issue for lots of creative people is the process of creating enough work to make an impact in their careers. More specifically, creative people seem to have a problem with sharing their own work out in public. This can be attributed to a lot of things – for example:, perfectionism, the feeling of inadequacy (e.g., “this work will never be good enough to show others”), or thoughts of being able to immediately create another work that’s even better than the the work just made.

But you know what? All of those crippling excuses for not sharing your creative works don’t matter. As soon as you come up with something creative, you need to put it out there ASAP. If you look throughout history, every single success story in any artistic field has tales of flops and tales of successes. But what defines those successful people from others is the fact that they kept trying again and again and again. If one thing they tried wasn’t successful, they immediately moved on to something else. Let’s look at a few examples.

Mozart was an incredibly prolific composer . He only composed a little over 30 years, but he wrote over 600 sets of pieces by the time he died at age 36. Starting when he was about 5 years old and ending literally on his deathbed, he never stopped the process of creating new artistic works.

The odd thing in Mozart’s story is that he only composed works purely for higher. He couldn’t sit around and wait for divine inspiration to strike at the perfect moment. No new compositions meant no money on the table; no money on the table meant he couldn’t support himself or his family. But even without sitting around waiting for a spark of creativity, he still managed to continuously compose and expand his accomplishments, creating beautiful masterpieces along the way.

If you go through Mozart’s catalog of works, you’ll see that most of his stuff isn’t even performed today. The first 200 to 300 works are pretty average, with some exceptions of course, but it didn’t stop him from composing the next piece. Even if one of his works failed miserably, it was still a brand new work to share with others. People kept hiring Mozart because they appreciated his compositions and admired his skills. Mozart never, ever took a break or quit; he worked nonstop on becoming an even better composer until the end of his life.

The best artists, the best writers, the best actors, the best directors, the best artistic people in the world are obsessed with continuously creating and throwing their new works into the hands of the public. If a new song or a new movie is a flop, so what? There’s always next time. They learn the lesson from the failure and move on.

Lady GaGa has been touring on almost a constant basis since early 2008, and now she’s selling out stadiums. Liberace started performing in restaurants when he was about 22 years old and didn’t stop until he was forced to due to extreme sickness, in his mid 60s; by that time, he was selling out Radio City year after year. Madonna constantly revives her career by sharply turning down different roads every single year, never halting to take a break. When she finishes recording a brand new record, there’s promotions and a tour to be done. When the tour is wrapped up, she undertakes another creative project almost immediately.

Great actors never stop honing their craft. A new role is always available for them to take on. Directors continuously direct.

The bottom line is that any famous person in any field, any success story, will have a long list of works behind their names. They might not be perfect works. They might not be works that people will look at in 20 years and think they were anything special. But to these people, it doesn’t matter – it’s a process of growing, of reinvention. It’s a story of becoming successful not right out of the box, but because they truly believed in their creative talent and did everything in their power to get that talent in the hands of other people.

Not every sonnet that Shakespeare wrote was a literary masterpiece. Not every piano piece Chopin composed will enter someone’s piano repertoire. Not every piece of art that Picasso painted was considered among his best.

Getting your work out there isn’t sitting on a completed work and thinking of ways that you could possibly perfect it. It’s doing the absolute, very best job you can at the time and then getting that work out into the hands of people who would appreciate what you do.

Will the average person notice the slight awkwardness of a brush stroke in a painting? The odd musical phrasing in a classical piece? A flubbed line in a play? Nope. Not at all. The average person is going to be focused on the piece of art being presented – the item you created. Not all of the imperfections that you personally see when you view your art.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of constantly sharing your works with the world is that you’ll be able to get first hand, live experience that shows you what works and what doesn’t work. Without this kind of awesome feedback, you’d never be able to know how to hone your craft into something greater. It’s one thing to be able to write a novel that you think deserves to be on a best seller list; it’s another thing to give it to somebody so they can assess what you’ve written and ofter a critique. Getting into a cycle of creating a work, sharing a work, then creating another even stronger work is something that will help you your entire life.

Think of it like a real world tennis lesson. When you first start playing tennis, you’re probably going to be absolute terrible. But with a teacher, and some practice off court, you can surely expect your skills to gradually improve over time… to the point where you might be pretty competent at hitting those balls. With the right mix of dedicated practice and a teacher to guide your moves to make sure you aren’t making any beginner’s mistakes or picking up on the wrong technique, it’s easy to see how your skill level would begin to improve and eventually soar.

Sharing creative works works the same exact way. Instead of learning tennis, it’d be creating valuable works for the world. Instead of hiring a private coach, you’d get real time feedback from your friends, family, even strangers who stumble upon what you do. Instead of practice, you’d be refining your process and coming up with an even better item to share with others. This process never changes, no matter if you’re learning a new sport, picking up a musical instrument, or writing a book of poems. Remember when you first learned how to drive a car? The method was exactly the same. You try, you got feedback, you tried again.

Creating and deliver value is at the heart of any creative career, ranging from fashion to music to acting to art. But it’s not enough to create a few things in hopes that one of them catches on with the public. You need to be the person who strives to always create something better, something brand new, every single day of your life. Be the person who takes every single completed work and shares it with the world.