I’ve been thinking about scheduling a lot lately, what with SxSW going on TOMORROW and all. I’m juggling a few projects at my daytime contract and a few for my personal business. I feel that some of the reason I’ve not been at the top of my game lately stems from how I schedule blocks of time to get into the flow.
I was reminded a few days ago of Paul Graham’s essay on Maker vs. Manager Schedules and I thought about my personal business. I often times need to be a maker and a manager – to need to have meetings and also give myself enough time to work effectively (and one assumes, live a life in between). I think what I’m going to do is schedule one day out of the week when I need to have a meeting and keep the rest of the week open to have some bit of flow.
There have been some awesome co-working spots that have opened up in Austin recently and talking with some of the people who run them about getting some time to get some real work done once a week or so. I think if I make myself have a standard meeting location, I have time to do managerial duties while leaving the rest of the evenings free to focus on actually making things (a persona I was working on should’ve been finished in one night instead of three).
I really want my business to succeed, I just need to be more effective in how I structure workflow so that I’m not doing more work with less results. We all make better ’stuff’ when we get in the zone, into the flow of things, so the more often I have batches of time, the better off I think my work will be.
