Lack of time, so you don't have enough time for marketing. I get it, it can feel like there aren't enough hours in the day. But what I do know is that when you have a system in place, you clear strategy and some pretty nifty tools at your disposal. Things that happen. One of the biggest objections I hear from fellow creatives who wants to get more exposure for their work, sell more products get more clients, is I don't have time for self promotion. Or I don't have time to make more art.
I get it. I know what it's like to spend countless arguably wasted hours days on promotional tactics that have had little to no impact on getting you the exposure you want. on making work that ultimately no one was interested in and I'm not even happy with. If I had a magic lamp, my three wishes would be to go back in time and reclaim those wasted hours. To while I'm there, give former me the following tips and three Have a bit Triceratops. Well, I can't help you with two of those.
I have got those tips for carving out more time, whether it's for making your art or promoting it. We all have 24 hours in a day and I value sleep greatly. So I'm not recommending any all nighters. I do you know is that when you have system in place, things really do start to happen. One, take notes, where is your time going? Getting honest with yourself is the first important step towards creating the time for the things that you need.
Understand that there comes a point in our day. For me, it happens to be after 4pm that the idea of chugging through more work, whatever it is, sounds about as appealing as throwing a fist through a place of glass. When I used to work in an office, I would try to work as hard as I possibly could. For the eight to nine hours I was there until I was making mistakes because I was so exhausted, not ideal. By the time I got home, a two hour commute later. I couldn't stomach the idea of working on that.
Passion projects. My passion at that point was sub zero. What I realized about myself when I did manage to cut the cord and start freelancing is that my work pasty has actually remained more or less the same. The only difference is that I managed to eke out more of myself because of my calming environment. And because I can control what I do and when this means I can save the brain taxing tasks for when I'm most energetic, and the less exhausting tasks for when I'm ready to tap out. What this means is that when I'm ready to switch on Netflix and veg out, I can turn to something that requires less effort and skill than writing a pitch to some bigwig editor.
Okay, so what does this mean for you? Well, it means taking stock of what you're doing and when I understand that you might not have much flexibility if you work a full time job, but it's worthwhile at trying to assess your productivity throughout the day, and learning to optimize it, your boss will most likely appreciate it. It might be worth Returning to one of our early classes in which we talk about what's the best time of day for you, the time of day when you're most effective and what tasks you save for this golden hour or hours, you can try rating your tasks on a level of challenge. I personally don't do anything that requires too great and attention to detail, or any real originality for later in the day. Writing is definitely a morning task for me. What I can do in the evening is edit podcasts, format, blog posts, schedule, social media posts, I can also do a little bit if I want to watch some binge worthy TV and have it on in the background.
Get honest about what you don't have time for. It's likely that some of the tasks on your to do list aren't worth your precious time. There are people out there who are more than happy to help you with these things. I often use sites like fiverr.com or upwork.com often, especially for technical jobs, like when my website breaks. Even if I could do the job. I know it'll be slower and less Effective, the nice specialists, you might think that you can't afford the help right now.
But it's worth checking out some of the prices and running the numbers. What's an hour of your time worth? Is that more or less what these folks are willing to save you? often because of the difference in living costs around the world probably is. Then there are tasks which, if you're honest with yourself, you simply don't need to do no one needs to do them. I ask clients, I coach all the time to get honest with themselves here.
What if they just posted one blog post a month rather than one a week for a while? What if they try repurposing all the work rather than publishing new stuff every week? So they need to be on all social platforms? Or can they double down on one? There is no answer to these that I can give you. You have to run the experiments for yourself.
Use your intuition and above all, be honest. Three, get organized. simply taking the time to get organized will ultimately save you time. It might feel like that The task itself and you don't have time for that there are actually some relatively quick wins that over time will make your life much easier and save you time. For one, there are Twitter lists. I use these to keep my feet tidy.
That means I can review a certain group of accounts depending on what I'm interested in. And I use them as a way to organize my contacts. For example, I have a private list of journalists that I want to woo as well as potential podcast guests. I know I'll have to chat to you casually before making the ask. Using these lists saves me bags of time when I would otherwise be scrolling through like a madwoman trying to remember who it was I was trying to get in touch with to categorize your life. You could start with some of the classic big categories Work Health, relationships, adventure, whatever it is you care about.
And from there, you can start getting specific. What are your ongoing projects in each of these areas? What upcoming projects you want to work on what skills You want to develop by categorizing, you can make a start for carving out time to dedicate on these so nothing slips on your radar. For example, I have multiple categories under the work umbrella, one of which is the creative interpret. Within this category, I have the podcast, my online community coaching, marketing, the weekly newsletter, unlike most classes, and so on. If I have any goals in any of these areas, I'll be making damn sure that I'm making time in each week for these categories.
Looking at life in this way, it makes it much easier to decide what time goes into what and what just has to fall by the wayside for a while. Three, schedule time to tidy. I'm definitely not the Marie Kondo of the family, but I do know the value in keeping a tidy external environment. I have a theory that many introverts have a tendency to ignore their external world or try something and this results in unnecessary stress. Take the time to sort out your paperwork clear workspace Make your home nice or at least make one room in your house nice as a place to work in order to just come home and chill out. And for Chris calendar.
Once you have your categories as we just discussed, I recommend trying to roughly assign at these two different days of the week or month. For example, I dedicate Fridays to my podcast, I used to dedicate Mondays this had to adapt because of clients. So remember, these aren't set in stone, it's flexible within reason. I recommend being strict with your higher priority goals though. For example, I don't let any appointments get booked before noon. Because that's my time to take care of myself and create.
If it sounds outlandish, and you have a family and many more constraints. Don't worry, you're in the vast majority of people. But unless you're in prison, you probably have some flexibility, even if it's a couple of hours a day in which you can book in time on your calendar to spend on anything you'd like. Great things don't happen overnight shipping away at something daily or weekly will overtime add up and probably be even more gratifying when it's done. also recommends a time management app like Asana, which I use on my laptop or my phone for organizing my whole life. I can make categories, projects, tasks, sub tasks, and assign them to days of the week and times of the day.
This alone lets me see my life as a lot of color coordinated blocks. And I find this totally harming. There are alternatives such as Trello, which are worth exploring, too. It's not for everyone that paper planners and old school calendars might be more your cup of Joe, I recommend you find a system that makes sense to you and use it life will get dramatically more simple when you get one in place. Five, use the Sunday planning one pager as much as I don't like to admit it. distractions creep into our lives.
Even if you do have fancy pants calendars at your fingertips. This is a one page option that that likely won't take you longer than 10 minutes. It will make your week ahead a lot more focused and clear. Plus, you'll likely sleep like a log on Sunday night because you won't have those floaters in your head that normally gets saved for Monday morning. Here's how it works. Take sheet of paper, right at the top of the page, you'll number one mission for the week, break that goal down into three smaller goals.
They don't have to relate to the main goal, you might assign one of the smaller goals to another life area working on like health or family. Either way, you're left with three very actionable measurable to dues to focus your attention on. And one more thing what Darren Hardy calls the devil's vortex. This is whatever is your soft spot where you're most likely to waste time get distracted procrastinate. When you find yourself succumbing to this in your week, stop. Simply calling it out on your Sunday one pager will likely be enough to save you from the vortex and help you get back on track.
What falls in my vortex is often browser Feedly for done blog posts, Instagram, scrolling and checking emails. Keep your one pager somewhere visible that week where you'll see it daily. It'll keep you honest. At the end of the week, when it comes to drawing up next week, have a check in. How have you done? Did you succumb to the devil's vortex?
Reflect on how you did without judgment. There's always next week. And next time yourself. Something weird happens when we pay attention to how long something takes. I learned this from playing with a pomodoro timer breaking up my workday into chunks of 25 minute work periods, followed by a five to 10 minute break, seeing how much I could do, or how little in that 25 minutes made me a master of judging how long something would take me and I'll admit bring my competitive side out. I started getting competitive with myself.
How long does it take to write a newsletter? Now how much quicker Can I do it next time? Okay, you might not be such a competitive applicant. But I really believe that just paying attention to how long something takes you will make you stay more focused and on task. And seven, give yourself less time. This sounds counterintuitive, I'm meant to be offering you tips to save time not giving you less time, right?
That there's something magical called Parkinson's Law, which states work expands as to fill the time available for its completion. This basically means that if you give yourself a week to complete a two hour task, then psychologically, the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting, so ends up filling that whole week. You might not spend all that time working on it, but you spend the time stressing and overthinking about having to get it done. However, when you assign it the right amount of time to a task, like two hours, you gain back more time and the task will shrink in complexity to its natural state. I like to think of this as an opportunity to surprise yourself. If you only have an hour today, how many emails pitches Can you send?
How many doodles Can you draw? The less time you have to overthink and procrastinate the better action step, choose one of the tips that we've been through today and apply it next week. I recommend giving the Sunday one pager go for it really quick when with significant effects