Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind

by Jocelyn K. Glei

As the legendary inventor Thomas Edison famously said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration.” To make great ideas a reality, we must act, experiment, fail, adapt, and learn on a daily basis.

It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen.

I’ve never seen a team sport without a huddle, yet we’ll continue working for months—if not years—with clients and colleagues without ever taking a step back, taking stock, and making improvements to our systems.

Through our constant connectivity to each other, we have become increasingly reactive to what comes to us rather than being proactive about what matters most to us.

You can surrender your day-to-day and the potential of your work to the burdens that surround you. Or, you can audit the way you work and own the responsibility of fixing it.

Truly great creative achievements require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of work, and we have to make time every single day to put in those hours. Routines help us do this by setting expectations about availability, aligning our workflow with our energy levels, and getting our minds into a regular rhythm of creating. At the end of the day—or, really, from the beginning—building a routine is all about persistence and consistency. Don’t wait for inspiration; create a framework for it.

If you want to create something worthwhile with your life, you need to draw a line between the world’s demands and your own ambitions.

But for most of us there’s a wide gray area between the have-tos and want-tos in our lives. If you’re not careful, that area will fill up with e-mail, meetings, and the requests of others, leaving no room for the work you consider important.

No one likes the feeling that other people are waiting—impatiently—for a response. At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, an array of voice mail messages, and the list of next steps from your last meeting, it’s tempting to “clear the decks” before starting your own work. When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, it will be easier to focus. The trouble with this approach is it means spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities. By the time you settle down to your own work, it could be mid-afternoon, when your energy dips and your brain slows. “Oh well, maybe tomorrow will be better,” you tell yourself. But tomorrow brings another pile of e-mails, phone messages, and to-do list items. If you carry on like this, you will spend most of your time on reactive work, responding to incoming demands and answering questions framed by other people. And you will never create anything truly worthwhile.

The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.

But it’s better to disappoint a few people over small things, than to surrender your dreams for an empty inbox. Otherwise you’re sacrificing your potential for the illusion of professionalism.

Start with the rhythm of your energy levels. Certain times of day are especially conducive to focused creativity, thanks to circadian rhythms of arousal and mental alertness. Notice when you seem to have the most energy during the day, and dedicate those valuable periods to your most important creative work. Never book a meeting during this time if you can help it. And don’t waste any of it on administrative work!

Use creative triggers. Stick to the same tools, the same surroundings, even the same background music, so that they become associative triggers for you to enter your creative zone.

If you keep adding to your to-do list during the day, you will never finish—and your motivation will plummet. Most things can wait till tomorrow. So let them.

Train yourself to record every commitment you make (to yourself or others) somewhere that will make it impossible to forget. This will help you respond to requests more efficiently and make you a better collaborator. More important, it will give you peace of mind—when you are confident that everything has been captured reliably, you can focus on the task at hand.

Establish hard edges in your day. Set a start time and a finish time for your workday—even if you work alone.

Dedicate different times of day to different activities: creative work, meetings, correspondence, administrative work, and so on. These hard edges keep tasks from taking longer than they ne...

experiment with these building blocks and notice which combination gives you the best foundation for doing your best work. You’ll know it’s effective when your daily schedule starts to feel less like a mundane routine and more like a creative ritual.

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a short period, and underestimate what we can do over a long period, provided we work slowly and consistently.

Frequency makes starting easier. Getting started is always a challenge. It’s hard to start a project from scratch, and it’s also hard each time you re-enter a project after a break. By working every day, you keep your momentum going. You never have time to feel detached from the process.

Frequency keeps the pressure off. If you’re producing just one page, one blog post, or one sketch a week, you expect it to be pretty darned good, and you start to fret about quality. I knew a writer who could hardly bring herself to write. When she did manage to keep herself in front of her laptop for a spate of work, she felt enormous pressure to be brilliant; she evaluated the product of each work session with an uneasy and highly critical eye. She hadn’t done much work, so what she did accomplish had to be extraordinarily good. Because I write every day, no one day’s work seems particularly important. I have good days and I have bad days. Some days, I don’t get much done at all. But that’s okay, because I know I’m working steadily. My consequent lack of anxiety puts me in a more playful frame of mind and allows me to experiment and take risks. If something doesn’t work out, I have plenty of time to try a different approach.

THIS IS TOTALLY ME WITH BLOGGING!!!! Actually, with everything social media!

Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project. When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.

Frequency nurtures frequency. If you develop the habit of working frequently, it becomes much easier to sit down and get something done even when you don’t have a big block of time; you don’t have to take time to acclimate yourself.

That’s why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful. You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work. Progress is reassuring and inspiring; panic and then despair set in when you find yourself getting nothing done day after day.

Instead of feeling perpetually frustrated that you don’t have any time for your project, you make yourself make time, every day. If you do a little bit each day, you can get a lot done over the course of months and years (see above).

“It’s the task that’s never started that’s more tiresome,

“What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while.

there are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way they want to because their strategies are broken.

The strategy is simple, I think. The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way.

The notion that I do my work here, now, like this, even when I do not feel like it, and especially when I do not feel like it, is very important. Because lots and lots of people are creative when they feel like it, but you are only going to become a professional if you do it when you don’t feel like it. And that emotional waiver is why this is your work and not your hobby.

I think that all the people who have figured out how to do this for a living have figured it out because it was important to them, not because it came naturally.

the person who gets a little freelance work here and there but can’t figure out how to turn it into a full-time gig—that person is practicing self-sabotage. These people sabotage themselves because the alternative is to put themselves into the world as someone who knows what they are doing. They are afraid that if they do that, they will be seen as a fraud. It’s incredibly difficult to stand up at a board meeting or a conference or just in front of your peers and say, “I know how to do this. Here is my work. It took me a year. It’s great.” This is hard to do for two reasons: (1) it opens you to criticism, and (2) it puts you into the world as someone who knows what you are doing, which means tomorrow you also have to know what you are doing, and you have just signed up for a lifetime of knowing what you are doing.

It’s much easier to whine and sabotage yourself and blame the client, the system, and the economy. This is what you hide from—the noise in your head that says you are not good enough, that says it is not perfect, that says it could have been better.

The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.

Unlike computers, however, human beings aren’t meant to operate continuously, at high speeds, for long periods of time. Rather, we’re designed to move rhythmically between spending and renewing our energy.

Instead, we live linear lives, progressively burning down our energy reservoirs throughout the day. It’s the equivalent of withdrawing funds from a bank account without ever making a deposit. At some point, you go bankrupt.

The first is that sleep is more important than food. You can go a week without eating and the only thing you’ll lose is weight. Give up sleep for even a couple of days and you’ll become completely dysfunctional. Even so, we’re all too willing to trade away an hour of sleep in the false belief that it will give us one more hour of productivity. In fact, even very small amounts of sleep deprivation take a significant toll on our cognitive capacity. The notion that some of us can perform adequately with very little sleep is largely a myth.

It’s possible to push ourselves past ninety minutes by relying on coffee, or sugar, or by summoning our own stress hormones, but when we do so we’re overriding our physiological need for intermittent rest and renewal. Eventually, there’s a price to pay.

Zeke started scheduling thirty minutes in his calendar at lunchtime for a walk outside. He leaves his smartphone at his desk to avoid temptation. The walks give him a chance to recharge, but also provide precious time to reflect on the morning’s meetings and anything else on his mind.

It would be wonderful to do this too, just spend a half hour running around the block or working. I have such freedom working from home, and I should use it to do something like this. I would love it, and I think it would help my creative state in then! Win-win!

Over time, Zeke also began making better choices about what work to take on. So long as he arrived at work already feeling tired, he instinctively put his energy into executing simple tasks. Doing so allowed him to feel productive without having to expend too much energy. It was the equivalent, he came to recognize, of a sugar high. It was satisfying to accomplish a series of relatively simple tasks, but the pleasure didn’t last for long.

I love the idea of tackling some simple tasks to build yourself up, if you're lacking energy one morning. While this states to tackle important things first—because tackling small tasks creates a "sugar high that burns out just as fast"—I think for myself, I could see myself getting confident with seeing my small To Do list dwindle, and then give me the high and energy to then jump to other big projects (that maybe I was too exhausted to start on a particularly hard morning). On the other hand, I can also see myself just wanting to stick to easy tasks all day and avoiding the big To Do's then. This would be worth experimenting with because everyone works in different ways!

When he travels, for example, he still sometimes abandons the rituals he’s established at home. Then he has to struggle to build them back into his routine.

It's nice to know this happens to others, because it happens to me!

Even a small time set aside for solitude each day—from twenty minutes to an hour—can make an enormous difference.

This calming of the mind helps us to figure out what really matters and to hear own creative voice, which can be drowned out by the cacophony of our daily tasks and online interactions.

Set the time for your first block of solitude now—and make it an essential part of your daily routine. For many people, the best time for solitude is early in the morning. The kids are still sleeping and everything is quiet. I get my best work done then, and the great thing is that nothing comes up that early to disrupt your schedule.

If you work best at night, you can find solitude by scheduling a block of time to work alone after dark.

Every time you’re doing something, you’re not doing something else. But you don’t really see what it is that you’re giving up. Especially when it comes to, let’s say, e-mail versus doing something that takes fifty hours. It is very easy for you to see the e-mail. It is not that easy for you to see the thing that takes fifty hours.

Plus, there is that pesky truth that anxieties and self-doubt can multiply when fed with silence and an abundance of time.

The part of our brain associated with decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shrinks and the brain regions associated with habit formation grow when we’re under chronic stress.17