I recently read Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind as a part of a book presentation for class. While usually these kind of presentations aren't my thing, the title caught my eye, hence why I chose it.
I will be graduating in May and the search for a job has already begun. While many students in the Literary Citizenship class are creative writing majors, I, myself, am a journalism major. I do enjoy reading, but find it quite difficult to pick up a random book out of my interest range, which is probably one of my detriments.
Until recently, I found it tough to stick to a daily routine while balancing everything on my plate (school, job, extra-curricular activities, etc.). This semester, I am interning at 501 Life Magazine and that has slowly brought me into a solid routine but I still struggled with managing what is essentially a "big-boy" job with everything else. Managing Your Day-to-Day gives tips and tricks for not only managing these things, but also the book improves your creativity and focus.
One of the toughest things I have found through my internship is to balance and manage e-mail. Being a journalist, I do several articles a week, talking and interviewing multiple people and organizations for each. E-mail is my go-to when communicating with these people, whether it is to interview them, set up the interview or ask follow-up questions.
The book says to deal with e-mail on a priority basis. Too many workers today drown in their own e-mails and end up spending most of the work morning sending and replying, that they can't begin on actual work until after lunch. As much as we want to please everyone, we have to understand getting our work done. As the book says, "it is better to disappoint a few people over small things than to surrender your dreams for an empty inbox."
It is crucial to start your creative work at the beginning of your day, with reactive work being secondary. Avoid meetings until after lunch, capture your commitments on paper to avoid stress and find out the times of day that you have the most energy. The more frequent you work on something, the fresher it is for your mind to work out issues. This can be applied to almost any sort of work whether it is writing a book or having an office job.
Creative work jogs our minds which stimulates brain activity, avoiding that "2:30 feeling" that comes from such things as responding to e-mail all morning, which results in ourselves not achieving a sense of accomplishment thus shutting down our bodies.
Part Two will take a look at the myth of multitasking, creativeness amongst chaos and creative solely for yourself.
If you are interested in the book, you can find it here.
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That bit on email prioritizing is definitely handy. Even in college, I find myself weighed down by the amount of emails I receive every day. I can't imagine how burdensome it will become once I move onto a professional career.
ReplyDeleteI never thought how uncreative it is that I wake up and immediately check both emails that I have before I do anything else with my day. I don't have a ton of important emails, but it still takes time and sets up the beginning of my day as being really routine and uninspiring. Maybe I'll mix it up in the future.
ReplyDeleteI feel like email is part of my daily tasks. But I did do what you suggested from the book which was to clear my email of places that don't need to be sending me emails such as Hastings or other places that I don't need emails from.
ReplyDeleteI agree about emails. I'm even worse, responding to emails in my phone as they come which will probably become very difficult when starting an real-adult-job.
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