Productivity Quest: Ultra-Schedule
One of the best parts about being a freelancer (or “Running a One-Person Studio” as I prefer to say) is having a flexible schedule. Yes, client deadlines impose some structure to your calendar, but for the most part (if you’re willing to work strange hours) work and life can blend smoothly together—a haze of business and pleasure from the moment you wake until the moment you inevitably pass out in front of your open laptop screen. For years I prided myself in my flexibility—I woke up without an alarm, took off work mid-day occasionally to treat-[my]-self to mani-pedis, worked until 3am if the spirit moved me. Weekend days were my most productive, with no frantic client emails to derail my concentration and little twitter activity to distract me.
When I moved to San Francisco, things changed. I was suddenly surrounded by people with “real jobs” (full-time salaried positions), who didn’t have the flexibility I had (and who loved filling their weekends with fun non-work-related activities). I found myself, more and more, conforming to a normal office work schedule, running into the same problems I had the last time I kept a 9-6 workday (i.e. giant unproductive blocks of time before and after lunch), but compounded by all the additional running-your-own-business daily bullshit.
I would spend entire days answering emails. I would have afternoons so jam-packed with “just touching base” calls with clients that I couldn’t hit a work groove without being interrupted. After a morning of panicky email fire-fighting with east coast clients, I’d slump into my chair taking a “well-deserved break” and fall into a social media vortex for hours. I’d get into a good work flow in the late afternoon, look up, and notice it was already 7pm—I’d worked (actually made stuff) for only two hours that day. If my schedule was already this tough to wrangle, what would it be like when I was managing the lives of micro-humans on top of my career?
Since I can’t reclaim my round-the-clock work/life situation anytime soon, I have to figure out ways to jam all of my work needs and wants into a tighter timeline, injecting a bit of “life” into my schedule so that I don’t go on a stress-induced murder spree. I would make the ultra-schedule—a strict hour by hour timeline that would keep me in line and make sure that every day I accomplished something other than answering a few dozen emails. There were already a few things I discovered about myself and my schedule that would be helpful in developing this:
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No deadlines on Mondays.
If there is a deadline on Monday, and you are prone to procrastinating / procrastiworking like me, you are most definitely working on the weekend. As I said before, I love working on weekends, but I love it a lot less than I used to now that I have fewer work-a-holic freelance friends in my life.
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Mondays are for administrative work.
Since I have no deadlines on Mondays, they’re great days to catch up on email and all the other nonsense you deal with as a business owner. If I give myself one day to do the bulk of my emailing / interview answering / file organizing / scheduling etc, I feel WAY less guilty about ignoring all of that stuff for large periods of time during the rest of the work week.
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Work on for-fun stuff during the day.
One thing I’ve definitely noticed about myself is that I can stay up all night working on a client project (because there’s a deadline the next day that must be made) but have a hard time staying up all night for a for-fun procrastiworking project, which means that, unless I am working on for-fun projects during the day, they get put off or are started and not finished. Sometimes I have a huge burning desire to work on something and can power through it in one 20-hour start to finish work marathon, but a lot of my for-fun projects can’t be finished in a single work session. Type design, for example, is a always a bit of a long-game process—one that I have a terrible time sticking to or integrating into my calendar. I needed to find a way to block off time specifically to work on typefaces so that I can finish up the dozens of half-baked fonts I’ve started and not finished.
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Exercise is important to my productivity.
If I feel like a puffy lump of a human with rock-like knots in my shoulders, I don’t work as efficiently, I have trouble managing stress, and I don’t sleep as well. I have to give exercise the same importance as client meetings on my calendar. No client deadline or social affair can make me reschedule an hour set aside for exercise because the second I do so it all goes to shit.
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My brain works best in the morning.
Post coffee and pre-lunch is when I have my best ideas. It’s when I write best, when I enjoy sketching most, and when I can read for long periods of time without getting drowsy. Post-lunch is for production and is when I can best find a flow-state with (vector) work.
So! I set out to make a calendar for myself that I could follow every day. Frank Chimero pointed out Benjamin Franklin’s attempt to impose structure on his daily life, which is awesome, but wasn’t precise enough for me.
“Work” can mean a lot of things, and I specifically wanted to figure out how to manage all the different kinds of work that I do so the more menial stuff wouldn’t completely take over. This calendar is different than the calendars I already use (all of which create a rainbow of activity in my iCal: Travel, Final Deadlines, Sketch Deadlines, Meetings / Lunches, Life Stuff). This new calendar, which I’ve called Ultra Schedule, is the skeleton on which the body of my week (the things I actually have to get accomplished) can be built.
Every day is a little bit different, unlike Mr. Franklin’s schedule, because monotony makes me sad. I’ve kept Monday as “Admin Day”, but given it a bit more structure. I built in time for fun work during the day on Wednesday and Friday so I can actually finish and release a few typefaces this year. There’s plenty of time for exercise, most of which I’m already doing so it’s not too much of a stretch to push myself to do a bit more. There are scheduled times during which I can be fully immersed in email and for the rest of the day I’m forcing myself to ignore it. Most of all, there are scheduled blocks of time where my wifi will be off.
This schedule will of course not work (or be very difficult to adhere to) during days I’m traveling for conferences, but I’m in one place, San Francisco, for nearly the whole month of August so it’s a perfect time to experiment with strict schedules. I’ll let you know how it goes, and hopefully some of you find this inspirational in a weird way. I already have gotten plenty of positive feedback about the Yoga > Waffles time block on Saturdays and the distinction between “Lunch with a Book” and “Lunch with a Person” on weekdays. Wish me luck!