Blocking the exits

Let’s see you get out of this one. (Image by Petra)

The hardest work we have to do — the work that matters the most, the work that challenges us the most — is the work that nobody else cares about.

It’s not on a deadline, unless we create one for ourselves. If we never do it, no one will ever notice.

That’s why it’s really hard to fit this type of work into our workday, even if we work for ourselves. The work that we do for clients, along with the basic administrative tasks of life, tend to take precedence.

To work against this tendency, I place constraints around the work that, due to Parkinson’s Law, will always expand to fit the time available. I recently made some tweaks to my schedule to facilitate this.

I began by restricting meetings to Monday through Wednesday, hoping that would free up more time and energy for creative work and business development. However, after a couple of weeks of this, it was clear that, with a reduced workload on Thursday and Friday, I was just working more slowly. Somehow, I kept finding excuses that prevented me from being able to get into a creative flow and get to the important-but-not-urgent quadrant of activity.

My next move, then, was to organize my work into different categories so that I could make better decisions. I realized that, on Thursday and Friday, I could limit administrative tasks like bookkeeping, responding to messages, and errands to no more than one hour, scheduling any other such tasks for the first three days of the week.

In this way, I could open up my entire afternoon to creative work, long-term business strategy, and other non-urgent activities that require deep thinking — and that most rare of luxuries, long stretches of time.

It’s ironic that, in an attempt to be virtuous, I was prioritizing stuff that was relatively unimportant. I had the illusion that I would be able to get to the end of these types of tasks and then get to the good stuff, but that didn’t work out for two reasons.

One, the annoying administrative tasks multiply and replicate. For example, you have to check your mail every day. You can’t check your mail once on Monday and be done with it. You can’t wash your dishes at the start of the week and never have to worry about them again. There effectively is no end to them.

The second reason I was unable to get to the end of the tasks and on to the good stuff is that the good stuff is scary. By its nature, it is nebulous and ill-defined, requires difficult decisions to be made, and takes lots of creative energy. It’s much easier to procrastinate and leave it for the next day or the one after that.

By tightening the time spent on routine and less threatening work, I challenged myself to become more efficient with those tasks and forced myself to face the really hard stuff. With nothing else to do and nowhere to hide, I succumbed.

The creative work, I have found, does require some patience. It is not as productive, in the literal sense, as the “tick the box” type tasks. There is a lot of warmup time needed. There is quite a bit of staring off into space. There’s some angst and some desperate wishing to escape.

But once I accept this reality, I find that the work is not so bad. When I reduce my expectations and acknowledge that it may take some time for results to show up, it’s not as discouraging.

The desire to take a nap can be strong. The temptation to retreat to something less demanding is overwhelming at first. But, with practice, I can strengthen my ability to hang in there and do the things that, though no one would notice if I didn’t do them, are important to me. Having set aside the time, removed distractions, and blocked the exits, I can make progress on the hardest projects.