There’s no doubt that being creative is much more fun than being organised. However, the reality is that those in creative industries — from photography to design and yes, even marketing — have the same amount of hours in the day to work and make the monies as everyone else. Through effective time management, your days will be little easier to face, and this means there’ll more time for the fun stuff!
Here are some tips on how you can help yourself get organised:
- Planning seriously, it works: plan out your days, weeks and even months when you can. If you can foresee what you’ve got to do, there won’t be [as many] surprises in your day. More planning equals less stress and more time for the things you love.
- Do what you dread straight off the bat: that meeting with a difficult client, that strategy you’re not that interested in, those tiring monthly invoices? Tick those boxes early in the day
- You’ll feel a sense of achievement for getting that dreaded job out of the way
- Your subconscious won’t be thinking about that ‘ugh’ job that’s still hanging over your head
- Once it’s done, you can do something you enjoy! Tick, tick, tick!
- Don’t reinvent the wheel:make it easy for yourself and have simple processes and templates in place – it’ll save you time in the long run. It’s also a good idea to create a standard checklist or list so you don’t forget important things (like your camera gear before that really important photo shoot!).
- Work now, play later: if you need quiet time to work on a strategy, draft copy or edit your photos, you need to minimise your distractions. The latest fashion post on Instagram is probably way more exciting than that video brief you have to write but unfortunately Miss Instagrammer doesn’t pay you to look at their awesome photos. Your client, however, does pay you for an awesome content strategy. Turn off your phone, close your emails. If you reduce distractions, it’ll mean more time for play later.
We all talk about how busy we are, how many deadlines we have to meet and how full our social calendars are, so in order to get the most out of our hectic lives we need to think about how we can best manage our time. We hope that by implementing a few of our time management tips, you’ll make it all happen.
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