If you’ve been following your Time Diet, you’ve already become an expert on scheduling a good variety of Meat tasks, Vegetable tasks and Dessert tasks into your day. However, you may have encountered a problem. Sure, it’s easy to schedule tasks that have a finite completion time. If I give myself half an hour to respond to some emails I’ve set aside, I know I can sit down and knock those out in the time allotted. When I sit down to finish my grades for school, I know that as long as I stay focused, I will have them done by the end of the afternoon. But what about those tasks that require more creative thinking?

Sometimes when you sit down to complete a creative task, it goes very quickly because you think of an idea right away. Other times you can spend what seems like hours just figuring out how to start because the ideas just aren’t coming to you. How in the world do you plan for that?

In one of my graduate classes at ASU, we read about a guy named Graham Wallas who explains why “planning” to be creative is such a problem. Now, don’t get me wrong. There are tons of theories out there about how creative thinking works, but this one really spoke to me. Wallas wrote about the 4 steps he believes make up the creative process.

Step 1: Preparation- This is when you gather information about the problem you are trying to solve (or in this case, the creative task you are trying to complete.)
Step 2: Incubation- This is when you step back from your task and allow all the information you’ve collected to sink-in and gel.
Step 3: Illumination- The moment of “illumination” is when a great idea comes to you. It’s that creative spark when a great idea pops into your head.
Step 4: Verification- This last stage is when you take this new idea and do something with it. This is when you test it out and see if it’s an idea worth sticking to.

When I read all this, I thought, “Ah ha! This explains why creativity doesn’t always mesh well with time management!” When we’re planning out our day, we need to take these steps, especially the one about incubation, into consideration. We can’t say, “I’m going to be creative between the hours of 4pm and 5pm today.” It doesn’t work like that! Instead, here are 3 ways you can make creative tasks work with your time management.

3 Strategies for Time Management of Creativity

1) Go do a Vegetable task. Taking your mind off of your creative task for a little while can help ideas come to you. This is that “Incubation” period Wallas talked about.  By doing an (easy) Vegetable task you can still be productive while waiting for inspiration to strike. (One of my fabulous professors says that you can always tell when she’s working on a big creative project because her garden looks amazing. Working in her yard is her “Vegetable” task she does when she’s searching for a creative idea.)

2) Just write something. When trying to come up with a good idea for a creative project, we sometimes get hung up on perfection. We hesitate to write a sentence until we are absolutely sure it is the perfect combination of brilliant words. This not only wastes time but it puts a lot of pressure on ourselves! Got an idea? Write it down! It doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s what revisions are for. Not sure if your creative idea is very good? Who cares! Go with it for a little bit. See where it takes you. Maybe you’ll come up with an even better idea in the process.

3) Set aside a day for creativity. This doesn’t mean you have to sit around the whole day waiting for that magical spark of inspiration, but it just means that you can be slightly less rigid in your planning. For example, instead of planning to be creative during one specific hour of the day, take a look at all the times in your day you could devote to this creative task. If you have time at 10am, 2pm and 6pm, leave yourself a little flexibility as to which of those times you use for your creative work and which you fill with other tasks. This way, you are still able to schedule your time but you don’t have to force that creative spark into a specific time slot.

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One of the tenets of The Time Diet is that stressing out and worrying wastes our time. Half the stress of getting it all done comes from worrying about getting it all done. This attitude comes from our unhealthy obsession with deadlines and due dates. We are bombarded with deadlines in our lives. Bills are due! Projects are due! Paperwork is due! This is the kind of stuff that keeps us up at night and we’d be far more efficient if we spent that energy developing a plan of attack to actually complete this work. You see, every deadline you write in your calendar has a corresponding date that is much more important: your start date. While deadlines are often set by other people, the more important start date is set by you.

This past week was the first full week of the ASU spring semester. There is no better time to witness the stress of deadlines than this initial week of school (except maybe finals week, which has some pretty intense deadline stress too). You see, this first full week of classes is when all the course syllabi are handed out. As the professors carefully walk the class through their expectations for the semester, the students are frantically flipping through the syllabus looking for words like “20 page paper” or “Final Exam: worth 50% of your grade.” Those deadlines then take their place in the part of students’ brains reserved for stressful things where they will loom for the rest of the semester. When you multiply this process by the number of classes a student is taking, the resulting state of mind is the student version of deadline-stress which I like to call, “syllabus overload.”

Syllabus overload is a perfect example of the dangers of stressing out about deadlines with no regard for start dates. Rather than allowing deadlines to pile up in their brains, students should immediately get out their calendars, write down the deadline and then also write down the date they intent to start that project. Does your syllabus say you have a 15-page paper due half-way through the semester? You’ll want to allow 5 days to write it (3 pages a day as a general rule of thumb) plus a buffer of a few days to allow for unexpected things to come up. I would pick a date in my calendar no later than 10 days before this paper is due and write “start paper.”  Do this for every due date in all of your syllabi. Now, you still have a lot of work to do, but the deadlines don’t have to freak you out. All you have to do is look at your calendar and you’ll see your whole plan of attack all laid out. No more worrying about how in the world all your work will be done. You know when it will all be done. You just planned it!

The importance of start dates applies to more than just students. Anyone who has deadlines in their lives needs to also plan out their start dates. Take taxes for example. April 15th does not often invoke thoughts of happiness because it is ingrained in most people’s heads as the day taxes are due (except of course this year when they are due April 18th.) If you do your own taxes, you’ve likely stressed about this deadline many times. Instead of just writing “taxes due” in your calendar, pick a date that you will begin working on them and write “start taxes.” The simple act of designating a start date will do wonders for your stress level. Looking at a calendar of only deadlines makes us feel powerless. Looking at a calendar of self-created start dates makes us feel in control. The Time Diet is all about being in control. Good-bye deadline-stress!!

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