If you make a living from creative ideas like a good logo designer or painter, you ought to read the free e-book published by a London-based creativity coach Mark McGuinness entitled Time Management for Creative People (pdf).

Subtitled ‘Manage the Mundane - Create the Extraordinary’, this free 32-page book provides practical tips to help you maintain your creative focus while handling other business or personal commitments.

Undeniably there are numerous Websites tackling about time management but most of them are created for the consumption of the general public. Creative people, on the other hand, think differently. For instance, McGuinness pointed out most creative thinkers view organization, habit, and discipline as threats to creativity and not as good qualities to strive for.

Creativity is all about thinking outside the box and breaking the stereotypes. One of my favorite tips is to ring-fence your most creative time by asking the following questions:

When is your most creative time, when you are most alert and find it easy to focus?

If you could arrange your ideal schedule, what time would you ring-fence for focused creative work?

How close to your ideal schedule can you get within the constraints of your current situation?

Do you have a special place for creative work?

What physical triggers (such as pens, paper, computer hardware or software), rituals or routines do you use to get yourself in the right state of mind?

The e-book is under Creative Commons License, meaning you can share this on a noncommercial basis with any people you believe would benefit from these insights. Just keep the name of the author intact.

Via Creative Generalist

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Resources + Tools, Tips for Creative People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.