October 18, 2003
There are two things I’ve learned about working for yourself and one of them is, if you don’t do the work, it doesn’t get done. There is no special ‘creative temp service’ to hire, no magic fairy who swoops in and completes everything with her wand and, as far as I know, there isn’t any special chant you can do either. The other thing I’ve learned is that freedom is a wonderful thing.
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been terribly ill. The downside to that is that my projects didn’t go away; they’re still sitting there with deadlines and people waiting. On the upswing, I don’t have to worry about sleeping during the day and working for 10 minutes at 3AM.
Little by little, I do the work when I can. Sometimes I get a block of an hour and I work like mad to catch up on yesterdays slack. Sometimes, I only get to work in random spurts of ten minutes. Whatever it is, I find time to continue working whilst always fitting in nap and lots of tea.
I’ve learned to balance looking after myself with doing my work, something that was hard in the beginning. I used to take the freedom I have too far and think, ‘Well, I don’t have to work right now, so I won’t. Funny how much never got done or deadlines would all of a sudden appear and I’d overwhelm myself with catch-up work.
When I discovered the ten-minute rule last spring (Do anything in just ten minutes and that’s it), it changed things for me. When I don’t think I can do something or I don’t have the time, I take just ten minutes because I’ve realised that doing something in ten minutes is doing something, and creates something that wasn’t there just 11 minutes before.
Sometimes people think to be creative or have a create job, one must spend it takes lots of time and freedom. But if you have another job, or pneumonia, sometimes all you can work in is little slots of time.
And really, if you try and work hard in those few minutes and build them up over a period of time, they’re enough.
Elsewhere