One thing that I love about the holidays is the concept of the world going offline for a couple of days or three or four. This year, with Christmas Eve on a Thursday, it seemed as if lots of folks were softening their schedules starting on Monday, and what a delight it was. My inbox was surprisingly empty, as if the concept of the “inbox” became the Ten’s version of the freelancer’s mind / body / soul which must be periodically emptied and sharpened after times of total “crazy busy-ness.” If you’re a freelancer or if you work a few jobs, as I do, you know that there’s really little “down time” in your life of 9 to 5 freedom. Response time, speed and follow-through is often a freelancer’s best method of origination and client retention, and it’s only during times like “the holidays” that the nomads can really turn it off and breathe for a few days. It’s as if “the holidays” is becoming an annual stateside land-locked retreat opportunity, much like when you’re flying on a plan (which, if Richard Branson has his way, will soon stop becoming a 2-hour safe haven free of incoming pings). Freelancing is full of contradiction: people want to be free of the regular corporate life but require it’s existence to pay the bills. People want to work from home, yet working at home quickly blends work life and home life into one big mesh of worky-livvy jello. I wonder if the key to true productivity is to redefine what it means to be “productive” — I think it’s perfectly fine to do 3x the amount of work in a third of the time, and to spend the remaining 2/3 of that time training for the big race or planning the next “fun only” project. It’s easy to fill that remaining time with more work, especially if you’re addicted to working, because it’s (not surprisingly) fun. But forcing yourself to “not work” might make the actual work more fun — and might allow everyone to invite-in the right kind of work. And not the filler kind of work.
I love any article about productivity that advises us to actually work less and play more, especially this one by Jason Fried, the founder of 37Signals. Many of you either use or have heard of the productivity leviathan that is Basecamp. It’s probably one of the top three gears that have allowed Marshall Creative to work so quickly and efficiently (#2 is Distracting Bits and #1 is Diet Coke). Mr. Fried recommends less time on email and more time reading and drinking tea. Nice. Before I went to college, my grandfather gave me some lasting advice — Don’t let your classes interfere with your education. And I think we’re extending that at Marshall Creative; we don’t let unnecessary work and systems get in the way of real, actual work that moves jobs a step closer towards completion. When I started this little project three years ago I made (and have kept) just one rule — not get or do something for this company until it was totally necessary. Got a new website and logo? Time for business cards and a letterhead template but not physical letterhead. Farming work to a friend? Create an LLC and get a bank account and pay them sooner than anyone else would. Thinking about getting an office? Think again and then revisit the idea in a year. And I think that applies to people currently freelancing in this market and thinking of starting a small company or hiring someone else to help out with a growing workload. When recessions occur and people get laid-off, they have time to re-evaluate and say you know what, I never wanted to work for Ernst & Young anyway, whatever happened to that salon I was going to open back in the day. Individuals or companies going through an identity or operational or creative sea change are our favorite clients because they have tight budgets and very little time for bullshit. They’re already under the gun, which allows us internally at Marshall Creative to implement tight, workable systems. Not all companies can be like that, many companies working for clients are actually subversively forced to create fat budgets and unproductive systems to sort-of slide through jobs over the course of 18 months. I like the idea of working less often over a longer period of time, and during that time working more often in a single place. One of the great challenges for freelancers today is location and place and finding a productive home base that’s free of the wrong distractions and full of the right distractions. So maybe I’ll talk about that tomorrow. Either that or I’ll repost a fun photo of the solar system. Probably the latter because it’ll take less time.
One thing that I love about the holidays is the concept of the world going offline for a couple of days or three or four. This year, with Christmas Eve on a Thursday, it seemed as if lots of folks were softening their schedules starting on Monday, and what a delight it was. My inbox was surprisingly empty, as if the concept of the “inbox” became the Ten’s version of the freelancer’s mind / body / soul which must be periodically emptied and sharpened after times of total “crazy busy-ness.” If you’re a freelancer or if you work a few jobs, as I do, you know that there’s really little “down time” in your life of 9 to 5 freedom. Response time, speed and follow-through is often a freelancer’s best method of origination and client retention, and it’s only during times like “the holidays” that the nomads can really turn it off and breathe for a few days. It’s as if “the holidays” is becoming an annual stateside land-locked retreat opportunity, much like when you’re flying on a plan (which, if Richard Branson has his way, will soon stop becoming a 2-hour safe haven free of incoming pings). Freelancing is full of contradiction: people want to be free of the regular corporate life but require it’s existence to pay the bills. People want to work from home, yet working at home quickly blends work life and home life into one big mesh of worky-livvy jello. I wonder if the key to true productivity is to redefine what it means to be “productive” — I think it’s perfectly fine to do 3x the amount of work in a third of the time, and to spend the remaining 2/3 of that time training for the big race or planning the next “fun only” project. It’s easy to fill that remaining time with more work, especially if you’re addicted to working, because it’s (not surprisingly) fun. But forcing yourself to “not work” might make the actual work more fun — and might allow everyone to invite-in the right kind of work. And not the filler kind of work.
