Episode 8 Time Management

In this Creative Work Hour Podcast episode, the team discusses managing revisions and unexpected challenges. Bobby shares his approach of dedicating 70% of work time to direct tasks, allowing for breaks and unforeseen issues. Key topics include planning for uncertainties, working ahead, prioritizing "good enough" over perfectionism, valuing downtime for productivity, and maintaining client trust through honest communication. Visit creativeworkhour.com for more episodes or send feedback to hello@creativeworkhour.com

Welcome to day eight of the Creative Work Hour podcast. And this question Bobby had asked this and Bobby, please correct me if I get it wrong. Just uh to get us going, Bobby said he would like to know how people deal with tasks that need to be redone when things don't go as expected. Do you schedule time for revisions? if you can make the time or do you just leave things as they are? And how does the person that's receiving those perhaps flawed efforts factor into your decisions? And what are the consequences or what about the consequences and the level of perceived or actual failure? That's a pretty big question. So, I'll break it down one more time. Um, maybe with the first Yeah, go ahead. But

If I may, let me just reword it a bit. You know, we all know things are going to go wrong at some point, right? Nothing, nothing is perfect. So my question is how much effort and in what manner do you plan ahead? Like do you automatically leave some amount of time each day? Do you know what you do? And does that vary depending on what what you're the content what you're producing like if it's a boy if if I screwed up one thing here I'm going to lose a source of revenue so I'm going to make sure there's time I make time and so it's like do you drop things other things off your plate do you um is it part of how you plan your time your day your week whatever I mean just how do you think through how you would address that is where I was going with this. And I'll just chime in. So, when I was working full-time, um I was big into time and motion studies and risk aversion, all that.

So, I determined that my employees um we could probably do contracted work. They would do contracted work for roughly 70% of their workday and the rest of the workday was meetings, bathroom breaks, water, cooler, chat, whatever. Um, and a reasonable amount of average time for things that might go wrong. So, I did a lot of studies on this and I was able to get to that and based on data studies I'd read where the average blue collar worker was effective for 55 % of their paid time and white collar is 45%. So anyway, that got me thinking down this path and so I intentionally only would when I built up a schedule and built up a cost and everything, I would assume 70% towards what we were contracted for. Um, and it was beautiful. It just really worked. So anyway, that's kind of my background on this and I still kind of do that to this day. I monitor how much is on my plate and how much time I'm holding back to deal with the uncertainties or to be reactive to new things. So, I hope that helps.

Yeah, I think at least if I'm understanding correctly, um I tend to not like being smashed for time. So, I tend to work ahead on a lot of things so that if something comes up it's already done. Um, so whether that be scheduling posts or setting up uh things ahead of time, scripting things ahead of time before recording so that if I don't have the time to do all the things I want, at least there's pieces that are set up ahead of time.

This is always something that I've struggled with, especially with having ADHD and TBI. Uh sometimes for me I work better when I have a a deadline and sometimes I'll procrastinate. If you know all good intentions I'll try and plan things out. Um in an ideal world I would plan it out and then I would look at my time I would say I was writing a blog post I would read it through. I would give it a you know first over. If I got time I would go, you know, do it again. But when I plan too far ahead I rewrite things so much that they're not what I set out to write to begin with because I change them so much by the time I'm done. Um, and I do tend to work well when there's a deadline.

One thing I have learned from everyone is you minimum viable quad product and I think on the ship 30 they talk about you know um good good enough ship it right um because if it's if it's left to me it'll never be good enough. Um and then there's the curse of the artist like you know someone once explained the curse of the artist. To that painter, everyone else, you know, the painting is perfect, but to the artist, there's always one more brush stroke that should have been done or the brush stroke was slightly wrong, and they'll always kind of see that um flaw, which other people would not have. Anyone else?

I'll just, I mean, just to play off your minimum available product and thing, um because I work a lot with uh events. We used to work a lot with event production where you had a specific time that things had to be done. Uh the caveat was or the caveat the motto was done is beautiful. You know um then the thing that is finished and has been shipped is always better than the thing that is not finished and did not ship um on time. Uh so there's that idea and also just like Bobby, I was big into the whole movement studies and things like that. And I think one of the ways that I'm still trying to shift my thinking is you said something along the lines of " they're only effective for 55% of the time and the rest of the time was like water cooler and things like that.

And the shift becomes the fact that the water cooler and the downtime and the rest time is as necessary. is necessary is a necessary part of the job along with the effectiveness. Like you when you're paying them for eight hours of work, that replenishment time is the same. Just like if you're being paid by the hour to drive a car, you're paid not only during the times that you're driving it, but you're also paid for the times that you are filling up the gas tank, changing the oil, because that's part of the necessary maintenance to do the driving. And I think the mistake that I have made made with myself and is things is to think that I do have to be effective and that those other times are the downtime is required um and needs to be made just as important as the you know effective time um because it's all it's all effective if it is enabling them to do that 55% of activity whatever it is. So that's kind of my own battle is to internalize that because I still don't do it. I I know it's true. I don't feel like it's true. Um so let me just respond to that. No, there's I absolutely in say bidding a price to a customer I included okay there's in anything that in any way would be in support of what we were doing not just doing the deliverable work but the meetings or side stuff I mean or redoss that was all predictably built into the cost. I'm referring to things that have nothing to do with the customer or even the ashits that might pop up that were not so predictable. I shouldn't fold in some of that probability in time. So um yeah that that was definitely worked in. Um and the result for me was that I went 17 years without missing a budget. a cost or the performance of a delivered product. Once I started doing this,

I think you have to include some of that. It's it's uh the the problem was I had a number of other engineering type people around me who bid work as if they were doing it and these were cream of the crop people, not the average guy that was going to do the work and so they were starting off in a failure mode from the beginning.

I think leadership plays a big part in it as well and your leadership style and how um what your people who report to you think about you as well. I was always always very successful at Home Depot in management, but I would do a lot of things other people wouldn't. I was a great believer in recognizing people in front of their peers. So, you know, at a morning staff meeting, you know, the hoo-ha, we're going to have a good day and I'd say, you know, how about Jill? You know, she um had a customer yesterday and I would I I would try and find reasons to to say I had a boy, I had a girl like that they done did something right or even you know we had certain goals for meeting metrics and I would write you know great job and even putting a piece of candy on a report and giving a report and things like that and I think you know so there's going to be an organic certain amount of time that you know based upon time and motion as well but I think what your the people think of you as well as whether they would be more productive in that 30 40 50% of time how much more productive might they be and that human factor I don't know but how anyone else um so I've been doing technology consulting for over 15 years for corporate 500 and I would say um there was there's always fires. There's always something. There's always something not going wrong in technology. Um, so but if I worried about everything being proactive like I did early in my career, I got high anxiety. I got burnt out. So I had over time had to realize that a lot of stuff is out of my control. And even if it is, what if I miss a deadline, if budgets are missed or something's missed, whatever, it's all about the relationship development that you do with your clients, right? And that trust that you know, you mess up. You're a human being. You're going to mess up. You have to also give yourself that permission that you messed up and that it's okay, right? And you can't foresee everything. You just can't. No matter how much you try to pre-plan. So, I think for me, what I just do is I can only focus on so much, especially as I get older, I can't do all the things anymore and remember all the things anymore, right? Um, so what I just do is every morning I sit for 30 minutes to like an hour. I set time aside to think about just to think, to have a moment just to think about what's going on in general, right, with my clients, with the work, with my own life of what's going on, like have I fed my dog? Like these sorts of things that I have to start to try to remember also that I have so much on my plate, but I can't focus on everything. So, it's really to figure out what that is, what's on your mind that day, what is the most important to you to that day? And I try to come up with three things that I can get done that day that is something that's doable and that doesn't bring me extra anxiety or depression or anything else, right? But it's something that I can say, "Okay, at least I got this done." But try to make it small enough where it's accomplishable, right? If you make it too big, and that's kind of what I do every day. Just figure out what are the most important three things I can do today to move the ball. Right.

Right.

And then everything else is just and that's just task-wise because majority of your work, if it's with people, it's services, is relationship management. I will tell you this, right? If you have a good relationship and trust with your client, even if you're like a week behind, you be transparent with them and you talk with them, they call you, it's all right because you do quality work. I know how that goes. Can you get it to me by this date? Help me if I could do that.

Honesty goes a long way with that, doesn't it? I'm not going to get it done on time, but

yeah.

Well, and communication, I mean, I'll just second on what Adrian said. I mean, for me, because I'm in technology consulting as well, and communication both within the team internally and with the client. The better the communication, the better the projects. I mean, you could have a train wreck of a project, but if the communication was consistent throughout, like it could still be choked up as a win, where it's a small mistake with poor communication can turn into a real, you know, possible losing a client event. So, yeah, it's going to happen. It's just how you manage it.

I Yeah, I wanted to say that honesty you know, my customers internal, external, all knew that depending on the effect of whatever was going on, I was going to make sure they heard it. I wasn't, this wasn't an excuse. I wasn't, you know, I was simply letting them know when it was reasonable to let them know. It was part of reporting um, you know, risks and such. What the effect of what I did as I did for my environment when assessing everything, picking that 70% number. The first thing it did was the people that worked for me realized I was not going to be the guy that walked in and started beating them, saying, "You you've got to make this work. You got to work faster. You got to work longer. Whatever. We got to get there." That I was never that guy. I kept them in the loop, too. Hey, you know, we're seeing this. We're doing that. Um, and they love the fact that I acknowledged there was going to be time that they weren't going to be doing things directly impacting a contracted job and that was expected and planned for and everything. It respected their time.

Congratul I'm going to like to take it back to teaching and whatnot. Um you walk in with a lesson plan and in front of you you have 28 six year olds which was not unusual for me to have a first grade class of 28 or 29 kids. In front of you, you have 28-29 different levels and expectations coming back at you and you have a plan and you have just so much time to get through that lesson. And supposedly you can do this, this, and this. But nope, somebody throws up, somebody um does this, somebody that somebody doesn't get it, somebody is distracted. by a bee in the room, whatever it is,

it doesn't mean that the plan isn't still in place. But if I, as the teacher, don't adapt to that and push it through, if I try to push it through no matter what, by the next day, when I say, "Okay, now we're going to take that and we're going to do this." And we build on that, they still don't have the one from the day before. And I've gotten nowhere. And I think we do that in ourselves with our plans for our days. We spin our wheels because we set this expectation. It's got to be here, but we don't allow for those other things that are completely valid that may come in. And we have to step back and I go, "Okay, we're only going to get through this part of the lessons today." And then tomorrow I have to review that part of the lesson and then add a little bit more. I still might not get through it. And then on the third day I have to review the first day and the second day and add the third day. And that's for everything that a kid that lesson that you teach a kid that you have to it's they don't just get it the first time. They have to have three to seven rep repetitions. I think we need to do that same thing too. If we need to allow ourselves to be perfectly imperfect, start ugly and just let it go when it's if it's the time, if I've got the essentials in there, then okay I can come allow myself to come back to it if I need to in in my own work and if it's in a project that I have to do for someone else or for some other a limit I'm going to say okay is this original plan really the best fit for that maybe I need to revise anyway

yeah Gretchen that was you know you reminded me of so many key things. But what I heard you saying is what's key and that's you had the awareness. Here's what I may have to deal with in teaching these kids whatever. So you built up a plan. It's like when I was climbing up and over the western divide, we went up a scree slope which is a picture of an entire mountain slope that's marbled. So every time you take the plan step up one, you slide back halfway. And but if you know that's going to happen and you have adaptations, life is wonderful.

Yeah. And you just have to plan for unplanned things. I mean, and have it out there. It it I never walked in a day at school expecting everything to go perfectly. I had to know exactly. I had to have know in my head what if we have a fire drill. Okay, there's a windstorm going on. What if the power goes out? Okay, we've got uh like There's an increase of whooping cough right now in the state of Washington. What if we have kids that are sick? What do this I mean, you just kind of go, okay, this is the lesson plan and yes, I'm being observed by the principal and they're coming in for a 40minut shot and they're going to sit there and write down and I have no I may have the best laid plans, but I also have 29 unpredictable six-year-olds or I have 30 unpredictable fifth graders. I don't know which is worse.

The best laid plans of mice and men. So that's great. Um I bring Does anyone have any other thoughts? If not, we can call it a wrap. We're at the bottom of the hour.

I'll just add in one last thing: we keep on saying plans. And one of the things that has been scientifically proven is that we are really bad at planning things and estimating how long something's going to take. And just accepting that if something isn't going right, it's not that you're doing it wrong. It's probably that you planned it wrong. And just get better at planning. There you go. You heard it here first. So, check out the website. I'll edit that. That didn't sound right. Check out the website atcreativeworkhour.com. Send us an email hello@creativeworkhour.com. And if you've got a question that you'd like the crew to discuss, go ahead and send that off and we'll see what we can do. Thanks everyone. That's a wrap.

Cool.