Great Advice: Manage the Mundane - Create the Extraordinary

Over at the blog Wishful Thinking, poet and business coach Mark McGuinness has given a gift of an e-book to all of his readers. The free download is a great resource to get your creative work-life in order for the new year.

In his Time Management for Creative People, which you can download HERE he offers sensible advice of how to better manage day-to-day tasks, and adopt practices that will make your creative life more productive.

Having read his advice at the start of this new year, I've found a few tips really glue into my head and have helped me get more organized overall. I like his advice to:

Prioritise work that is 'important but not urgent': This is a simply put word of advice, but one that I find extremely helpful. When emails drop into your inbox at light speed, it can sometimes feel like you are a hamster on a wheel, running as fast as you can to keep up with what must be done right now. Facing this a few times already this year, I've followed Mark's thinking toward the issue and kept some top goals in mind, in the face of itty bitty little things that must also get done. I'm finding that the little things roll in a lot easier when they fall into place about what you are ultimately focusing on.

Avoid the 'Sisyphus effect' of endless to-do lists: His point on this topic made me laugh. I'm totally guilty of making daily/weekly/hourly to-do lists, often backed up by a master to-do list and a dream to-do list. All these to-do lists are helpful to me, and I have a pile of these lists, most saved on 3x5 index cards that go back to about 2000. I guess I

save them because it is hilarious, and sometimes frightening, to look back 5-6 years and see what nitty gritty stuff was running through my mind. My old to-do lists remind me of all those little pieces in my life that I totally don't remember. I'm not alone in my fascination with to-lists, as a number of to-do list communities have popped up on the web, like: 43things.com, 52projects, Superviva. Sasha Cagen, is even a to-list expert and author with a to-list blog. Like Sasha, I love finding abandoned to-do lists, as they are the ultimate voyeuristic peek into another person's daily life. My favourite to-do list find was when I stumbled across an old bosse's to-do list that she was using as a bookmark. It read out her day's list of tasks including buy milk, eggs, pick up prescription and at the very end -- sex? I couldn't stop myself from totally laughing out loud over it.

There are many sites where you can share any found to-do lists, the most popular being Found magazine and my favourite quirky one Grocerylists. (Clearly from this last rambling tangent about to-do lists, you can see why Mark's tips are both needed and helpful in my own life.)

Following Mark's advice, I've been limiting myself from writing up massive detailed to-do lists, and instead have been putting the top must-do items, about 3-4 a day. I've been leaving off the nitty gritty things like grocery shopping or cleaning -- and have found that I get the bigger picture done much easier without clouding up focus from teeny tiny tasks.

Get things done by putting them off till tomorrow: Along the lines of streamlining to-do lists, this tip has made me

re-prioritize the things that really need to get done everyday. And there is an incredible sense of relief when you can free yourself with a bit more time for a task, and look at the reality of how things that are seemingly urgent, just aren't really that urgent. This is a huge stress reliever, and I should point out that original credit on this concept probably goes to the author Mark Forster who wrote Do It Tomorrow, and is referenced in this e-book.

Get things off your mind: With this tip, he offers praise to the current guru of time management David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, and reminds the reader of the concept of "mind like water" -- a kind of Zen-like state that can be achieved by "reclaiming your own mind by clearing out unnecessary mental clutter, usually caused by trying to keep track of all your work commitments."