Economy of Time and Motion
[by Luke Copping]
Money isn’t the only asset that you need to manage judiciously.
Cash flow, income, sanity, energy, and time are just some of the resources that we have to properly manage. When one of these is neglected and not properly maintained your business can shift away from the ideal and harmonious balance you want it to operate at and put you in a position where you are always playing catch up and always responding to self-created crises rather than focusing on moving forward and gaining ground.
A lot of photographers I speak with often have particular issues with self-managing their time. While I am not an advocate of micromanaging your day to the minute, I do believe that an occasional time audit can help to reveal larger overarching patterns of behavior to help you better plan a more efficient day. One of the the tools I recommend for this self-research is Rescue Time.
If you are an avid reader of Tim Ferriss you might already be familiar with this service, but the idea is simple. You install the Rescue Time application on your computer, which then tracks your activity and gives you information about what websites and applications you use and how much. It also indicates in what areas you are most productive and where you are most distracted.
Over time you can use this information to identify positive and negative patterns in your work habits, and once you are cognizant of these patterns you can begin to remedy the bad ones and optimize the positive ones. Rescue time also has other tools available to you including Focus Time – a tool that blocks distractions for a set amount of time, allowing you to focus on a task.
Luke Copping is both a commercial photographer and a recovering procrastinator who has admitted he has a problem. He is currently seeking help
3 Responses to 'Economy of Time and Motion'
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Interesting. I signed up, installed it, and the program launch keeps telling me I have to install it. Weird. :-/
Another option would be to set time management goals.
30 minutes between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morning doing blogging
15 minutes on email two or at most three times a day
20 minutes on education
etc.
If you set time management goals and you will find yourself becoming more productive whether you adhere to them very strictly or not.
Just because “there’s an app for that” doesn’t mean you need an app to do it.
@ Dean Birinyi
Dean
I agree with you wholeheartedly – everybody will find techniques that work for them while others may not be ideal solutions. Many find analog tools to be effective, while other prefer the more analytical approach to time optimization. The block based time management structure you mention can be extremely effective, and I often use a similar method incorporating a timer (much like the Pomodoro method) to keep myself on task and to stop from drifting into distraction.
I think where tools like Rescue Time are most effective is when used occasionally as part of a regular optimization or self-assessment, rather than as a constant monitoring/micro management of your day to day efficiency. An occasional audit can help to illuminate revealing patterns in our behavior that we may not be aware of ourselves. And this can be an effective tool in further refining an already solid time management method.