On Friday, I took the Emerging Writer's Festival masterclass on Business for Writers. They covered everything from tax, business legals and invoicing to time and project management to social media, marketing and promotion in six pretty grueling hours (some great key points of which have been summarised by E. Markham over here.)

It was probably the best workshop / class I've ever taken. While a lot of the business and money side was stuff I realised I already knew from Uni, (and it reinforced my conviction that nobody can "teach" you social media, other than the two rules of Don't Be An Arse, and It's Not All About You) there was some really great discussion and tips on marketing and managing things - especially time.

Time management's been my big stuggle of late. Finding time to work regularly on my projects, juggling time between projects, and allocating time for work, projects and relaxation - none of that seems to be working well. After almost a decade of the luxury of a uni schedule, with frantic overwork followed by great swathes of free time, I find myself echoing almost everyone else in regular work - I just wish I had more time. Too sleepy in the morning to do things before work, too tired when I get home from work, too exhausted from my work week to do more than recover on the weekend.

This masterclass gave me some great ideas to try on managing that. Although it wasn't exactly the ideas themselves, but rather the realisations I had about how they relate to me. Forgive me for an all-about-me post, but in this case, I don't think I'm a special snowflake - these are problems and attitudes that affect the majority of people trying to find time to do things, so hopefully you can find some epiphanies of your own in my rambling.

I'm a completionist. That is, I find my sense of achievement in completing something, and if I'm working on something I tend to want to keep going until it's finished, even if that means working until 3am (alright, I might be a little more extreme than most people there, but I blame that on eight years of university assignments). But that also means I don't like to start things at times, because I know I won't be able to finish it that session or day. Which makes no sense - there's no logical reason not to start something that won't be finished that day. But to our brain, it looks like a long hard slog with no reward at the end. It's a pretty common thing - most people feel more accomplishment from completing something than just progressing toward it, but that's not necessarily a helpful way to look at things.

Paul Callaghan, who spoke about time management at the masterclass, made two really excellent points:

• There is always infinite work (there will always be more projects to write on) and there is always finite time. Producing art is about reconciling those two things.
• Resenting, fearing or making an enemy of time because there isn't enough of it isn't terribly healthy. A more productive and less stressful approach is to accept that there is never going to be "enough time", and the best way to solve this problem is through understanding how you yourself work so you can do what's important to you.

Paul was all for questioning our working process - how much time do you have in a day, how much can you allocate to a project, how do you track your time expenditure, how do you estimate it, how do you procrastinate (see yesterday's post), how do you inspire yourself. All of these things give you more of an idea of how you work, and how you can use your time more effectively for you.

I'd learned to break my projects up into tasks (and have just realised that it'll help a lot if those tasks are even smaller - things I can get done in an hour or two, despite the monumental list of tasks that creates). But when you're constantly feeling like you don't have enough time, it can be helpful to also break up your time into smaller chunks. Using something like the Pomodoro technique (which, I'll admit, was suggested to me ages ago by a friend; I had dismissed it due to my completionist attitude mentioned above.) can help shift your focus from being completionist ("I have to get all this done today!") to being progressionist ("these are the things I'm going to work on today"). You still have tasks and goals, but the emphasis is on getting what work you can done in the time you've got (and getting better at knowing how much you can get done.). It also gives you set amounts of play time to relax which can help stop the procrastination - your brain becomes willing to work for the 'on' time, because it knows there's some 'off' time coming soon.

I'm not saying this is the answer for everyone - the whole point is that you have to look at your own work process, issues, difficulties and life and figure it out for yourself. Try things, see if they work, figure out why they did or didn't. But that's the thing - you can improve things, just by getting to know yourself a little better.

Also, if you're in Melbourne, the Emerging Writer's Festival is still going this week - I'd strongly recommend you check it out.