Don’t Mix Creative and Administrative
You cannot mix creative tasks with functional or administra-
tive tasks. You cannot really do operational tasks and creative
tasks simultaneously. They require fast or slow thinking, but
not both. Office activities require fast, short-term thinking.
Creative tasks require thought, planning, and application.
Think of creative time as your “internal prime time” and
operational time as your “external prime time.” And don’t
mix them up. You cannot do big creative jobs requiring focus
and concentration in a typical office environment unless
you put up a DONOTDISTURBsign on that door. Otherwise,
you must be creative in finding ways to get away from your
work environment so that you can complete the tasks that
your career really depends on.
How to Create Chunks of Time
Here are several recommendations for creating blocks of
time, any one of which can dramatically improve your effec-
tiveness and efficiency.
First, work in the morning when you are the freshest
and most alert. Many of the most productive people in
business discipline themselves to go to bed early and then
arise at 5:00 or 6:00 A.M. so that they can work for sixty to
ninety minutes uninterrupted before they go into the office.
Even if you get into the office a bit late, in those ninety min-
utes of uninterrupted work, you will accomplish as much
as the average person does in an office environment in
three hours.
72 TIME MANAGEMENT