What a mouthful of a title. To be clear, this article isn’t about being productive. This article is for those who find joy in ticking off little boxes on their to-do lists. The strategies I’ve outlined below for creating and maintaining a goal-based schedule is for those days when you set out to write your memoir and instead find yourself reaching level 209 of Candy Crush Saga an hour later.
I’ve accomplished a lot by creating task lists that adhere to a greater schedule because my follow-through knows no bounds. I cut my teeth on creating schedules at The Mill, an award-winning post-production house, where my title was literally “Scheduler.” After that, I moved onto Grey, an advertising agency, where I worked as an advertising producer for three years. I left to become a line producer at NYLON, and am now freelancing as a creative entrepreneur. All to say that I’m highly experienced in creating clear tasks, communicating deadlines, and holding creatives to schedules.
BE REAL WITH HOW MUCH TIME THERE IS IN A DAY
For the 9-5 Types
There are only 24 hours in a day. Take away eight hours for sleeping, three hours for eating, one hour for exercising, two hours for waking up and winding down, and you are left with:
Ten Hours.
Do you have a job that takes eight hours of your day? Assuming you eat during your job but eat breakfast and dinner at home (so factoring in two hours of eating), that leaves you with three hours of flex time a day. In reality, this leaves me with two hours of watching One Piece and one hour to stare at a blank Word document.
But I want to write a script. I know that it takes me an hour to write one page. If it takes me an hour to write one page, and I want to write a feature that’s 110 pages, then I need to put aside 110 hours, minimum, to write a feature.
So finding out how you much time you can put aside to accomplish a big goal, like writing a feature film, can be broken down into a simple math equation of taking the total amount of hours in a day and subtracting the amount of hours you have committed to other activities (i.e. sleeping, eating) to leave you with the amount of time you have left to pursue your goal.
To bring you through the rest of my thought process on the issue of writing a feature:
Five days a week I have a full-time job, and I refuse to give up my nightly television binging, leaving me with 5 hours per week to dedicate to writing.
There’s also the weekend, but I value social time, causing me to only commit to four hours to my goal throughout the weekend.
This means that I can spend 9 hours per week on my feature script, resulting in a need for 12 weeks to finish the draft for a feature film.
In short, to create a schedule to accomplish a goal with a full-time job, I find out how much time I realistically have to dedicate to the goal and how long I think the goal will take to achieve.
What goals are you looking to achieve? Realistically, how much time per week can you commit to that goal? Knowing that, when can you expect the goal to be accomplished?
For the freelancer types
Without a full-time job it gets a bit more tricky. It’s fluid and entirely depends on how you want to run your life. These are my beliefs below. Adjust as needed to taste.
As an owner of my own business, I need to work a minimum of forty hours a week to be mentally stable.
Weekends are ‘off.’
When I say I work 9am-5pm, the 5pm is a strict stopping point unless there is an urgent and important task (more on that later in the article).
What are the core values for your business? What are rules you would set for yourself to achieve success?
Write down your own HR handbook and stick to it. This includes:
What constitutes a workday?
How long is your lunch break?
What is your job description?
The purpose of this question is to know whether you’re wasting your own time. Does the task you’re doing align with the greater needs of your company? For example, going through my invoices is boring but it helps my company along. Playing Farmville, on the other hand, for two hours straight, does not.
If you were writing an HR handbook for your freelancing business, what would it include? What would you want to hold your ‘employee’ (yourself) responsible for? What is your company’s goal, and what is it aiming to achieve?
CREATING A DAILY TASK LIST
My memory is terrible, which is a horrible trait for someone in my profession to have. How did I ‘fix’ it? I didn’t - I developed a note-taking system and daily task list that keeps me true to what was discussed and what to do each day.
As one of my favorite sayings goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” Tasks are concrete, snackable items that can be finished in a day. Break down your goals into these manageable, everyday tasks to stay on track towards finishing that bigger goal.
To get the most out of my task list, I create it at the end of each night for the following day, and review the task list first thing in the morning. This way, I’m mentally prepared for what I need to get done instead of writing down twelve different time-consuming tasks first thing in the morning and having an anxiety attack.
My task list has signifiers - different shapes that take the place of a bullet point in front of each task. My triangle shapes are the actions I’d like to do on a daily basis (i.e. Meditation, Working Out, Journaling). My square boxes are for one-and-done tasks, and little fillable circles are events to remind me what I’ve committed to that day. It’s a small and pleasurable part of my day to fill in these triangles, squares and circles.
Once you’ve achieved your task(s), make sure you congratulate yourself on what you’ve done that day. Take a full, present moment and articulate out loud to yourself your daily accomplishments. Even if it’s just walking the dog, you deserve to reward yourself for the goals that you’ve met just as strongly and as often as possible.
And if you haven’t been able to meet your goals for that day, have an honest conversation with yourself about why and take that learning into the next day. Often my most unproductive days are followed by my most productive ones.
DO I REALLY NEED TO DO THIS TASK?
(Image courtesy of https://trainingindustry.com/articles/strategy-alignment-and-planning/what-is-the-eisenhower-matrix-and-how-can-it-help-with-time-management/)
The Eisenhower Matrix is a recognized time- and project-management tool. To prioritize my goals, I use this matrix to determine the order in which to do my daily goals. First-off, Urgent and Important tasks need to be done first.
Then, Urgent but Not Important tasks – since I'm a company of one, I don't have the luxury to delegate tasks and have to handle urgent needs that come up on my own.
Then it's onto Not Urgent but Important tasks, and recognizing and trashing Not Urgent and Not Important Tasks.
See https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_91.htm for a further deep dive into specific examples that demonstrate the Eisenhower matrix.
FOLLOW-THROUGH / BE KIND
Ok, so you’ve created your schedule, figured out the tasks/steps you need to take to accomplish your larger goals, and put them tidily into your daily planner. Now what?
The follow-through is the hardest. You need to keep yourself on schedule. You are the only one who cares about you accomplishing these tasks (if you don’t care about accomplishing it, please refer back to the Eisenhower matrix and decide if it belongs in the Unimportant and Non-urgent category).
The way to follow through is to make change slowly. Establish small habits that build up into greater habits. For example, want to wake up earlier? Change your wakeup time by fifteen minutes each day until you get to your goal wake-up time. Still not meeting your goal? Change your wakeup time by fifteen minute increments on a weekly, not daily basis. The point here is to make a large goal, like waking up at 6am when you generally get up at 11am, a set of manageable and small tasks that build into a habit.
Another tip is to have an accountability group for each goal. Want to get swole? Create a text chain with friends, set a daily time each day to workout, and FaceTime for ten minutes after working out with said friends. Frustrated at your lack of progress on your filmmaking project? Join Filmshop, where they will force you to state your weekly goals and make you into a better filmmaker just because you are held accountable to your goals each week. If you don’t have friends that overlap with your goals, find a support system online. Facebook groups have proven surprisingly helpful, although be picky and immediately leave any group that has toxic people in it.
Also, be kind to yourself. It’s ok to not meet your schedule every day. You don’t have to cross off every Important task on your checklist - move it to the next day if it’s not urgent. For example, I have therapy on Wednesdays at 9am, and for an hour afterwards I’m wrecked and all I can do is play cell phone games from 10am-11am. Be honest with yourself, treat yourself as your own best friend (what advice would you give to your friend if they came to you with your scenario?), and understand that trying to execute and maintain your schedule is as important as actually doing it.
Lastly, truly celebrate your achievements. Say out loud to others what you’ve achieved that day. Accept their congratulations and allow yourself to be proud of what you’ve done. And if that feels weird to you, at least take a moment to yourself to fully realize what you’ve accomplished, because you deserve to be recognized for all of your hard work.
THANK YOU
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed getting it all down on paper. I love having a chaotic world diced down into little manageable chunks that make my day-to-day feel meaningful. I’d love to hear tips, tricks and questions if you have any, so feel free to reach out to my email below.
If you’re someone who still has trouble creating and maintaining a goal-based schedule, reach out to me at alexandra.hsie@gmail.com. I’m starting a productivity coaching business geared towards creatives where I create a monthly schedule for you based on your goals. I’ll break down your goals into weekly tasks and hold you accountable to those tasks on a weekly basis. Together we can achieve your dreams!
Meet Alexandra hsie
Alex is a creative entrepreneur focusing on producing, writing, and productivity coaching. Her production experience spans a wide variety of media, including but not limited to indie features, reality TV, branded content, editorial and commercial at companies such as Grey, NYLON (digital magazine), and Hudsun Media. Outside of her career, Alex is a dedicated rock climber, member of the all-women LGBTQIA+ motorcycle club The Sirens of NYC, and dog mom.