Freelance Graphic Designer London

Time management for graphic designers

Before I start of this post I would like to ask you to think of an answer to this question: What one thing could you do that you aren’t doing now that if you did on a regular basis would make a tremendous positive difference to your personal or professional life?

One book I enjoyed reading very much was Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One of the concepts in this book is about time management and the four quadrants of time.

Quadrant I: Urgent and important matters. Crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects. We all have these things; we’ve all got to do them.

Quadrant II: Non-urgent but important matters. Relationship building, planning, recognising new opportunities, improvements to your workplace, exercise, recreation. Things we know we should do but don’t because they’re not urgent.

Quadrant III: Urgent but not important things like phone calls, email, interruptions, popular matters, some meetings. This is visible stuff on-hand at the moment that isn’t really important. It’s easy to get caught up in this quadrant!

Quadrant IV: The worst of the lot – non-urgent and non-important matters. This includes trivia, spam, time wasters, distractions, non-productive activities.

OK. I bet your answer to the above question was a Quadrant II activity!

For Covey, time management, is all about minimising the Quadrant III and IV activities so that you can concentrate on Quadrant II (Quadrant I just has to be done!). It’s so easy to get caught up with your head down gardening that you don’t look up to realise you’re in the wrong garden!

Think about what it is you really want to achieve. A successful design business? How are you going to achieve that? How can you expand your business without neglecting what you’ve already worked hard to achieve?

I’m also a big believer in meditation to clear your head and realise your goals. I’ve talked about the method on my quitting smoking website. It’ll work for non-smokers as well.

This was written in response to a productivity meme. I was invited by webee’s productivity post. Who was invited by Paul Enderson. Who was invited by Instigator Blog. Other excellent posts in this meme are Aaron’s 5 tips, Chris’s flow state and Tara’s productivity secrets