Time is the Weapon of Death: A Cheerful List of Productivity Tips for Creatives

By Martin Agency SVP/Group Creative Director Neel Williams

[Illustration by Brand Communications Designer Kelsey Waugh ]

I’ve been thinking about time quite a bit lately. Some of this fixation is no doubt related to plucking more gray nose hairs and confronting my own mortality. However, not all these time-tormented musings are focused on our slow, daily march to the grave—there is a little advertising connection to be found.

If you’re not my wife, mom or proofreader, you may not have read the last article I published: “Save the Adplanet! A Case For Creative Sustainability.” It’s cool, you’re excused. That piece was about time, too. Specifically, it was about allowing for the proper amount of time in a schedule to help increase the odds of coming up with big, memorable, brand-building ideas.

Now, this piece picks up where that one left off. Let’s say you’re lucky enough to have a Goldilocks amount of time. Not too long to wallow and lose focus. Not too short so that it’s basically a sprint. Or maybe you just have more than 48 hours. Nice. Now what? The ad industry is really good about hyping what to make, but there’s not as much guidance on how to do it. Below you’ll find some friendly advice from yours truly, gleaned over roughly 18 years of trial and error and more error. Because as the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis once said, “Time isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing.”

1. Protect Your Work Time

Do not, I repeat do NOT, leave your thinking time to chance. Especially if your calendar looks open and you feel really really good about carving out time on the fly. Something else can and will take it. A co-worker. A last-minute meeting. Your needy cat. The chatty delivery person dropping off CBD edibles for your needy cat. Block the time on your calendar and treat it with as much sanctity and savage boundary-keeping as a meeting with the Dalai Lama. Or Dolly Parton.

2. Get Uncomfortably Focused

Once you have your time protected in a good cadence, you’re going to have to do the hardest thing of all. Not waste it. If you’re like me, you’ll have mixed emotions as you try to focus. The uncomfortable pull to multitask juuust a little. The feeling that “I’ve been focused for 15 straight minutes, wow look at me go, maybe a quick email won’t hurt.” Close Outlook. Turn off your phone. Shut down Slack. Hide the snacks. Empty your bladder (in the bathroom). Now sit down and get ready to hurt a little, but take heart that this light mental anguish means you’re doing it right. Personal tip: I like to alternate between writing down ideas in a notebook and on a laptop. When I get stuck in one medium I switch to the other. Doing so feels as if I’m tapping slightly different parts of my brain, like two oil wells probing parts of the field. Also, Moleskines don’t have TikTok.

3. Beware the Air of Productivity

Certain tactics feel productive and look productive but yield few results. Avoid these like somebody having a sneezing fit on an airplane circa 2020. Don’t sit in a room staring at your partner all day taking turns Googling stuff and sharing dumb memes.* Don’t have a 12-email back-and-forth with the strategist over one word in the brief before you can really get started. Don’t respond to every Slack with immediacy and gusto. Don’t sit within your boss’s eyeline in the office tap-tap-tapping away on your lappytappy and feel like you need to stay late even when your brain says, “Oh hell no.” It’s like if Nike was for downers: Just don’t do it.

*Note: This partner-staring stage is important and necessary, but you have to work by yourself and then regularly bring back those solo findings to your creative partner for proper kicking around. Whether it’s in a group of 2 or 20, brainstorming is not deep, foundational work. Only you can do that.

4. Protect Your Not Working Time

Just as a farmer’s field must rest to rebuild nutrients, you have to give your brain a break. Or a break from work, at least. Remember how you’re supposed to block out your work time with the intimidating force of a 350-pound bouncer? Do the same with your leisure hours. Taking a walk, meditating, swinging kettlebells, listening to a podcast, reading to your kids—these are as important to being productive (and sane) as the actual work. Not only can they bring inspiration in their own right, they give your poor, tired ad brain a rest. I’ve had some of my best ideas away from work and think that’s probably for a reason. With a still mind, you can hear the faint whisper of your subconscious saying things like: “What if the talking gerbil had a monocle and a British accent?”?

5. Do Less, Better

Many creatives believe that making good work is like a raffle: the more entries you have, the better your chances. Past a point, this is not true. Everyone has a finite amount of quality bandwidth. You may say, “I work best when my plate is overloaded,” but consider this: that could just be a made-up story you tell yourself that has no basis in results and simply helps you feel better about having a poor work-life balance/integration/whatever-it’s-called-now. Fill any bandwidth too much and it compromises everything you’re working on. You have to be honest with yourself and what you can handle well. This requires a very difficult word for any hungry creatives to say. No. It sucks and it hurts and it’ll tear you up inside, but sometimes you just have to say it. A good brief is indeed a wonderful thing, but you’re only as good as the version of yourself you’ve brought to that project. Try to bring your best self when you’re fortunate enough to have that control. And when you truly can’t say no, at least try to build in a breather when things wrap up.

6. Make Time for the “Boring Stuff”

You need to make time for finessing the messaging and mandatories. Push back if there are too many to juggle, but after that, embrace them. They aren’t speed bumps on your way to creative realization, they are actually the fuel. The sooner you accept them as opportunities, the more likely you’ll be to sell work that’s not only brave but also smart, strategic and effective. So don’t just cut and paste from the brief into your work and write-ups. I can almost promise you that a smooth, casual-sounding delivery of a client’s message will warm their hearts more than a killer joke. Which is not to say you don’t need that killer joke—c’mon, give me a little credit. It’s more to say that if the messaging sounds like Siri reading an instructional manual back-translated from High Valerian, your clients won’t even be able to process the cleverness you spent all night crafting. Consumers won’t much care for it, either. One of the most memorable compliments I ever got was when a CD told me I had a knack for making the RTBs sound like two normal people having a conversation about a product. This CD didn’t have anything nice to say about my comedic efforts, but that’s neither here nor there.

7. Don’t Stop ’Til You Need To

Back to the part about blocking out dedicated work time every day. In the long run, this approach will allow you to dig deeper and in more unexpected places. Take the runner who goes 5 miles a day for an entire week, versus the one who runs a marathon on Sunday. In the ad world, success is about total creative distance traveled. The first runner will have run a marathon by Saturday, be fairly well rested and able to ask themselves, “Okay, so now what weird roads do I want to run down these final two days since I’m basically playing with house money?” Yes, I know I just jumbled together running and gambling and creativity, but hopefully you get the point hidden in there. This final stretch is where a lot of the most unexpected ideas lie, and what your excellent habits have set you up to expose. Do not stop at 26.2 miles, use your work habit advantage—to your advantage.

8. Know It’s a Losing Battle, but Still Worth Waging

Even if we all had crystal balls and the perfect amount of time for work projects and the bestest brief in the world—horrible, random stuff is going to happen. It will undermine your best efforts at productivity. The great illusion is that time is under our control. Any plan, any future we envision, is always a hope rather than a guarantee. The best we can do is grab the present moment with as much courage and discipline as possible. And not be too perturbed or surprised when it all goes south at several points along the way. Good news is, strong habits put you ahead of the game for when fate strikes, and they also help you get back on track quickly.

As a closing thought below, I’ll leave you with a quote from someone much smarter, Cal Newport. His research on what he calls “deep work” is fascinating and illuminating, providing data to support many of the habits that can take decades to hone if you haven’t explicitly studied them. So here’s hoping something in this article helps you become an even more effective communication artist and lets you skip a few years of getting it wrong like I sure did.?

“[Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.” ―?Cal Newport,?Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World