In a traditional work environment, your manager is the person responsible for making sure you have all the material things you need to do your job. If you don’t have the things, you can’t get any work done.
Sometimes – the relationship between good management and solid provisions is pretty easy to see. If your manager asks you to make 100 copies of a long document, but the copier keeps breaking down, and they refuse to get someone in to fix it, that’s bad management.
But what if they won’t replace your computer when it’s running a little slow? Or they want you to do deep work that requires a lot of concentration in the middle of an open-plan office without any headphones?
Unfortunately, even the best managers are sometimes constrained by budget, and this will be doubly true for you, managing your artistic labor. Still, when managing yourself, you have to keep those limitations in mind. Maybe that means adjusting your expectations accordingly. Maybe, it means finding creative solutions.
I’ll admit, it’s easier to be creative about someone else’s problems. For instance, if we consider the hypothetical above, where an employee is trying to concentrate in a loud environment, there are a lot of possible solutions. Here’s my list, but I bet you can come up with more:
- Wearing noise-cancelling headphones
- Borrowing the quieter office of someone who travels frequently
- Working from home, or from the public library
- Establishing “quiet, meeting-free hours” in the office itself, because maybe everybody could stand to have more quiet time for focusing on their work
- Working non-standard hours, so they’re there when the office is quiet
- Turning a conference room into either a “free for all” zone, or a “quiet work” zone
- Getting everyone involved in the project that’s taking such concentration
Obviously, not all those solutions will be reasonable or effective, but which ones work will depend on the specific details of the workplace.
Now, think about the things YOU need. Sometimes, being a good manager for yourself requires you to change your mindset about those things. Here’s a quick process to help you think about them as if they are someone ELSE’S problems:
One. Make a list of anything that would help you do better work. This first list is just a rough draft, so it can be sloppy and as ambitious or whimsical as you like.
Two. Pretend you have an external manager for your creative life and rewrite the list as if you’re about to present it to them. For every single item, write a short explanation of why it’s important. For instance, I might write something like, “New fountain pen – Because I am more likely to push myself and come up with better ideas when I’m actually enjoying putting ink on paper.”
Three. Put on your metaphorical manager hat, so you can respond as if you’re a different person than the person who wrote that second list. Experienced actors will find this similar to changing roles in an audition scene. Novelists might pretend they’re writing a different POV character. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy when you’re essentially responding to yourself. Some other silly tricks: use a different color pen. Go sit in a different room. Put on a different hat, literally. Let it sit overnight and consider the list over your morning caffeinated beverage of choice. Ask a good friend to look at the list with you. And then…
Four. Go through the list, item by item. Read the justification and think about what it would take to provide that thing. In some cases, simply changing perspective makes it easy to provide that thing. (A few years back, I realized my hands and wrists were always cold at my writing desk, so I bought some wrist warmers, but it took me months to figure out that I could just do that.) Solve the easy things first.
Now, for each thing that seems impossible – because it’s not in your financial or energetic budget – get another blank sheet of paper and write only the justification for the item at the top. Using my own example, I might write, “Need to enjoy putting ink on paper.”
Five. Brainstorm solutions like I did above, as if it’s some other person that has the needs you’ve described. Imagine that person in a variety of different circumstances, so that you can come up with ideas that might not work for you (at first), because you never know when they’re going to inspire some other thought.
Honestly, the most important part of all of this is to remember that it’s your job to make sure you have what you need to get your creative work done. That’s not an excuse to not work until you have the perfect tools and environment. Nobody gets the perfect tools and environment. But you deserve your equivalent of functional photocopier. This whole exercise is meant to be empowering. What do you need, and how can you get it for yourself?