Someone who’s exhaustingly trying to start from zero

The painful reality of managing up is, your boss’s time is more valuable than yours. Period. It’s simple organizational economics.

Because of their level of experience, degree of judgment, access to power, and ability to effect change on the broader team, they have more leverage than you. Their opinion weighs more than yours.

And that’s okay. Knowing this makes you more effective at your job and thus, more valuable as an employee.

Now you can hyper focus on making things easier for that person. You can establish a better working arrangement by formatting and filtering tasks against the filter of, okay, does this give my boss more of what she needs to succeed?

What’s unfortunate is, creative professionals forget to apply this same thinking to their own internal processes.

Because the principle of prioritization works for managing within, as well as managing up. Again, it’s economics. On any given workday, not all of people’s minutes are created equally. Time spent on creative execution is disproportionately more valuable than time spent on administrative work.

You might have plenty of tasks on your plate, but your daily discipline of physically generating new ideas will always be the single highest leverage activity that facilitates all the others.

It’s the catchall. Which means, if you only have two hours each morning and two hours each afternoon do that work, then you better be efficient. You better know how to get your brain up to operating temperature quickly, without a lot of ramp up time.

One tool that’s profoundly helpful in solving this problem is called well digging. It’s a creative professional’s ongoing reference file. Almost like a forced savings account for your ideas that always has a high enough balance to make withdrawals on a moment’s notice.

That way, when you sit down to create in those crucial two hours of high leverage time, the blank page is no longer ground zero, your life is. Your intellectual reservoir has been constantly replenished.

Hemingway had his own version of this. He famously advised writers to always stop their work when things are going well, and when they know what will happen next. If they can do that every day when they are working on a novel, they will never be stuck.

That’s well digging. And you always do it before you’re thirsty. When we have parts of something, we always want to create a whole.

How much of your high leverage creative time are you wasting trying to start from scratch?

Make things easier on yourself. Accept the painful reality that not all of your time is created equally, and prioritize and execute accordingly.

Contribute to your ongoing creative reference file on an hourly basis. And each time you sit down to do your work, you’ll have a creative advantage over someone who’s exhaustingly trying to start from zero.

It’s not managing up, it’s managing within.

Have you developed an exquisite understanding of your own timing?