Exactly. Yeats called it “the fascination of what’s difficult”.

Your quotes from Steven Covey and others, combined with your insights about squeezing time into moving the important, creative objectives forward, really resonated with me. So often, we’re bombarded with “urgent” messages on the phone, the “urgent” need to answer emails, IM, the need for “Instant” replies to the messages on the Blackberry, unnecessary meetings, power lunches, all take up valuable time. Valuable time that could be more usefully utilized for what we know to be important. Covey reminds about putting first things first. Only we can decide what’s first.

For me, it was painting and drawing. But once it’s decided, every effort, must be made to create the time for serious input in the #1 priority. I used to escape in a bookstore at lunchtime, work late at nights, sometime on long weekends. While at the same time, not forgetting family duties. It’s not easy, but doable, as so many entrepreneurs have shown. Thanks for the reminders. Errol.

You’ve inspired me to take on a personal project that has been bubbling. Thank you!

I love to find people who are looking to provide these custom solutions because it helps to give people a great example of how they can think about their own time management system as something that they own and can customize.

I’ll mention your ebook on my site as an example of a custom time management system, and perhaps some more “creatives” will be inspired to be inventive in this area of their lives also.

You might be interested in my e-book Time Management for Creative People, it was born of a similar feeling that most time management systems don’t really fit the needs of creative types: http://media.lateralaction.com/creativetime.pdf

From what I have seen, it takes some creativity, but it’s the only thing that really works for them. I am not an artist by any means, but I know that some are able to go past the conventional tools of the day, to come up with customized ways of assisting themselves.

It seems that most (if not all) of the time management systems I have seen that are offered commercially aren’t designed for creative people — they are more likely to be used by engineering types.

I write about this growing phenomena – Time Management 2.0 – at my blog and in the following article:

http://www.2time-sys.com/2008/10/17/time-management-20/

Jani – We have Brian to thank for the term ‘Lateral Action’. Try doing one small thing every day to turn your ideas into reality.

I think I’ve got much more problems with the productivity part of the process, like everyone else. Wonderful ideas, but no action usually. I try to improve it though…