Time management plays a key role in your personal branding success.
Time management is even more important than your ability to write the books, blog posts, emails, memos, and proposals, and reports needed to inform, convince, and persuade others!
You can know how to write, but unless you can find the time to write, and build your personal brand-building writing time into your day-to-day creative routine, your expertise and ideas will never see the light of day.
Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind is an important book for anyone interested in personal branding success.
It contains dozens of concise success strategies to help you find the time to write, focus your ideas, clarify your ideas, and write your way to personal branding success. It’s a short, fast-read book containing concise, thoughtful essays by contributors who thoughtfully address the obstacles that keep creative individuals from achieving their career and branding goals.
Background
Manage Your Day-to-Day comes from the Scott Belsky, founder of Behance, a showcase and resource for helping creatives succeed, and the 99U.com blog that shares insights for creative individuals in all fields of endeavor.
You can learn more about Scott Belsky and his first book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Barriers Between Vision and Reality, in several previous posts, including Turning Your Book Idea into a Published Book.
What you’ll find in Manage Your Day-to-Day
Belsky’s provocative Foreword, Retooling for a New Era of Work, sets the stage for fresh insights from 20 of today’s most tuned-in observers of our digital creative culture, organized in 4 chapters:
- Building a Rock-Solid Routine, with essays like Harnessing the Power of Frequency, Building Renewal into Your Workday, and Making Room for Solitude.
- Finding Focus in a Distracted World, with suggestions for Scheduling in Time for Creative Thinking and Banishing Multitasking From Our Repertoire.
- Taming Your Tools, with timely, provocative ideas for Making E-mail Matter and Reconsidering Constant Connectivity.
- Sharpening Your Creative Mind, with inspiring thoughts about Creating For You, and You Alone, Training Your Mind to be Ready for Insight, and Letting Go of Perfectionism.
The last section is a Coda: a Call to Action by Steven Pressfield, How Pro Can You Go. You can learn more about Steven Pressfield contribution to writing and personal branding in my previous post, How To Write Your Personal Branding Book in Spite Of Yourself.
Is Manage Your Day-to-Day for you?
Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind is for you if:
- You’re so busy working for others that you don’t have time to do the projects that you know, in your heart, will advance your career and build your personal brand. As a result, you’re always putting your projects on the back burner each month.
- Your time is controlled by e-mail, social media, and interruptions that leaves you too stressed and fatigued to work at your full creative potential.
- You have trouble concentrating and getting started when you sit down to write something important, whether it’s for you, your boss, or your client.
- You’re looking for a better way to align your energies, your time, and your goals so that you can make the time to build your personal brand.
What makes Managing Your Day-to-Day different?
The key to the success of Managing Your Day-to-Day is found in the last two paragraphs of the books preface, written by Jocelyn K. Glei, 99u’s editor-in-chief. In her words:
Because we each have a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and sensitivities, it is impossible to prescribe a single approach that will work for everyone. The right solution for you will always be personal–an idiosyncratic combination of strategies based on your own work demands, habits, and preferences.
So, rather than lay out a one-size-fits-all productivity, we provide a playbook of best practices for producing great work. Our hope is that these insights, taken together, will help you shift your mind-set, recalibrate your workflow, and push more incredible ideas to completion.
What do you think?
Does Managing Your Day-to-Day sound relevant to you? Does it address any of your concerns? Are you able to both “survive each day” and move forward on your career and personal branding goals? Share your comments, impressions, and questions, below!
Author:
Roger C. Parker offers advice, writing assistance, and tools for building your personal brand. Get his free 99 Questions to Ask Before You Start to Write workbook or ask him a question.
