A female artist in her studio
Someone on a first date recently asked me if I had any side projects. I laughed, which unfortunately gave them the false impression that I thought they were funny—dangerous on a first date. It was a silly question to me because as a freelancer, all my projects are side projects. “Passion projects,” they expanded. “What are your passion projects?”
I could almost give the same answer. I’m a professional writer, and at this moment in time, most of my income comes from putting words on a page. In a sense, I’m living my dreams and therefore have no need for another creative outlet. In fact, a therapist recommended I develop a side project that was specifically not creative, to give my brain a break from constant artistry. (Her suggestion was gardening, which I’m not going to do, out of respect for the plants).
However, just because I get paid to write doesn’t mean I get paid to write exactly what I want. Many times, what I most want to write is something that won’t make me any money at all—at least, not soon. And I do feel a certain emptiness at the end of the day if every task I did was for money, although maybe that’s just my inability to ever be satisfied. But when so much of my schedule is filled with various paid freelance projects, how do I fit projects that are only for me?
The trick is time management. Spoiler: it usually is. And for the 28% of freelancers who work more than 30 hours per week, it’s tricky to squeeze in everything. I’ve had to figure out what times of day are best for certain tasks and organize my schedule accordingly. I’ve started splitting all my tasks into three categories—deep work, shallow work, and administrative tasks.
Deep Work
For me, deep work (a methodology adapted from this book) is the first two hours of my day. Well, minus the first twenty minutes of the day, which I obviously spend wallowing in bed, asking myself, “do I really have to do another one of these??” Deep work is when I dive deeply into a project that requires great focus. I shut off the WiFi in my apartment and try not to even check the time until those two hours are up. If all I do in a day is two full hours of deep work, I feel quite productive. But two hours is a pipe dream—I’m lucky to hit ninety minutes.
It’s in these deep work hours that I work on my passion projects. If I have an idea for a new long-term project—something like a new book or a newsletter on a specific topic—I use deep work time to dig in. Because these projects don’t yet have an endpoint, they often require uninterrupted thought to put together brand new ideas. I haven’t yet been able to divide them into tasks or respond to requests from outsiders. For example, I’m currently working on a psychological mystery audiobook. I started it four months ago, and by committing one deep work hour to it almost every morning, I’ve managed to get 30,000 words on the page. The mystery, at its core, is whether or not those 30,000 words are any good. But they are on the page.
Shallow Work
It’s not only my unpaid passion projects that I do during deep work hours. Much of this column was written during deep work time. But the rest was written during the largest chunk of work-time—shallow work. The name is dismissive; there’s much to be said for shallow work. To me, it’s any type of work that requires a mixture of creativity and looking things up. It’s work that I can make progress on even if I take a break every ten minutes. I use the internet during shallow work time, so if I need to find a statistic, cite a source, or ask a partner via email for information—that’s shallow work.
Any and all research counts as shallow work, as well as anything I work on with other people. I’m able to spend hours each day on shallow work because the chance to take breaks and check social media sustains me. Viewed this way, social media is a gift! Just, not a very good one (they can’t all be winners).
I usually do an hour of shallow work after my deep work, and then I pick shallow work up again in the afternoon. I’ve found my brain is still able to concentrate on shallow work well into the evening.
Administrative Tasks
The third type of work is administrative tasks. This is when I pay bills or sort out my Google Drive folder or respond to most emails. Anything that needs to be organized. It’s easy to call this type of work “mindless,” but that feels unfair. It’s the opposite of creative, but it’s all the housekeeping that supports both my own creative projects and my paid freelance work. Sometimes, I listen to music or podcasts while doing it, which makes the whole endeavor something of a treat (is there anything less relatable than calling emails a “treat”?). I typically do administrative work between 11 am and 2 pm when, for whatever reason, my brain is wholly resistant to creativity. It’s when I barrel through those sweet, sweet to-do lists. Honestly, it’s satisfying.
In organizing my time into deep, shallow, and administrative work, I’m able to make time for passion projects. I don’t necessarily even want to turn all of these into paid projects—there’s a downside to monetizing our passions. But I certainly want the time to do them, and with my current schedule, I can.
