Creatives can embrace a business day

Creativity and Business, two words which don't always sit happily together. In our minds, things-to-do like admin, bookkeeping and documents with lots of small print can build into something resembling Dad-O-Graphic's latest graphic. Read Parenthood as Practical Stuff.

image: Gabriel Solomons
A little tip for freelance creatives who are just starting out, (i.e. haven't reached the stage where they employ the help of business advisors) diary a practical day into your week. Some weeks appointments and deadlines demand immediate attention but, as a normal routine for planning the week, I can recommend this:

In your mind tell yourself, say, Tuesday is Practical Day.
Throughout the rest of the week every time you think of something "dullsville/brain stretching", add it to a list and forget about it until Tuesday. Same with important but non-urgent post: Make one pile of all mail and and another for filing to be done.
Set up a Practical Day folder in your emails and drop relevant unurgent emails into it.
Anything that you find difficult to switch into while working (e.g. domestic and work administration) is saved for Tuesday.
This works in the highly creative mind because it really is difficult to switch between one side of the brain and the other and tasks take longer.
However, by waking up in non-creative mode and getting down to what needs to be done, the super efficient side of you will work faster. You could always try giving it a more exciting name than Practical Day to make the day seem more worth getting up for, but it works both ways.
Just sometimes it's nice to wake up and know that we don't have to try and produce something of beauty, relevance, importance or value for one day.