BREAK YOUR BUSY

Richard James Conner

Fast Space Creative

Contents

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Title Page

Preface

Quote

Introduction

Breaking Your Busy

1. Busy Work vs Real Work

2. Riding Work Edges

3. Primal Necessity

4. Money, Work and Time

5. The Seven Works

Making Clear Space

6. Reality Check

7. List Manipulation

8. Experiments In Reductionism

9. Work Vacuum Challenge

10. Expect Inefficiency

Getting Real Creatively

11. Ignore Creative Urges At Your Peril

12. Connecting To Your Creative Core

13. Journalistic Intention

14. Continual Idea Generation

15. Being Most Creative

Conclusion

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Also By The Author

About The Author

Resources

Further Reading

Copyright

Disclaimer

Contact

Reconfigure The Facets of Life

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Set Your Creativity Free

A Disruptively Simple Approach to Better Life and Time Management. Stop Procrastination and Be More Effective.

by Richard Conner

Break Your Busy More Effectively

Click Here To Download FREE Break Your Busy Cheat Sheet and Bonus Guides

Preface

Old Beginnings

Until recently I was the managing director of a successful thriving London head-quartered consultancy business. It was co-founded officially with two of my closest and longest standing friends around the turn of the millennium. The business was born during a three to four year incubation period while the partners worked their respective day jobs.

As co-leaders of an international creative agency we had to navigate the extremes of the relentless economic turmoil, the fast moving disruptive pace of marketing communication technology and online content creation strategies. Like many businesses leading into and out of the crash of 2008 we were forced to hustle. We had to quickly and regularly identify, often pre-empt, but always implement significant change to restructure and reorganise. This was necessary in order to compete, survive and after much hard work eventually thrive.

Prior to this, and in parallel, I was also co-founder and co-director, with the same partners, of an award winning architectural practice. Under the leadership of my former co-director since my departure during late 2009 it too has matured into a successful focussed in-demand creative consultancy business.

Stark Contrast

In stark contrast, to the hustle and bustle of the agency’s London studio in Shoreditch and my architect designed London Fields two bedroom apartment my life has taken a seemingly sudden and abrupt change.

Now, I live in a cave, my jungle home on a small island off mainland Thailand. Surrounded by nature, in peace and calm, I have for the moment, a relative abundance of time, energy and space to work on what I want and feel passionately drawn to, when I want to.

In the past I might have used this space and freedom frantically working to get a new project or business off the ground without skipping a beat, to secure an income and stay ahead of the game. Normally this would happen without a moment’s break or pause for real thought and feeling investigation into what I really wanted to do with and become in my life. Perhaps most importantly these entrepreneurial endeavours were missing a meaningful Why. This time, at long last, my approach was intentionally different.

Overlap

In order to help ensure each book within the Work Life Wide Open Series as accessible as possible it is necessary to establish a conceptual base understanding for new readers. This calls for a level of overlapping content from book to book. While each book is a standalone piece the reader is encouraged to go deeper into the content and practice of Work Life Wide Open by reading each book in the series.

There is no required order of reading but please assume there will be some overlap and that it will be kept to a necessary minimum. It should not exceed 5% - 15% of any book unless otherwise stated. I hope you accept any overlap in the spirit it is intended and appreciate that it serves as a valuable reminder of key concepts relevant to the book’s content.

‘I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’

William Blake

Introduction

Unwarranted Urgency

We have inherited an urgency to do more. We strive to be ever more efficient regardless of how effective this never ending work we incessantly keep doing really is. We feel a desperate need for better life and time management techniques to help reduce stress and overcome overwhelm so that we can continue to be yet more productive. Despite our best efforts these surface level solutions only tackle the symptoms of the High Definition Life context we are all living in.

They ignore the underlying cause of the discord and conflict that drives this incessant cycle of work for work’s sake. To solely use time management, motivation and anti-procrastination techniques as a way to help you feel better, less stressed and more purposeful is like trying to keep the rain off with a sieve during a thunder storm. You will get soaked wet through and your life will be riddled with yet more Busy Work.

Ocean Of Overwhelm

Like fish swimming in the sea we’ve forgotten we’re in an ocean and can no longer see this vast expanse for what it is. We need to step or jump, literally or metaphorically, out of our current life context and content to see the reality of the situation that surrounds us, at least for a moment.

We will fall back into this ocean of overwhelm and Busy Work, sinking to its high pressure depths every time we forget our selves. Start immersing yourself with your most meaningful Whys as buoyancy aids and the Real Work What of your life will be steadily revealed to you as an island oasis. Before long you will be effortlessly gliding across the surface, riding your Work Edges and navigating your way towards your Real Work creative haven.

To get to the root of the problem and actually enjoy the benefits that the practice of good time management promises we must be disruptive in our approach. We need to look inside instead of outside for the solution. Now, more than ever we have an obligation to ourselves and others to seek out the deepest Why of what we find ourselves doing in the day to day and in the bigger picture of our lives. When we discover our Whys we can and will create small compounding situational change as well as significant long term change on our own terms in our own time rather than have it forced upon us by others when we least expect it.

When you are fully connected to your creativity, in whatever form it takes, you’ll have no need for the sticking plaster of better time management. Your Real Work of the moment will be known to you and everyone else you come in contact with. Resolving never ending priority conflicts, being pulled from pillar to post, taken for granted, overworked and underpaid will become things of the past before you know it.

Prior to recognising the difference between Busy Work and Real Work for me personally I was disillusioned, unfulfilled and didn’t have a hope of turning my ideas and visions into reality due to overwhelm and Busy Workaholism. As soon as I could tell them apart I had more time, energy and focus to implement necessary changes in my life and be better prepared for and available to my neglected creativity. All of a sudden my stalled plans were set in motion and personal success goals reached through consistent action combined with a more open and giving attitude and life outlook.

With this book, you’ll quickly be able to identify what Busy Work is for you and start using straightforward strategies and steps to keep eliminating it from your life. You’ll also learn simple techniques to nurture and enhance your creativity so that your Real Work will have the reason to recharge and power up its idea engine to make a positive lasting difference in your life as well as others.

Remaining ignorant of the difference between these two works is one of the biggest hindrances to our being able to manage our time effectively and live a more productive, purposeful and happier life. Armed with this knowledge of good and evil we can start to authentically get real with our creativity in all areas of our life where it’s needed most.

Things Of The Past

The need for external motivation subsides and procrastination becomes a thing of the past by taking responsibility for what you really want in your life and finally Breaking Your Busy. With practice, wasting your valuable time and effort doing meaningless work that doesn’t resonate with you any more, if it ever did, will be relegated out of your life permanently. When the dust settles you will be doing what you want to do instead of finding ways to force yourself to do the things you don’t. You will feel more purposeful, fulfilled, happier and in tune with your creativity. You will be willing to take action to bring it to life in the world, either at home, in your relationships, in your community, at work or in your small business enterprise.

Break Your Busy outlines the initial steps, most of which are still part of my ongoing practice, I took leading up to what was my significant life change of leaving my job, career, business, friends and home. In my case this wholesale elimination of Busy Work created the necessary space and Work Vacuum for my Why and my Real Work of the moment to emerge. Extreme change such as this of course is not always necessary, but it always available to us depending on our life context and underlying motivation.

What has Break Your Busy (BYB) done for me?

- I now work only 2/3 the time I used to before BYB.

- I have all but eliminated Busy Work from my life.

- I no longer feel the need for motivation or procrastination.

- I know what I’m doing and Why so get it done while enjoying the process.

- I waste much less money, time, energy and focus than when I was pandering to Busy Work.

- At least 80% of the work I actually do now is what I call Real Work.

- I have more time, space and energy for idea generation, exploration and implementation.

- My mind is stronger, faster and more in sync with my creative instincts.

- I am more in control of my thoughts, feelings and emotions and use them to my creative advantage.

- I feel like I am giving more of myself to the world and living my gifts more authentically and freely.

- I’m clear on the Why, How and What of both my work life and personal life.

- I’m able to keep re-mastering The Seven Works to enjoy a more balanced, productive, meaningful, fulfilling and happier life.

I have most definitely passed through the crucible of my version of Breaking Your Busy and as a result the biggest Busy Work vs Real Work battle of my life to date is all but over. The result? I feel more purposeful, fulfilled, happier, more tuned in to my creativity and willing to take action to bring it to life in the world. This has impacted all areas of my life positively, and it can for you too, if you read on and understand how to Break Your Busy.

The concept and foundational practice of Break Your Busy is outlined as follows:

Breaking Your Busy

Busy Work vs Real Work / Riding Work Edges / Primal Necessity /Money, Work and Time / The Seven Works

Making Clear Space

Reality Check / List Manipulation / Experiments In Reductionism / Work Vacuum Challenge / Expect Inefficiency

Getting Real Creatively

Ignore Creative Urges At Your Peril / Connecting To Your Creative Core / Journalistic Intention / Continual Idea Generation / Being Most Creative

I hope that you find this book enjoyable and useful. If you do please remember to take a moment to share your thoughts by leaving a review here. And of course I would be extremely grateful if you felt the urge to share on your social media channels or blogs. Do use the sharing icons that can be found on the book product page here.

The more reviews and shares a book receives the more likely I will be able to advertise it more widely. Some promotional websites won’t consider your book if you don’t have many reviews so every one really does help. By leaving a review and social sharing you can help this book’s message have a greater chance of supporting more people as they work towards making positive change in their lives.

Thank you in advance for your support.

It’s time to Break Your Busy (BYB), stop procrastinating, be more productive, reduce stress, do more of what you want and set your creativity free.

Note To Self

Please note that throughout this book I will use ‘your self’ and ‘our self’ to refer to the most authentic self. That part of us that deeply knows what we really want in life as oppose to ‘yourself’ or ‘ourself’ which are used to refer to the individual relative to an external factor or influence.

For example in being too distracted to really feel what we are actually experiencing in our day to day lives and postponing what we really want to do to a far-off future we are forgetting ‘our selves’. Conversely we may have to convince ‘ourselves’ that breaking a bad habit is good for us.

As a shorthand consider working with ‘your self’ as an internally referenced experience and working for ‘yourself’ as an externally referenced experience.

Part One

Breaking Your Busy

Chapter One

Busy Work vs Real Work

You’re either a student, employee, freelancer, or business owner manager. Maybe you have a business plan or a life plan. Maybe not, but I’ll bet you have a dream of being freer in What you do, When you do it, How you do it and Why you do it?

What stops us turning these dreams of ours into reality?

Is it fear of change? Fear of what might or will happen is a big factor in our decision making process. Often we don’t even realise, appreciate, or understand that we are holding onto any fear at all because we’re so distracted by the busyness and Busy Work of our lives. We are so content in our stress and overwhelm that we postpone doing or looking for what we really want to do and be to some distant conditional future. We are often unknowingly trapped in an ‘if I can just do this then I’ll be able to get that’ attitude and life cycle.

Whether it’s about money, a skill, confidence or any other of the plethora of excuses that hold us back from living the life we want or searching for the life we might want, we are limiting ourselves. Many would agree that change needs to happen and it will happen with or without us. Proactive change needs to start somewhere, normally with us. It often demands a lot of preparation and planning which can be off-putting. Sometimes it doesn’t require much, if any, at all. Depending on our dissatisfaction with our lives and the degree to which we know what we want initial baby steps of change may or may not lead into giant leaps and significant life change.

Breaking Your Busy is not solely or predominantly about achieving work life balance. Who really wants to balance their life so that they can continue to take on and cope with yet more Busy Work that would distract us still further from what we really want to do. What is one of the primary reasons we become stressed, overwhelmed, demotivated and err towards procrastination rather than getting things that are important to us done?

Conflict, that arises when the thought we are wasting our time and our lives comes to mind more frequently, is the likely answer to this question. We feel this conflict more and more when the knowledge that we’re not doing what we really want to do and not living up to our potential and giving our fullest gifts rises to the surface and into our awareness. This is true even if we don’t know what we’d rather be doing. Ordinarily all of the Busy Work we create and take on clouds our vision to the extent we won’t even start to entertain our true desires.

Gradually we feel we can no longer really tolerate the idea that what we are doing now and Why is outdated and no longer meaningful to us. The apparent conflict, combined with how busy we are, causes us to push these feelings away rather than deal with them. The more we avoid this discomfort the more disconnected we become from our Creative Core and the more disillusioned and unhappy we feel as a result.

We must make some changes, even small ones to start to give this conflict space to be felt, explored and resolved on a consistent basis. Does this mean you’ll end up changing your job, your position, your career or your relationships? Not necessarily. The first step is to start Breaking Your Busy so that the real reasons you are suffering stress, procrastination, inefficiency and lack of creative fulfilment can come to the fore and be let go so your decision making process can be as clear and as objective as possible.

However, before we can really get to grips with Breaking Your Busy we need to appreciate the difference between Busy Work and Real Work. Once that’s clear we can start working to reduce one and increase the other. Then we’ll have, for as long as we hold it, space in the middle to start to fully understand what might be holding us back from doing or finding what we really want to do.

At the same time we can start to tease out and nurture our creativity and ideas surrounding what our creativity and Real Work might look like.

This space in the middle, a Work Vacuum, as I call it, is purposeful dedicated time not doing anything, but contemplating, meditating, thinking, journaling and listening to what we might really want in life and work. It is space to come to terms with the changes necessary in our lives that we may or may not be ignoring or denying. This space is needed regardless of whether we do or don’t know what we want to do with our time, now or in the future. In either scenario we can find ourselves procrastinating in the day to day or in the bigger picture of our lives, rather than focussing on finding out what we really want. The pull back to Busy Work will be strong. Doing nothing even for short periods of time may be a completely alien concept to us.

As we work through and transition a process of Breaking Your Busy we must resist the urge to refill the Work Vacuum. The more we continue to prioritise What we are doing and Why the Work Vacuum we create will inevitably get bigger which is why we need to protect it from attracting more of the same. Busy Work, created by ourselves or thrust upon us by others, with permission or not, in our work or personal lives will weed its way back into our unprotected Work Vacuum the moment we aren’t looking. Be wary, be vigilant.

Busy Work vs Real Work is the primary War of the Works, one that, despite the battles you’ve fought with yourself and others is all but over, otherwise you wouldn’t be here now, reading this. Busy Work has won, often without you even realising what happened, how and why. You know there’s something more to life but you’ve forgotten where to look.

The casualties and effects of this war however are easier to spot. They are normally experienced as our being disillusioned, unhappy, dissatisfied, unfulfilled and resigned to our dreams, aspirations and expression of our true gifts being pushed away, all too often indefinitely. In fact a big tell-tale sign is that we no longer dream of better. We are resigned to doing our time, always living for a future. This despondency persists even though, by making even small changes in our lives, we can do everything we want to do in the future now.

First let’s look at the difference between these two Works, the forces of good and evil as it were. We need to get a feel for what makes them unique, especially to us as unique individuals. This is needed even though at first glance at our day to day lives we may truly believe that we’re engaged with Real Work for most of it.

Giving Work vs Getting Work

When we are working, any form of work, we consciously or unconsciously have an underlying attitude of giving or getting, or a mixture of the two. We look to all that hard and long work we are doing to meet that deadline, or to deliver the project in the best way we can as giving. We are making countless sacrifices along the way. We are pouring our energy, skills, passion, discipline and lost time into delivering something we are proud of. On many levels these are forms of giving, but it’s not always the case, especially when you look beneath the surface.

If we neglect our own interests, passions, visions, plans and dreams in the process we are failing to give to ourselves in the first instance. If we know consciously, or unconsciously on a mental, emotional and feeling level we want to be and would rather be doing something else with our time and energy we are out of alignment and balance. This is true, whether we know what that something else would be or not.

In this case we are really only utilising our hard earned knowledge and skills to get something. This something we believe will make us feel better about doing what we don’t really want to be doing in the first place.

This getting normally points to the necessity to acquire enough money to live well, have some fun and be prepared for the future. This often includes a dream that at some point in that ever receding future we will get the opportunity, the time, energy, and money to be able to do and give what we really want to ourselves and others.

I call this phenomenon Planning To Get. Our attitude and state in the moment is fully loaded with a skewed intention to get, in the future, that which we already have access to now, in the present. Our selves. This translates as a perpetual waiting and wrangling. It is a continual postponement and procrastination. It presents itself as the need to distract ourselves from our present feelings, thoughts and resulting behaviours and actions. This unseen, unrecognised tendency will inform and impact ours as well as others, present and future, normally in the negative.

We are, underneath all of these Planning To Get tendencies, projecting a need, a longing to be connected to our selves, others, our creativity and our Real Work without knowing, let alone accepting it.

In contrast then, in broad, high level terms to operate with an attitude of giving, we are ensuring that we are honouring ourselves, our desires, wants and creative instincts. We do this, in the first instance, now, regardless of how well nurtured and honed they are, whether we are ready or not. If this is the case then we are giving to ourselves and of ourselves to others to the best of our abilities in the moment.

I call this Planning To Give because our attitude in the moment is fully loaded with aligned intention. Our present thoughts, behaviours and actions will inform and impact our present and future as well as others, normally positively. It is knowing and accepting of the fact that we have access to what we really want right here, right now, in our selves. This is presence.

In day to day practical terms this is why for the purposes of illustrating the difference between Busy Work and Real Work I’ve defined them as follows:

Real Work

Work, at our edge, beyond our comfort zone, rooted in a state of giving to ourselves and of ourselves to others, in whatever form feels more aligned with the deepest truths in our Why, How and What of the moment is Real Work.

Real Work shouldn’t be confused with our most important Busy Work. Just because it’s important doesn’t mean it’s our Real Work. Deciding whether to prioritise the urgent or the important, with everything else going on at work and at home is challenging. It is a skill that is normally developed with knowledge and experience. To help with this decision making and prioritisation process is it not better to first decide whether the task, project, business or interaction is your Real Work of the moment?

Determining the true difference between Busy Work and Real Work for you personally requires an alternative strategy above and beyond responding to time sensitivities or external influence. When considering your Real Work keep in mind that as our What may change so does our Why and vice versa.

This stresses the importance of developing a simple Breaking Your Busy practice. One that can help to make sure your Why doesn’t get left behind, stagnate, and fall out of alignment with your reality and create more internal and external conflict. The most important component of this reality is what you want and need in your work and personal life to feel fulfilled and happy right now.

At its extreme, Real Work could be considered that which only you could do, in your own unique way, to the quality, in the process, the How, and the end result What, and of course your Why.

It is the most important work you can do at any moment in time. It is not confined to a particular task or area of your life.

When you have succeeded in Breaking Your Busy your Real Work will mainly, orientate around and focus on your day to day work, job, career and intimate relationships.

Busy Work

Work, born of an attitude of getting from others and the world, that distracts us from rediscovering, finding, connecting, opening to, living and being our Real Work in the moment is Busy Work.

Busy Work can take many forms. Sometimes it is even satisfying. This is mainly because it is well within your comfort zone and your Work Edge. It doesn’t stretch you mentally, emotionally, or physically.

Busy Work can feel like home to us, yet so can Real Work. The difference is in its most matured form the latter carries with it an actual or perceived risk. This can be in the form of a potential loss of your comfort zone due to a threat to a self-identity, be it professional or personal, we are overly attached to. Overcoming this perceived potential loss through personal growth and development stretches you. It pulls you into and beyond your Work Edge. This is Real Work no matter what area of life you are dealing with.

Busy Work can show up in the bigger picture of the Why, How and What you are doing in your life as well as in the more menial day to day tasks of your job or career. Irrespective of context it should be dealt with in the same way. Reduce and eliminate it and create a Work Vacuum. Keep creating space.

At its extreme, Busy Work could be considered that work that any number of people could do just as well if not better than you. It distracts you from looking for, finding, doing and being your Real Work. It is that work that if we were honest with ourselves and open to others isn’t growth for us. Appreciating and moving beyond this would put us firmly out of our comfort zone and at our Work Edge.

Even if our work is creative in nature, be it art, sculpture, design, architecture, writing, or in the wider sense of say product development or building a business it doesn’t necessarily make it Real Work for us. This is especially true if we’re not predominantly happy, satisfied, fulfilled and purposeful in our work.

These definitions are intentionally high level and general so we can make them uniquely relevant to our own individual situation, experience and context. The aim would be to apply the definitions to whatever work we are doing or that we have planned. We should practice this until it becomes an unconscious habit. In this way, in the least we are aware of the variety and truth of the work we are undertaking or planning even if we don’t do anything about it just yet.

Now we will look deeper into Work Edges and learn how they are the primary mechanism to prioritise Real Work vs Busy Work.

Chapter Two

Riding Work Edges

We can quickly begin to understand the concept of Work Edges by considering the primary creative conflict at play in our disconnected and unfulfilling lives. In the Busy Work vs Real Work (a form of David vs Goliath) War of the Works we can class the former as within our comfort zone and your Work Edge. The latter would be clearly and uncomfortably in your growth zone, at and around your Work Edge. It’s not always the case but as a rule of thumb this will, on the surface of it, normally suffice.

However, in reality when taking into account the myriad of interrelated, linear and non-linear dynamic relational intricacies of our work and personal lives this approach is soon seen as too simplistic. If you want to open the bonnet of your life, understand how the engine works and start tuning it or in some cases overhauling it we need to dig a little deeper.

Being at or beyond our Work Edge is not necessarily just a matter of spending time outside of our comfort zone although it can be that too. We shouldn’t be tempted to think that jumping out of an airplane, or plunging from a bridge on an elastic band to cure our fear of heights will be a cure all for every aspect of our life.

While perhaps benefitting our confidence in general by providing a positive frame of reference this is not the same as meeting our fears, doubts, discomfort, uncertainty, hesitation, boredom, frustration, impatience, a Work Vacuum or perhaps most importantly your Real Work at or near our Work Edge in context.

It is in this space, in the moment, either in anticipation of your Real Work or as it unfolds as a real life experience complete with all its emotional resistance and expression that fear and resistance can be processed by feeling it and letting it go. At this point, with staged repetition your Real Work can become more natural. This process expands our Work Edge and consequently our comfort zone. This is growth.

Our Work Edge, apart from leading our Real Work will stretch our related mental, physical, intellectual and emotional capacity in relation to it. It will likely present a risk with a potential consequent perceived loss of something that we deem important to us. It will represent growth even if we don’t realise or appreciate it in the moment. The loss most often will be the release of self-limiting beliefs that would, if left intact restrict our personal growth and ability to fully embrace our Real Work.

Being at, in, or around our Work Edge can also be considered a characteristic of work in a similar way to how we might describe work as hard or easy. Depending on its perceived order of difficulty, above and beyond how we categorise it, we could describe our work, assuming it meets the above criteria, as edgy.

These descriptors are generally relative to our current internal emotional resistance and state of being. Combined with our available work capacity, internal and external work influences (time, effort, standards, responsibilities and expectations) they are useful indicators for how close we may be to living and creating at our Work Edge. Is our work edgy? Are we Real Working in joy and happiness despite the edginess? If not, our What, How and possibly our Why may need to change, expand or evolve.

In some instances our Work Edge is not always tangible or easily recognisable as a challenge, perceived limitation or definitive goal. This is because our most creative edgy Real Work in its essence will be new, original, unpredictable or unforeseeable, at least to us. It may only reveal itself in the moment as a self-creating, self-perpetuating Work Edge.

Remaining alert, available and open to this Work Edge is imperative so that our default work profile and habits may be adjusted. Determining the level and extent of adjustment to best serve our Work Edge is of course our sole responsibility. Nobody will sense this opportunity for growth other than us.

In order to know more about, be alert to, available for and working towards our Work Edge it will also be beneficial to understand what it isn’t. It is not a safe place metaphorically speaking. It will test us in that it isn’t in work that has become easy, rote, second nature, or mastered, regardless of whether it is or was our Real Work at some point or another.

However, Real Work that has become easy and simple to us need not be relegated as Busy Work immediately. Remember the reasons we are working to Break Your Busy. We’re doing it because we are unfulfilled, unhappy, and unsatisfied.

Before making any quick decisions consider the following questions. Can you categorically say truthfully that you are fulfilled in the most part by your work and do not have any ill feeling towards your situation? Do you have any sensation or feeling of loss in respect of some other Real Work that you would rather be doing, even if specifics elude you? Are you neglecting what your Real Work could become because you have stagnated as you relax into an easy predictable and controlled life?

Are you developing and expanding your mental, intellectual and emotional relationship to your Real Work? In its purest sense, the fact this work has become easy, or we have mastered it is merely a component foundation of our further growth and development in our Real Work. In this way our Work Edge could be envisioned as a fluctuating line, ring, or undulating rippled sphere that surrounds us. Imagine that our Work Edges oscillate and vibrate in and around the transient border, boundary, and interface between our Real Work and Busy Work depending on how they are experienced and prioritised by us day in and day out.

If your Work Edge, overall and in its individual relationship to Breaking Your Busy is not expanding, and not the leading edge in your life as well as your work it is receding back into your comfort zone. If your Real Work is marginalised by distracting Busy Work your ideal life will forever remain too far out of reach. Negative life outcomes, experienced internally or manifested externally will continue to rain down on you in some form or another.

The way in which you and your Real Work make an impression on the world will become clearer and more intuitive the longer you spend at and around your Work Edge. Keep in mind the How, When, Why you do it precede the specific What or Whats you do, at the action, task, project, job, career, business and life levels. These Whats follow naturally from your Whys when at your Work Edge. The process of discovering your Whys, which is explored later, is, in itself, an act of Real Work at your Work Edge.

How will you know you’re living and working consistently and authentically at your Work Edge? You will see and feel your Real Work directly or indirectly out there in the bigger picture of your life. It will be manifested and experienced as positively influencing related others by how you show up in happiness, passion and joy in your life and work.

Chapter Three

Primal Necessity

Why is Breaking Your Busy necessary? Busy Work is a waste of valuable resources. The more time we all spend being busy the more of our own and others’ resources, in the form of time, money and energy we unnecessarily consume in the process.

We are addicted to doing to avoid the guilt of just being and creating. We incessantly do so we can feel like we’re accomplishing something in the world and that we’re enough regardless of the real value of this doing to us and everyone else.

Removing the Busy Work doing obstacles inherent in the tasks, projects, roles, jobs, careers, businesses and lifetimes created from multiple layers of meaningless distraction is a step toward stopping the waste of our precious gift of life.

This time, energy and focus could be applied to living, feeling, relating and more important purposes like consciously helping and giving to others in whichever way that makes us feel more alive in the process.

I am as guilty as the next person of being frequently mindless in this respect and am only now trying to make changes in my habits, situation and life context. I want to grow and continue being vigilant against the forces of distraction that still hold some power over me.

In my old belief system, in relation to my prevailing Busy Work life context I felt that my being instinctively creative in the way I wanted was an over indulgence and a form of not doing that should be restricted and avoided. I realise now that the guilt I felt from this not doing was only experienced if I allowed my thoughts, of what related others might think about what I was creating or those things I wasn’t doing while I was being creative, interfere.

This can happen more than we’d care to realise. I believe we all have this urge to be on purpose, on mission, doing something important with our lives no matter what anyone else thinks. Yet on the whole we avoid creating or enjoying too much space and time in our lives by constantly engaging in something that doesn’t really make us happy.

This problem still stands even if our doing clearly isn’t the right thing for us and we know it. Normally this is because it’s helping pay the bills, the mortgage and allowing us to feel like we are doers in the world accomplishing something while we save for what is, in fact, an unattainable future.

In the end, we resign ourselves to thinking we’re doing the right thing despite our feelings to the contrary. Herein lies the conflict that renders us ineffective, causes stress, overwhelm, procrastination, inefficiency and creative disconnection.

Our Primal Necessity is to be creative and express ourselves.

If change is inherently creative, which it must be, we need to embrace it to fulfil this, our most important need. If we ignore this urge we stop growing, stagnate and fall into a cycle of dissatisfaction, depression and unhappiness.

This is why Breaking Your Busy is so necessary.

Chapter Four

Money, Work and Time

There are a number of basic techniques that ought to be mastered so that starting and continuing the process of Breaking Your Busy is more likely, simpler and sustainable.

The three practical factors that most impact our addiction to the conscious or unconscious distraction of Busy Work are money, work and time.

In the first instance we establish our basic need and desire for money with our ideas and thoughts surrounding security, comfort and pleasure or their opposites insecurity, discomfort and pain. These needs are reinforced and compounded through our day to day actions and habits. These resulting behaviours often create demands on and apply pressure to our time and wallets to cope with the day to day overwhelm and underlying stress in our lives.

In turn, this over indulgence and addiction to Busy Work that pushes our discarded negative emotions and feelings still deeper out of sight and out of mind creates a need for extraneous coping mechanisms. Sometimes these knock-on distractions are bad for us and sometimes they are good for us, but they are still coming mechanisms. Most of the time it can be hard to tell the difference because we remain ignorant of the emotional drivers that lead us to partake in them to begin with. Either way, while they allow us to feel better for a while, it isn’t long before the stressful motivation, inner conflict and emotional discord returns.

These healthy and unhealthy distractions combined with the Busy Work, which is a form of coping mechanism in and of itself, deplete our time, energy, focus, space and money that we can make available to contemplate, think and act more creativity in the interest of discovering our Real Work.

In simple terms, to give Real Work a chance we must work primarily on money and time, as if bookends to the shelf of work. At the same time we need to start fully understanding What we spend our time on and Why, both in detail and in the bigger picture.

Ultimately, to make headway we need to aggressively reduce the amount of money we spend in general and significantly reduce the time spent on superfluous, and meaningless to us activities. Do both and the bookshelf of life will have less Busy Work books and therefore be able to accommodate more volumes of Real Work. With practice it will also have some space left over for new stories to be introduced as and when opportunities reveal themselves.

Before we delve into the reality of money and time let’s look at the work factor by introducing The Seven Works.

Chapter Five

The Seven Works

The purpose of this book is primarily to introduce you to the difference between Busy Work and Real Work and how you might start and continue Breaking Your Busy. However, there are of course many other works in our life which also should not be limited to the traditional classifications of work life and personal life. In fact the new more flexible work typologies introduced here can be interchangeable in the moment depending on your unique and specific life context.

These works, which I’ve called The Seven Works, and that include the primary works already discussed are Real Work, Skill Work, Step Work, Inner Work, Play Work, Living Work, and Busy Work.

It is best to consider The Seven Works as labels or tags that can be applied to a particular activity, job or interaction. Imagine you are preparing to give a presentation about your Real Work project and you have a fear of public speaking. You would tag time or money spent on the project as Real Work (moving forward with your Real Work project at and beyond your Work Edge), Skill Work (learning how to give presentations so your message can be delivered as well as it can be) and Inner Work (overcoming fears that potentially inhibit you being able to engage fully with your Real Work of the moment).

Knowledge of the difference between Busy Work and Real Work for you is critical in being able to track your time and money and their value relative to the Why of your Real Work. We also need to appreciate and remember that any one of The Seven Works, with the exception of Busy Work can be your Real Work in the moment.

In moving beyond Breaking Your Busy into a consistent phase of Working Your Why it is also important to understand what does and doesn’t constitute each type of work within your current life context.

Describing and showing you how to work towards balancing The Seven Works and Working Your Why in detail so you are able to constantly live purposefully at your Work Edges, fully engaged with your Real Work in all areas of your life is beyond the practice of Breaking Your Busy and the scope of this book.

If you’d like to learn and understand more about Real Work, Busy Work and The Seven Works in the day to day and bigger picture context of your life then I suggest reading the second book of my Work Life Wide Open Series ‘Master The Seven Works - Repurpose Your Life’.

Part Two

Making Clear Space

Chapter Six

Reality Check

We absolutely must understand, analyse and act on the reality of how we spend our money and time. Each must be considered an investment in our work, which ultimately in some form will return to us multiplied as long as what we are engaging with and investing in moment by moment is our Real Work.

The more we understand money and time and apply it as a conscious investment in our Real Work we will through reciprocity attract more time and money to continue going deeper into our most creative and passionate work. It may not happen with immediate effect but it will happen. We no longer have to wait in line to enjoy and feel fully satisfied with our work and lives, we can start now.

Our Real Work right now in this moment is understanding in detail What, How and Why we spend our time and money in all areas of our lives, especially our work.

Data Collection Tools

There’s a plethora of tools, apps and systems available to monitor, track and help analyse your time and money and to varying degrees automate these aspects of your life.

Here’s what I use, how and why to ensure I know exactly where my money and time is going every day. This allows me to make informed choices and become very conscious of my work and financial habits. Discovering whether the results of my research on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis are good or bad relative to my life context and Real Work aspirations or reality is the purpose of this kind of data collection and analysis.

The results of your research will be dependant of course on the information you decide to track. I would advise against overcomplicating the data collection and getting hung up on over analysis. The aim is in the first instance to be able to determine the percentage ratio of your time and money spent on Real Work and Busy Work. This statistic alone will speak volumes about how well you are Breaking Your Busy.

Harvest (Time)

While you can use Harvest for more than just recording and reporting time I use it primarily for keeping track of my time at both work and out of work. That way I can begin to understand how my time and focus is distributed across The Seven Works.

The free plan, at the time of writing allows you to have two projects, but you can, as far as I’m aware define unlimited tasks that you can apply to a project. So if running with the paid version is a no go for the moment you could start by setting up ‘Work’ and ‘Non-Work’ or something similar as your projects and, to begin with set up tasks naming them each of The Seven Works.

It may be that you already record your time at work. If this is the case you should also record, given how we’ve defined them, whether you recognise the chunks of work that you’ve done as either Busy Work or Real Work. You can also carry out Skill Work and Step Work (work that’s purpose is to eliminate or reduce Busy Work) during your normal day to day work time so these can be recorded on or tagged to the ‘Work’ project too with a brief description if you like.

In determining whether we consider our work Busy or Real we are answering the question of quality and not just quantity. To enhance your data you might also consider scoring the time spent on a particular task, regardless of whether you’ve assigned it as Busy Work or Real Work. To begin with try a scale of 1 to 5 depending on how good it makes you feel and how closely it resonates with the personal Why of your life, as far as you know what it is.

Taking this a step further I encourage you to also record how you interpret your ‘Non-Work’ time. This would call for you to log your time with a brief description, a feel-good score and tag it as either Inner Work (meditation, breathwork), Play Work (recreation, relationships) or Living Work (contemplation, visioning), or an appropriate combination.

See the screenshots below as an example of how you might set up Harvest to give you an overview of how you spend your time across The Seven Works. Play with this a little using this or your preferred time tracking software and be open to what you might find out about the reality of your habits.

Even if you’re required to do a detailed timesheet at your day job I suggest you to start doing them for your personal time as described and outlined above. I’d leave out sleeping time, but of course it is up to you how granular you want to go with this. Treat it as an experiment and data collection exercise that you can keep running as long as you need to. On analysis of your data specific insights may trigger necessary changes in Why, How and on What you spend your valuable and precious time.

If you opt for a paid version you can also track more specific projects. For example I know how long I spent Real Working and preparing the cave that became my new home, how long my concept architecture projects took as well as my book writing projects. I also know how long I’ve meditated and how much time I’ve spent in yoga, or not, as the case may be. You get the point.

This way I can start to understand the reality of where my time is being spent which will help me break down and understand the balance between my Busy Work vs. Real Work tendencies. Ultimately I’ll understand how to balance The Seven Works so that I can purposefully work to becoming more connected with my Creative Core and Real Work and still remain engaged with and in control of and able to balance other aspects of my life.

I also advise spending some typical and non-typical days each week really going into the minutiae of what you are doing, task by task, in your normal work day and your non-work time. Go deep and really pay attention to what you are doing and thinking, thought by thought, item by item so you are not kidding or deluding yourself about how much non-essential Busy Work you are engaging in.

You might also make a note of how it made you feel in your notes in whichever way means the most to you when you review your data. With some quick and simple analysis, you can understand the percentage of your life that you are engaged with your Real Work and understand a little more about the Why. Then you can make small changes every day or if the need arises decide on and implement more significant changes to how you live and work your life.

The objective of this exercise isn’t necessarily to reduce Busy Work and increase Real Work immediately, at least not in the first instance while you are in the data collection mode. However, if clarity hits you in the moment of course you can make some small and big changes as needed. Keep in mind these may be stepping stones that lead you to more significant and meaningful changes later. Change on many levels is more likely the more space you create in your day, in your week and in your life. The less you are distracted by Busy Work the more you can breathe literally and metaphorically. With more space, time and energy, the Work Vacuum you have created will allow What you really want to do and Why a chance to speak to you uninterrupted.

Toshl (Money)

I use Toshl for expenses, because I travel around the world with my new found creative freedom. It’s relatively cheap and has multiple currency options which is critical if you’re living or travelling in a country where you primarily use cash, like Thailand, and can’t rely on your bank account records to tell your complete financial story.

As you can see from the screenshots below, with tagging you can track whatever you like and link it to habits and behaviours that you may want to change or break. Personally I like to know where I’m spending money so I track by regularly visited establishment or more generally by location. I also track the type of expense so I know whether it was for breakfast, lunch or dinner for example.

I have a habit, as you’ll see form the screenshots that there is a cost to my carrying out my Real Work writing. I take reward coffees and juices throughout the day which soon add up. You’ll also find you have specific spending habits for each of The Seven Works. If you record and analyse your time and expenses frequently to begin with you will spot the trends in your behaviour patterns. Then you’ll be able to tune your habits and spending accordingly so that eventually you’ll have more time and funds available to invest in your Real Work ventures.

If you’re not tracking your expenses and clear on where you may be frittering away your hard earned cash you’ll struggle to know where you are now financially and where your Busy Work habits will likely lead you in the future. As a result planning your budgets and burn rate to make your escape from Prison Busy Work, if that’s what you want, isn’t going to be easy or straightforward.

Believe me if you don’t bottom out your personal burn rate and understand how much your specific habits are costing your escape planning will be severely hindered or completely misleading. Knowledge of time and money is essential if you plan to get firmer with your roles and responsibilities and what you will and won’t do in your work. What if you suddenly decide to go part-time? What if you are compelled to take Breaking Your Busy to an extreme like I did and just leave? Will you be inclined at long last to quit and start your own business? Or will you decide after much deliberation to quit your business?

Whatever decisions you reach knowing how you spend time and money in your life is a prerequisite of successfully Breaking Your Busy and sustaining it so you stand a chance of fully exploring your Real Work, however it evolves.

UK Postbox (Work)

In order to save time and effort whether I’m travelling or not, especially in the context of actual or likely significant change in my life I use a mail scanning and forwarding service to handle my snail mail and packages. It’s been an essential tool to allow me to manage the financial and personal aspects of my life more efficiently and effortlessly during and beyond change. The service includes accepting replacement bank cards so invaluable while travelling. You can have them forwarded to wherever you are or are going to be in the world.

Take a quick look at UK Postbox. I love it because it gets me closer to that seemingly ever elusive dream of not being tied to any one location and of being fully paperless in my personal as well as Real Work and business life. Please note as I’m an affiliate of UK Postbox I will receive a small credit should you decide to open an account using this link.

Chapter Seven

List Manipulation

List Building

List building is always touted as a good thing. Some efficiency experts suggest writing as many lists as you need no matter where they are or what system they are in and however disparate. The theory being that if you’ve written it down you’ve put it out of your mind somewhere safe and no longer have to use mental bandwidth to keep track of it.

There is merit to this slightly scattergun approach. It can serve to segregate your actions and to do items into specific topics or projects. In this way you’re less likely to be distracted or flit around multi-tasking or trying to tidy up and prioritise all those actions in one system or within one master list. As a result you can more easily start to identify whether a piece of work is Busy Work or Real Work, even if that includes or requires what I call Conscious Delegation, because it will or won’t fall off your radar.

Conscious Delegation assumes work, in particular your Busy Work, is not mindlessly passed on to others, just because you can, unless it can form Real Work for them. If it is deemed Real Work on Conscious Delegation it should carry an implied or explicit instruction that it be carried out only once, automated, or re-delegated consciously as appropriate after any learning and necessary skill acquisition has been obtained by the relevant party in the doing of the work.

Making a note of your to do items somewhere safe frees up some headspace and perhaps anxiety that you’ll forget a task or won’t get it done. The reality here is if it’s important and it is your Real Work you won’t forget. It may not get done in the order or at the time you or someone else envisioned to begin with but it will get done. Unless it’s Busy Work and turns out to be non-essential in which case it will be and can be delayed indefinitely or at least until someone screams loud enough for it.

Making notes, journals, and lists does give you a head start on a task so you don’t have to crank the wheel as hard when you do come to tackle it and make some progress. Practically when treated in a Real Work way, lists are used as staging or holding spaces so that tasks can be filtered out or fall away as unimportant Busy Work. Of course they can remain on your list as long as it’s not treated as a ‘to do’ list but rather a ‘not to do’ list.

List Demolition

My aim for any list I create is to review it and aggressively strike anything off that is non-essential. I only do something that needs doing once with a view to automating it or reducing the amount of time significantly that is needed to complete it. The rest of the time I either don’t do it or I Consciously Delegate it. My preference is not to do it at all.

Busy Work can be Consciously Delegated to a colleague or subordinate or to a third party individual or business. Take a leaf out of Tim Ferris’s book if need be and outsource your Busy Work. If you’re paid £50 an hour and you can pay someone a quarter of that to do the same work why not do it? You’ve just paid a fraction of your income to free up time to invest in your Real Work.

The aim is to do as little as possible, to be lazy some might say. This is liberating to the extent that you and your mind then remain free to be and create rather than just be mindlessly entertained and distracted by excessive doing for doing’s sake. There is growth in this and potential creation of mini Work Vacuums en route to any pending significant life changes that may be waiting patiently in the wings.

List Discipline

Experience tells me that the most important item on your list, as long as you allow enough time for it to brew and mature will rise to the top at the right time, in the right context, with the right support. As a result it will be relatively easy to complete. Be impatient, over efficient and try to force its completion to meet some arbitrary important for someone else, but not you, Busy Work schedule or deadline and everything related to it will feel like an unnecessary and tedious challenge.

You may find and realise as I did that if you revisit your to do list or lists some days, weeks, months or even years later you’ll find that a slew of them have been completed, changed form or have been written off as not needed. Interestingly you’ll find a similar situation with any goal lists and plans you may have hidden somewhere collecting dust, archived and long forgotten.

Those left untouched, that weren’t brought back to your attention, that weren’t deemed important by you, your subconscious, your colleagues, friends or family are Busy Work. If it’s really important for someone else they’ll normally let you know about it, repeatedly, which, depending on what it is, will make it a priority for you too if it also aligns with your Real Work. It will rise to the top of your list.

However, there may be wisdom in holding out to the second or third reminder or chase from others so that you are sure they really need or want what it was you were asked to do. I’ll leave you to decide the appropriate context for testing this theory out in practice.

Be aware though that this tactic is likely already a habit, conscious or otherwise, of those around you. This is why you may find yourself frustrated while chasing for things repeatedly or even taking on Busy Work yourself just to get it done and out of the way. Your eagerness to too readily take on Busy Work may be because it seems essential to your being able to complete yet another piece of unquestioned and likely unnecessary Busy Work on your schedule or to do list.

List Discipline then in the context of Breaking Your Busy is not about the priority of tasks and items, because that will look after itself. It’s about not doing the things on your list and trusting that what needs to be done and what must be done will get done.

Holding back from doing doesn’t stop you making notes, recording thoughts, ideas and lightly preparing for the possibility of doing the task or project. In fact doing this can actually lead you, and others to the conclusion that it’s not needed or not important after all. This saves everybody the time, money and energy that would have been carelessly spent jumping in straight away to get it done and out of the way. Patience in this context is indeed a virtue.

The more this is practiced the easier it becomes and the thinking patterns that would serve to uncover the futility of a task or piece of Busy Work will become more habitual and autonomous for everyone involved.

Chapter Eight

Experiments In Reductionism

Maybe in your process of Breaking Your Busy you’ve started to make some changes, maybe even significant ones. Perhaps you’ve gone all out, or all in as they say and quit your Busy Work job or business, gone part time, or negotiated a change of role to remove more of what you don’t want and adding more of what you do want.

What do you do now with the increased amount of time made available by creating your Work Vacuum? Although holding this Work Vacuum open is beneficial to allow undistracted contemplation and Real Work experimentation it is wise not to be left with completely nothing to do. Unless you are an accomplished yogi meditator and would relish the huge amount of time you might have available to not be doing in the traditional sense you may need some structure to help you through the transition.

Constantly filling your time with being aware of and letting go whatever comes up for you as a result of completely and abruptly extracting yourself from your life situation may be a little much to begin with. Depending on your personality type fully Breaking Your Busy might be better engaged with gradually as you stage down from the extremes of your Busy Work schedule. There will still be plenty of opportunities to really feel into the changes that are going on for you and experience what it is really like to do nothing.

My Breaking Your Busy saw me drop to half time during my notice period after my resignation, down to one day per week towards the end of it. This continued for another month for handover training. To begin with my time was filled with organisation and preparation work to help facilitate the significant life change I’d set in motion. By the time I’d landed in my new home I was averaging around one to two days per week of Busy Work. This left plenty of Work Vacuum to listen out for my Real Work.

Whatever you fill or don’t fill this time with be prepared for it. Combine the Work Vacuum with time saved through life automation, systems and processes you could be staring into the void. There is a risk if your jump is too sudden, without any transitional Busy Work that the fear, doubt, uncertainty and despair are too intense that you bounce right back out of the Work Vacuum.

You will likely re-engage with any form of Busy Work to distract yourself from your self. The self that you’ve only just started to pay attention to and experience without the usual cacophony of distractions. In the extreme, you may all too quickly decide to jump back into a life of Busy Work because the unquestioned feelings that come up for you are too intense. Go gently, you have not done anything wrong. By letting go of the emotions the feelings and resistance will gradually pass.

If you’ve ever experienced the impatient urge to return to work and more doing again after being on holiday for more than a week or two, you’ve experienced a momentary Work Vacuum. While it is experienced in the knowledge that you would be returning to your Busy Work and comfort zone of associated overwhelm and distraction it is still a short term mini-Work Vacuum.

What is left at the end? When there’s nothing left to automate, organise, reduce or eliminate? There’s just you, what you want and desire, your relationships, the most important of which is with your self. You now also have something fresh and new in your life. A Work Vacuum that you are keeping clear to receive your Real Work and the space to re-create a life that works for you and not against you.

Chapter Nine

Work Vacuum Challenge

Do you want to test out a Work Vacuum without taking a vacation? Take a 30 day diet of no TV, movies or box sets, no news media of any kind, no social media or magazines, no reading, no drinking alcohol and no socialising. I would encourage you to throw in a couple of silent days each week which will heighten your sensitivity to your inner voice.

Reading non-fiction self-development books is allowed but a maximum of only one hour a day. No more eating or drinking non-alcoholic drinks than you normally would to placate any feelings that come up during the challenge.

Make a promise to yourself to journal and take notes about your experience, your thoughts, emotions, as and when they come up, noting the time of day. Elaborate on your findings when you feel the urge, see where your thoughts will take you and what emotions come up as you write. Look out for recurring patterns in your behaviour.

Engage in writing, singing, dancing, and drawing, sketching or playing a musical instrument. This is not to learn how to do these activities. There is an assumption that you might already have the skill, at least to a level. Learning something new in this context is a distraction from your feelings and thoughts. Use the time to do what you are creatively or instinctively drawn to in the moment.

It doesn’t matter if these creative outlets aren’t your thing. We all write in some form so fall back to journalling as your daily ritual and moment by moment witness to your thoughts, feelings, emotions, resistance, reactions, triggers, habits and behaviours regardless of whether you deem them negative, neutral or positive.

Be sure to track your time, spending and the detail of the work you have been carrying out and Why. Remember a Why can be as simple as ‘because my boss asked me to’ or ‘I need the money’ or it can be as deep as ‘because this is an important project, I’m learning, I’m giving and am excited to see it come to life!’ This also counts for personal ‘Non-Work’ projects or creative moments you start or continue while experimenting and trying out this mini Work Vacuum you’ve created by rising to this challenge.

Who is happier and more purposeful? The bricklayer who when asked what he’s doing replies ‘Laying bricks.’ Or the one who responds ‘Building a cathedral.’? None would argue the latter’s Why is more powerful both to him and to others.

You’ll be amazed after 30 days how much time you have available and how much money you really need to live happily and creatively. This assumes of course you avoid increasing your spending out of boredom and distraction. Enjoy how much more in touch you are with your creative instincts and what you truly want in your life. It’s a beginning, a starting point. It is worth it just to see the positive differences that are possible. You can at last start to feel into and understand what could be and what is possible if you made these relatively small changes in your life.

Combine this with the techniques outlined in the next section and you’ll have a powerful cocktail of habit changing and creativity expanding practices. Drink this life changing beverage on a daily basis and you will most definitely trigger and maintain your Breaking Your Busy process. It will put you in the right state of mind and body to continue your journey deeper into finding and realising your Real Work.

There is one last thing you can be doing in the background.

Sell all your belongings, or as much as you can handle. The Work Vacuum we create is not just limited to what we do but extends to what we have. Excessive unnecessary possessions distract us without our even realising it. They keep us and our resources tied up, costing us money, time, space and attention. They distract us in all sorts of ways and for many unseen and unexpected reasons.

You really don’t need all that much. Use the 30 day Work Vacuum Challenge to experiment with this. Clear out your wardrobes, cupboards, studios, offices, garages, sheds and give it away or sell it, noting down and journalling any resistance you have to making the change in your physical environment and how it feels in your internal emotional world. Ask yourself does this <insert object name here> serve my Real Work? If the answer is ‘No’ you know what to do with it.

Chapter Ten

Expect Inefficiency

The more Breaking Your Busy takes hold in your life the more you’ll likely fall out of the habit of being hyper organised and efficient. This will be more likely if you’ve automated or delegated most of the admin aspects of your life and work.

Abandoning the Busy Work that demanded your organisational talents be so honed to begin with will free you up to be less obsessed and distracted by efficiency for a while so that you have the time and energy to consider why and how to be more effective through your Real Work.

It is best to consider Breaking Your Busy as the antithesis of ‘if you want something done quickly give it to a busy person’ in that you do not want to be the person that people or yourself give Busy Work to.

Expect inefficiency because it’s a symptom, a temporary effect as you transition through any change you might have set in motion. Post Breaking Your Busy there is little if anything left in your work to be efficient at. In theory at least some if not all of it will be new to you Real Work. As it emerges into the Work Vacuum there will be inefficient periods of necessary skill acquisition. Gradually you will become more skilled and efficient as your Real Work develops and matures.

This will inevitably happen after weeks, months or years at which point there is an evolutionary call to start letting go of this version of your Real Work to make way for a new Work Vacuum and your next NEW or deeper level of Real Work. During this transition your OLD Real Work will be relegated to Busy Work and no longer take up your time and money.

Your creativity or your Creative Core can be, if you allow it, the source of infinite unlimited expression even just for its own sake. If it makes you happy, or it helps others directly or solves a particular problem that will make the lives of others easier and more joyful indirectly then it is giving through your Real Work, no matter how efficient or inefficient you are at it.

Ultimately a return to your Creative Core, in any and all of its forms, relative to what you’re doing is a process of nurturing and development like anything else in life. We rarely wake up being able to form the best and most innovative business ideas, or have the skills to write, tell stories, act, paint, draw, sculpt, choose the most pleasing furnishings, interior design or layouts, or devise the best way for someone to learn how to do something new. We are constantly learning and evolving.

Creativity is everywhere, as is inspiration, all you have to do is tap into your own unique creative channel and start downloading. Interpret it as best as you can within the context you find yourself. You will get better at this with time, practice and patience.

Part Three

Getting Real Creatively

Chapter Eleven

Ignore Creative Urges At Your Peril

In the midst of the many challenges and distractions of working, managing and running jobs and businesses it isn’t always possible to be creative in the way that you want and that would excite you the most.

Despite these Busy Work restrictions, with intention and some discipline it is possible to nurture and stretch the legs of your creativity by adopting the mind-set and techniques we’ve covered so far. There will likely be some operational resistance depending on your role along with internal conflict and guilt about your not doing what everybody else thinks you should be doing with your time, but it can be done.

A particular instance comes to mind when I was around 33 years old during a period when I was running up to 40K per week. Having recently stopped drinking, a major form of coping mechanism distraction Busy Work, and smoking I was working to reverse some of the physical damage. To help clear the energetic blocks, aches, pains and fatigue in my body I’d started a habit of running at least every other day.

I was at the local gym rather than outside, pounding the pavement, which is about as close to nature you can get living and working in a city without any spare time on your hands.

I was working on an open architectural competition to design the new home for the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. My concept was revolving around creative energy being restrained by the box of convention. I was absorbed, studying states of awareness and creativity, brain wave patterns and the mind. I was working mainly out of hours at home and in coffee shops as my ideas and concept developed.

Suddenly, while treading the mill, thinking about my designs, the urge came to progress from vague conceptual thinking and sketch ideas and continue developing the design in detail. The need for me to start turning the concept into something that could work in reality felt immediate. The time was right. I felt it. The pull to immerse myself in the creative process was much greater than my established habit and routine of physical exercise.

The strong attraction to engage with my creativity and the intellectually engaging design challenges was way more powerful than my desire to exercise. I felt impatient, like I was wasting time. I returned to the studio and would obsessively try and find time to continue with this Real Work of the moment.

I eliminated as many distractions as I could in and around my normal day to day role of managing the businesses, working night and day in the process. One thing was certain I felt more alive doing this than not doing it. Exercising, managing the businesses and spending time with my partner took a back seat for a while despite my being aware of the potential conflicts at work and at home that could arise as a result.

This approach can wear thin on intimate relationships so the onus is on you to engage in some Skill Work and learn more about your unique modus operandi so that you can manage a team more effectively under these kind of circumstances. Assuming a team is available this will help prevent you from becoming obsessed with and overtaken by your creativity and Real Work.

The surrounding detail design development and presentation production elements of delivering and implementing creative work can easily and quickly become Busy Work. This is true even if you’re very skilled at it. In fact it’s probably more likely to be Busy Work for you if you are good at this kind of work.

If you continue in this way, over indulging in Busy Work it will be to the detriment of your Real Work and consequently every other aspect of your life. You can only serve one master.

I now see engaging with my creativity as a form of yoga. Thoughts and feelings are predominantly positive and directed towards creativity and beauty for their own sake in the first instance. The process of making things better and improving functionality I recognise comes later after the initial insights and ideas emerge and have some time and space to breathe.

To keep things in perspective in the early stages of a process like this I keep in mind it is a competition, or an idea generation exercise only at the moment. Even though a brief or a project will have a specific purpose and ideal outcome it can also be an adventure in unabridged free creative thinking at the outset. If we keep asking ‘What if…?’ and ‘Why?’ or ‘Why not?’ some amazing and unexpected ideas have a chance to surface and see the light of day, at least for a while.

The creative process has no place for thoughts of me or selfishness. This would represent a Planning To Get mind-set. Despite knowing this, errant ‘it’s all about me’ thoughts do occasionally enter my mind. Thankfully they are quickly seen for what they are. Normally these amusing ego thoughts and visualisations are of graciously accepting the ‘Oscar’ at the award ceremony and thankfully in the thick of the creative process can be let go with a smile. I then return, as if nothing happened, to a stream of intuitive creation, iterative interpretation and implementation. By writing, sketching, drawing, modelling and visualising in the moment, I intuit next steps through a process of forced feedback.

It’s worth noting that never once, in over 20 years of business have I won a project, a job, a competition or an award by keeping the winning, aka ‘getting’ in mind. When I focus on the value I am giving, to whom and Why, while enjoying the process I tend to have a far greater degree of success.

Ignoring your urge to create, in whatever form, for whatever purpose, regardless of where you are physically and stubbornly sticking with what you’re doing, good for you or not is a mistake. You risk missing the moment by recklessly relegating it as unimportant or postponing it as a non-priority. You deny your self when you believe that following your instincts and creative urge are an obsessive over indulgence. If you were ignored by a friend continually would you keep in contact? Think about this when you dismiss your ideas and creative instincts.

Every time you are drowning out your inner voice and side-lining your creativity with Busy Work and a host of other ‘shoulds’ or ‘should nots’ you are compounding the disconnection from your Creative Core. Keep doing this and you will become numb to everything in life that could get or keep your creative life juices flowing.

Ignore creative urges at your peril!

Chapter Twelve

Connecting To Your Creative Core

If you have started Breaking Your Busy by following the principles and techniques already outlined it may be that you’re starting to hear the murmurs of your Creative Core. It may be a whisper or a shout. The more you listen the more this dialogue will come to the fore and surface in your thoughts and feelings.

If you haven’t experienced these kind of changes yet don’t worry. Sometimes we’re just not used to listening or we’re still distracting ourselves. If you think this may be the case take another look at the 30 day Work Vacuum challenge and bring some of the suggested practices back into your daily routine.

The thoughts and feelings will come, but as we’ve discussed they will likely need to be teased and nurtured out. Be warned, your inner voice may not be all sweetness and light to begin with. Would you be if you’ve been ignored for the best part of your life? You may be berated and chastised for a while before you’re granted unrestricted access to your Creative Core once again.

A lot of old rubbish in the form of negativity may have to come up and be let go before your creativity has the inclination, let alone opportunity, to speak with you. The best, most effective and efficient way I’ve found to speed up this cleansing and rehabilitation process that also helps you in all areas of your life is to write. Being silent, with myself, and journalling establishes a direct link to your Creative Core so you can start to cut through the bullshit that has accrued over the years. It’s this negativity that normally lies at the root of our stress, procrastination, inefficiency and apparent lack of creativity. Like anything else in life it can be let go and in doing so clear the path to instinct, intuition, insights, ideas and intention.

Making notes, jotting down thoughts and sketches, forces you to observe your thinking and feeling about life. It also encourages you to face the specific detail of certain situations that are coming up for you in your day to day experience. I describe this as a generalist form of journalling. To begin with it can be wide ranging and is encouraged as a foundational practice. As you progress you’ll be able to get more specific, listen more intently and clear any negative resistance that arises in the process.

My tools of choice are Day One (www.dayoneapp.com), available on my Mac and on iPhone. It has photo and category functionality, recording weather and location. It serves as my primary journal. I use Notes to keep track of simple plans, briefs, actions, lists and aide mémoire because they are constantly being updated. My journal entries are more fixed, final and have a requirement to be time stamped, hence why I use a specific journalling app.

I’ve often found appending a ‘Why?’ or a ‘What if?’ to my thoughts and my entries encourages me to pursue the inquiry, to dig deeper into my ideas, rather than just ignoring them and pushing them aside.

Remember this is a practice to reconnect or strengthen your connection to your Creative Core. You don’t necessarily need to pursue any of the thoughts or ideas unless of course you feel a strong urge to take it further as part of your practice.

The aim in the first instance is to develop the journalling habit, at either set times or better still as the moment arises. This trains you and your mind to be more available to your idea stream. In particular I’d keep hold of the questions that crop up in your mind relative to what you see and experience on a day to day basis. An attitude of constantly questioning things, both outwardly and inwardly is of great creative value.

Refinement of your own unique process will of course come later as you develop your practice. You will become more efficient. Typing or handwriting will become faster and more accurate. Writing and editing skills will be honed. Talking and speaking, either professionally or in conversation will become clearer, more concise and on point. It will be more accessible and useful to you and others now and in the future.

Before long you’ll be composing emails, writing letters, book outlines and chapters or designing buildings in your head, let alone on paper or with your device. The more you develop your ability to translate your thoughts and feelings into words and visuals that can be recalled easily, in your mind’s eye, the more switched on you will be creatively.

This is not only great for you it is valuable to other people as well. This is because you are more aware of yourself. You possess greater confidence in your abilities, especially your creative faculties. As a result you are more able to join the dots of life and make what you know and what you can do more available to others in a form that is accessible and appropriate to them.

The more creative you are the more everything you’ve ever read, seen, experienced automatically indexes in your mind. The more attention you pay to your emotions, feelings, thoughts and what’s going on around you in the material world the more effective this process becomes. Your memory is sharper and you remember and recall a greater level of detail faster than ever before because you are employing all of your senses both externally and internally. You don’t just see and hear it out there in the physical world. You also see, hear and feel it in your inner non-physical being, in the moment and across time by accessing your experiential archive. All of this is rocket fuel for your creative process.

With all of this in mind I’d encourage you to get out more and go in more. Both are much easier to do with more time and energy born out of Breaking Your Busy. Doing this is a combination of seeing more of the world, what’s really going on around you in the detail as well as the bigger picture and also considering how it makes you think and feel.

Some things to begin with will often pass you by and be filtered out of your life experience. Other times there will be sparks of insight, hard to ignore, that will ignite and supercharge your idea stream engine.

Become a student of everything. You’ll know what everything is and means for you when you see it and feel it first-hand. It’s all very well being an expert and focussing your time, energy and effort on one subject or skill if that suits your personality type and you’re happy. However, if you feel the inclination and urge, be more willing to open up your experience. Study related and unrelated subjects.

The result will be an enhanced ability to consistently join the dots. Ideas and insights, not necessarily useful at this moment or time in your life will resurface when the time is right. This inspiration will be stored in your subconscious, in your experiential archive and of course in your journal. It can be readily recalled because the journalling process has encouraged you to question everything more intensely, beyond the surface level, until its deeper meaning and significance is revealed. If you make efforts to record your ideas, thoughts and observations about that which interests you most this ability will be compounded.

If thinking creatively and generating ideas hasn’t been at the top of your list in the past, keep in mind it’s just like going to the gym. It’s painful at first so you don’t really want to go. Overcome your initial resistance and after a few weeks you will gradually get into your stride. You are stronger, fitter and start to miss it if you have to skip a session.

For me, creative thinking is infinitely more sustainable and more pleasurable than going to the gym. Work beyond the first few days by taking the 30 day Work Vacuum Challenge, and you’ll have an ability that with only minimal maintenance will last you a lifetime.

In my experience even those you would automatically assume very creative don’t have the capacity to quickly and effectively generate ideas. Even with a detailed brief and lots of time they struggle or come up with mediocre and obvious solutions. These so called creatives struggle to generate ideas in the moment, when a solution is most needed, no matter what the context is.

This is because even though they have creative skills they are not necessarily creative thinkers. Becoming a creative thinker takes practice, exposure to the world and many different subjects. It requires a flexible and open mind. It demands that you are well read and experienced in thinking, questioning and journalling. You will feel and be more creative when these processes become more autonomous and habitual.

Our ability to think creatively is like a muscle. It starts building strength by being able to listen to your creativity. The voice within will present itself to you as a thought and idea stream. It will contain questions, answers, sometimes more questions, lyrics, poems, speeches, quotes, stories, processes, visuals, images, movies, songs, music, feelings, emotions all speaking to you in their own unique way. It’s your job to piece together these often disparate components and create something of value, enjoying yourself in the process.

The way we take note of this stream of creativity, no matter how weak and subtle it may be is to start paying attention to it and writing. Just write. You can’t get it wrong. Journalling forces us to become more aware and achieve greater clarity and understanding about what our inner voice is really saying. Some, a lot maybe, won’t appear to be of much value. We’ll give it little if any heed. However if we are continually paying attention, being present to what’s going on for us in the moment something will grab our attention that could be, if nurtured and developed the seed of our Real Work.

Chapter Thirteen

Journalistic Intention

By journalling thoughts and concepts we can start building an idea archive that will help strengthen our creative muscle. As a result our ability to be more innovative, whether in a specific subject or across multiple areas is bolstered.

To begin with the ideas we come up with when we journal might sound dumb, too simple (although that’s not necessarily a bad thing), too complex, under-cooked, over-cooked or too closely reference someone else’s work. It doesn’t matter. It is like a recycling funnel. You have to put a variety of raw ingredients into the top, including some of the material that came out of the bottom. Nothing is wasted. Over seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years our subconscious mind organises this material and makes it available to us in an instant appropriate to our context.

If your connection to your Creative Core isn’t blocked or disconnected this information and insight will be delivered to you in a relevant form as long as you keep out of the way and just let it. Your inherent genius will reveal itself to you in the moment as you go deeper into a task, a project, a product, a service, a piece of marketing, a poem, a song, a choreography, a lecture, a business or your life. All you have to do is pay attention to your thoughts.

All creation in the world starts with thoughts. These thoughts when coloured by our emotions and feelings become words. These words imbued with desire become actions. Multiple actions combined become our reality in many different and varied forms. Ultimately our emotions, thoughts and feelings determine how we perceive our reality. In turn the thoughts we have about our reality restart and re-inform this cycle of creation ad infinitum.

Valuable thoughts and words can be lost all too easily if not recorded. Or they can be negatively tainted if not investigated and interrogated relative to our authentic inner voice. Left in the shadows thoughts and words can fester. This can lead to misdirected actions that co-create conflicting internal and external realities that we don’t really want to be part of, so we avoid them. Often at all costs. This is why journalling is so powerful. It shines a light on our emotions, feelings and thoughts so they can be unravelled and any associated negativity, however subtle and unnoticeable, let go.

The development of our creative instinct through journalling and other more physical, often intense forms of letting go (explored more in 'Master The Seven Works' and FREE Bonuses) is always a work in progress. With maturity and accumulated life experience a visceral necessity to become more aware of the patterns of our thoughts, behaviours and actions develops. There is an inescapable urge to curate and direct them more effectively towards supporting the greater good in the first instance rather than just as an afterthought.

This is why determining which ideas, if any, we want to put energy, time, money and focus into is often harder to decide than coming up with the ideas in the first place. Yet this is exactly what we need to do. We must feel into our thoughts and interrogate our words to be sure they resonate with our Creative Core. Will our ideas and vision hold our attention long enough for the result to bring consistent value to ourselves and those they touch and impact in the world? Will the process and the outcome of our creativity and Real Work be beneficial to everyone involved now and in the future?

I believe the ultimate question we need to ask continually of our work and creativity is not so much ‘Is it worth it?’ but ‘Do I want it to be worth it?’ and ‘Why?’ In this way we are not succumbing to one worthy cause after another and neglecting our happiness in the process. To ask of something ‘Do I want it to be worth it?’ and receive an unequivocal ‘Yes!’ will ensure the What and the Why of our Real Work are aligned. Then, through dedication, commitment and perseverance these high level, meaningful and purposeful components of life become a more permanent Planning To Give fixture of our reality.

Chapter Fourteen

Continual Idea Generation

In addition to your journalling I encourage you to start a daily creative exercise regime. One day one idea about a subject that interests you. Your responses might not be about your job, unless you love what you’re doing and couldn’t imagine doing anything else (i.e., it’s your Real Work for the moment), but about something you’re already or could be really passionate about in the future.

1. Every day think about this particular interest or hobby and ask yourself Why you do it or Why you are so interested in it. Each day try to make the answer a little bit or a lot different from the last. This will help get you started. It could be ‘because I feel good doing it’ or ‘because it pays me well’ or it could be ‘because I get to contribute’ or ‘for the smiles and appreciation I receive’ or ‘I like doing high quality work and I can do that in this job’. Keep going, every day, more and more detailed, and at the same time more and more abstract, ‘just because I love it’. There is no right or wrong answer.

2. Alongside asking Why you do it or Why you want to do it note down at least one idea about this passion or interest every day for a week. How might you get to do it more often or what will you do with it if you can spend more time engaged with it? What could you combine it with? How might you market it and sell it? What’s needed to make it better or increase its efficiency? Could you solve more and bigger problems with it? In what ways could you make the experience more enjoyable? There really is no limit to how far and wide you can question your interests. Follow through the idea a little, no matter how silly, stupid, or crazy it sounds. Keep making notes, drawing references from wherever you need to into a mini-project scratch file.

3. Then leave it at that. For the purposes of this exercise there’s no need to pursue it further than a sentence unless you feel inspired to do so. Even then keep in mind that the point of the exercise isn’t to think up and jump onto your next big project. Knee-jerking yourself into one of the first exciting ideas that comes to mind could just turn into another Busy Work distraction. The aim is to develop the habit of connecting to your Creative Core, accessing your idea stream and turning it into intelligible and organised thoughts. The time will come for taking purposeful Why directed actions.

4. The following week, repeat (1) and (2) doubling your number of Why answers and ideas every day until you hit 100 on each. It may, and probably will get hard and be a struggle, but keep racking your brain and remember, it is just like going to the gym and will get easier with practice.

My advice is to carry out the first two weeks of this exercise at a set time each day. Perhaps in the morning before you go to work or you could try at the end of the day. Sometimes through tiredness and fatigue we can become more relaxed and less likely to filter out the sillier more outlandish ideas that come to us. At the start of the day our Busy Work no nonsense mind-set might have already kicked in. Try a few different options and see what works better for you. You could try early in the morning over breakfast, while taking lunch or record ideas into your phone while driving to work.

When I was working in my businesses I desperately needed my own time and space to pursue ideas and concepts. I would arrive at the coffee shop as early as possible, sometimes at 6:30am when it opened. I would enjoy two or three hours of reading and idea generation with some implementation before my main day started. This went on for years and as a result I became a faster thinker, reader, writer and idea generator. I also developed the discipline of working by myself in a more focussed and productive way despite any environmental distractions.

After a few weeks don’t just confine yourself to morning, evening or lunch. Start jotting down your ideas in and around your Busy Work activities. Start doing this whether you are with friends, out and about socialising or at talks, lectures, seminars or conferences.

By practicing in the thick of it, so to speak, you are developing the habit of generating and following through ideas regardless of your situational context. You are tuning your mind and memory. By turning these ideas into considered thoughts, ordered words, action lists and creative briefs they can be taken on by you or someone else with the minimum of additional work.

Remember these evolving plans must develop to a point of having a strong enough Why before you or someone else decides whether to pursue them.

Just the act of being conscious and present enough to consider, clarify and write down your thoughts, plans, ideas and concepts about your self, your life, your relationships and your work is key to being able to recall them quickly when you need and want them most. This is evident on a day to day basis when it comes to remembering people’s names.

If networking and socialising is or has been a large part of your work try jotting down names, where and how you met with a short descriptor of appearance. Then if you see them across a room you can quickly check your notes and recall their name. Having done this for so long, I rarely have to check my notes. In fact I now have a habit of only mentally recording or visually writing their names in my mind’s eye and not actually physically doing it. Whether it’s names or ideas the principle and practice is the same. The more we use our mind the more creative we become.

The more you Break Your Busy the more time and space you will have to be creative. You will soon have a backlog of ideas. You can combine these with your established habits and relevant skills. Possessing a highly developed creative muscle that is attentive to your inner voice and able to translate it into the written word is a great privilege and should not be taken for granted.

With maintenance, through mindfulness and meditation (Real Work is a form of meditation), your idea stream and experiential archive is always available to you and can be referenced and re-referenced with ease. In creativity and knowledge we are more confident, more discerning and better able to navigate the trials and tribulations of life helping others do the same. Your experience will become less stressful and more meaningful. You will be happier and more at peace. In this connected context you will be naturally more in tune with and more giving of your unique and special gifts.

Chapter Fifteen

Being Most Creative

The most creative people in the world aren’t spending their time thinking and worrying about other people and what they think. They’re actively thinking and feeling into the work, projects, ideas and concepts that are most important to them. They are constantly questioning, answering and communicating the results internally and externally and in doing so moving closer to their goals of giving.

They have something in common. They are always listening to and connected to their Creative Core. They feed it through education, life experience and skill acquisition. This creative fuel and inspiration, which isn’t always directly related to their Real Work is drawn from the detail and the bigger picture of life, from the past, present and their ideas about the future.

They appreciate that knowledge and experience know no boundaries. There is a built-in understanding that real creative breakthroughs come from combining two or more ideas to create a valuable third alternative that is of greater, previously unknown value.

Pay attention to, marshal and note down your thoughts. Establish a habit of purposefully focusing on ideas about a specific passion, job, role or hobby to hone your creative muscle. Become accustomed to generating plenty of Whys to What you love doing or think you might want to do.

Repeat this exercise and practice until it becomes an instinctive habit. You will soon have a mental, physical and digital record of organised journal entries containing thoughts, ideas, concepts, project plans, creative briefs, references, inspiration and life experience that are most important to you.

Look out for and study the patterns, trends and themes in your time logs, expenses records, journal entries and in your experiential archive and it will become clearer, maybe even blatantly obvious, What really makes you happy and Why.

Your Real Work really isn’t that far away and won’t stay hidden for long. Keep looking for it even if you think you’ve already found it. It is always changing and evolving.

Remember Breaking Your Busy is the beginning not the end. It is change, big or small and regardless of whether it is difficult or easy to manage it is and always will be a necessary, yet inherently creative, part of life.

Conclusion

To be able to consistently and successfully Break Your Busy, stop procrastinating, be more effective and productive, reduce stress, do more of what you want and set your creativity free can be summed up in these five simple steps.

Understand the difference between Busy Work and Real Work for you and remember they change as you do.

1. Use Work Tagging to analyse in detail What, Where and Why you spend your time and money.

2. Reduce or eliminate your Busy Work and coping mechanism distractions to create a Work Vacuum.

3. Develop a habit of listening to and journalling your thoughts and feelings to home in on your Real Work.

4. Explore and pursue creative ideas within your Work Vacuum when the urge is strong.

As you get started and work through the exercises and challenges included in this book these steps will become more habitual. To support your practice my next book in the Work Life Wide Open Series is a more in depth and wider look at The Seven Works and how to use them to create a more fulfilling and purposeful personal and work life free of internal and external conflict.

You can find out about Master The Seven Works - Repurpose Your Life here.

Thank you for reading.

Break Your Busy and Work Life Wide Open.

Richard Conner

Author, Architect, Artist @ The Creative Core

www.richardjamesconner.com

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Unlock Your Time And Creativity

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Reconfigure The Facets of Life

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Also By The Author

The Seven Works - Reconfigure The Facets of Life

Reduce Inner and Outer Conflict with a New Flexible Blueprint for The High Definition Life.

‘We have lost our purpose. We are in conflict, caught between a healthy desire to give more and an insecure need to get more.’

Welcome to the High Definition Life, a fractured world of relentless consumption, excessive overwhelm, increasing busyness and a widespread lack of truth and integrity. In this disorientating Idyllic Illusion we constantly agonise over the value we are giving, or not giving and the elusive ‘just reward’ we crave for all the hard work we are putting in.

This conflict leads us to question our contribution to our partners, our families and the local and global community we are continually co-creating. We are lost whether to spend more time on our work life to make ends meet and be of value to the world or to focus more on our personal life so that we have something of value to come home to after working so hard.

If we are to improve how we engage with these changing facets of life and reduce internal and external conflict in the process it’s clear we must learn how to redefine and reconfigure them. Only in this way will we develop a new life blueprint and supporting set of practical tools to ensure that we can both start and continue working ‘on’ a connected life rather than getting stuck and lost ‘in’ the thick of a disconnected one.

The Seven Works is that blueprint and toolset rolled into one simple to understand and implement system that you can start using, in the bigger picture and the day to day, ‘on’ your life as well as ‘in’ it.Most of us have inherited or developed an urgency to do more, achieve more and become ever more efficient in the process of doing regardless of how effective the hard work we do carry out actually is. We feel a desperate need for better life and time management techniques to help reduce associated stress and overwhelm so that we can continue to be more focussed and increasingly productive.

These surface level solutions, while they will seem to ease the problem for a while, only tackle the symptoms. They ignore the underlying cause of the inner and outer discord that drives this incessant cyclical process of what has become, on the whole, work for work’s sake.

Click to find out more.

* * *

Master The Seven Works - Repurpose Your Life

The Holistically Simple Way To Create Conscious Change and Work Your Why

In a world of excessive busyness, disorientation and lack of direction, truth and integrity few would deny that many among us are questioning our purpose in life. We agonise over the value we are giving, or not giving. We question our contribution to our partners, our families and the local and global community we have co-created. We are in conflict, caught between a desire to give more and an need to get more.

We are in urgent need of a new life blueprint and supporting set of tools. This enhanced model would allow us to permanently flip from a state of getting to one of giving, of ourselves to ourselves and others in whatever form resonates most deeply with our innate creativity.

Master The Seven Works is the new comprehensive yet simple way to prioritise and balance all the works of your life so you can discover your Why, reinforce your connection to your Creative Core and create change so you can fully embrace and live your Real Work.

Click to find out more.

* * *

Work Life Wide Open - Create Master Change

An Experiential, Anecdotal and Practical Guide to Finding Your Lost, Breaking Your Busy and Working Your Way back to your Creative Core, your Why, your Purpose and your Real Work

Work Life Wide Open explores in detail, why making Significant Life Change is so imperative in the High Definition Life we are all living. Using never before seen simple yet extremely powerful transformational concepts the author delves deeply into the life change process fully explaining how to prepare for, handle and overcome it as it unfolds.

This expansive work shows us that with knowledge, clarity and practice we can enjoy a more productive, meaningful, happier, fulfilling, connected and creative life that will benefit society now when it is urgently needed.

Click to find out more.

To hear about my new book releases, receive free books, guides, cheat sheets, mini-courses, blog posts, podcasts, author interviews, and special launch offers please take a moment to sign up my readers list, The Creative Core, and receive FREE Bonuses and Giveaway Invites.

About The Author

Entrepreneur architect business owner suddenly quits his international creative agency and London home. Selling everything he moves to Thailand to find time, space and freedom to rediscover his creativity and allow his Real Work to emerge. He finds himself constructing a dinosaur on the beach, living in a cave and designing for the fun of it again. Most importantly he is compelled to write.

The outcome of his journey is a series of books that explain in detail why making significant life change amidst the High Definition Life technological revolution that is taking place all around us is now so imperative it is ignored or avoided at our peril.

His writing focuses on how to instigate positive change locally and globally. Leaving no stone of his personal journey unturned he candidly reveals, warts and all, what to expect in our internal and external world during this inevitable personal and impersonal metamorphosis.

The process of understanding and appreciating the conflicted life context and content inherent to this incoming change is covered in depth throughout his work. How to handle this transition from chaos into order and make it work for rather than against us is described through simple, unique and never before seen conceptual models that are readily applicable to our day to day lives.

The Work Life Wide Open Series, twenty years in the making, are practical, experiential and anecdotal guides to Finding Your Lost, Breaking Your Busy and Working Your Way back to your Creative Core, uncovering your Why and connecting with your Real Work.

* * *

Broadly Richard’s writing, books, training, coaching, marketing and business courses and programmes revolve around The Seven Works, his core conceptual and practical blueprint for successfully navigating the High Definition Life. This extensive body of work explores how we can improve both our individual lives and the greater whole through Conscious Change, Creativity, Communication and Connection.

Richard is a Rebirthing Breathworker, a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Hypnosis and creative business marketing consultant and coach.

His Play Work includes Heli-Skiing, Snowboarding and dancing Argentine Tango.

* * *

Richard Conner co-founded architectural practice Piercy Conner (now Piercy&Company) www.piercyandco.com and creative agency Assembly Studios www.assemblystudios.com and founded Fast Space Creative www.fastspace.co.uk.

He has held CEO, Managing Director and Creative Director positions for over 20 years.

Now, Richard’s focus is on writing and consulting on creativity within the High Definition Life through his publishing, marketing and business consultancy Fast Space Creative.

* * *

Professional Career

Richard studied Architecture at Liverpool University and The Bartlett University College London (UCL). His professional career started with Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners (now GRIMSHAW) / Eden Project / Waterloo International Terminal / Berlin Stock Exchange.

He co-founded Piercy Conner Architects (now Piercy&Company) / Turnmills / Martello Tower Y / East Village alongside graphic design and CG illustration and animation studio Smoothe. Richard and his partners also co-created the Microflat, the worldwide press and media phenomenon. Showcased with two live in Micronauts at Selfridges in Oxford Street, London the Microflat was heralded as the answer to London’s escalating housing crisis.

Most recently Richard co-founded Design Week Top 100 creative agency Assembly Studios / Arab Film Studio / Battersea Power Station / ImageNation and The Creative Assembly / Creative Torbay / Creative Kirklees / Creative Somerset / Creative Hertfordshire / Creative Swindon / Creatives Across Sussex.

* * *

TV, Press, Awards and Client Testimonials about the businesses Richard Conner co-founded.

'Putting a Microflat in the Selfridges window was a PR idea bordering on genius.'

Hugh Pearman, The Times

'Piercy Conner is one of the new generation of British architects interested in adding poetry to the pragmatic. The young practice has a backlist of admired, imaginative projects where the old, high-energy, Newtonian assumptions of building geometry give way to more flexible and relativist concepts.'

Stephen Bailey, The Observer

'Piercy Conner has emerged in the last five years as one of the most conceptually advanced architectural practices of its generation, extending the theory and practice of architecture in a way that demonstrates a profound understanding of its cultural and communicational possibilities. Extending architecture, that is, beyond the practice of designing buildings into wider forms of social engagement.'

British Council

Architecture Foundation Next Generation Award Finalist (2007)

Architects' Journal Corus 40 Architects Under 40 Winner (2005)

Young Architect of the Year Finalist (2003)

Arena Magazine ‘X’ Men Awards (2002)

Building Young Entrepreneur Finalist (2001)

Mac User Creative User of the Year Award Finalist (1995)

Resources

Questions

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Further Reading

Here’s a list of related books that will help you to unlock your time and creativity:

- The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

- Essentialism and The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

- Less by Marc Lesser

- Quiet by Susan Cain

- Start With Why by Simon Sinek

- How To Do Better Creative Work by Steve Harrison

- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

All the books by 37 Signals Getting Real, REWORK and REMOTE are all worth a quick read, and it will be quick as they’re purposefully very short and on point. The lessons can be applied to whatever line of creativity, work, or business you’re in or want to be in.

Copyright

Copyright © 2017 Richard Conner

The right of Richard Conner to be identified as the author of the Work has been asserted him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews and social media posts where the author is credited.

Disclaimer

The information put forward within this book is by no means an instruction or invitation to take action. It is merely a collection of ideas and considerations that may or may not be applicable to your current or future situation. As such this book is intended as a practical guide for information and entertainment only.

You should seek, where necessary and appropriate, professional advice related to any significant life change you may be considering as you see fit to assess the impact and implications on other areas of your life before taking any action.

Contact

For information contact:

Fast Space Creative

Unit 7761, PO Box 6945

London

W1A 6US

United Kingdom

http://www.richardjamesconner.com

Book and Cover design by Richard Conner