Thought & Theory

I’ll be participating in a panel this Thursday at 6:30PM at the Art Institute about the process of putting portfolios together and promoting yourself as a designer. I’ll be focusing more on how the web can help you in your job hunt and how you should approach the wealth of options and outlets you have.

Looking for a new job? Who isn’t? Student or Professional – we’re all in the same boat now and we’re being rocked by the salty sea they call The Economy.

Whether you’ve recently lost your job, are new to the job market (student, recently relocated, switched industries) or just need a change of scenery – we’ve collected a diverse panel of portfolio masters to help you learn from their mistakes and successes when it comes to presenting your portfolio.

Panelists

• David Smith – Axis Design Solutions
• Rob Knox – PGA Tour
• Patrick Carter – The Kurtis Group
• Dennis Eusebio – Thought & Theory
• Karen Kurycki – The Kurtis Group

Moderator

Varick Rosete – nGen Works

More Details

See AIGA JAX for more details

Great new project from Shaun Andrews of Upstate Interactive. Be sure to check out the free book promotion he’s running to launch the site!

CLR is a semi-monthly online magazine focused on sharing stories of inspiration and motivation. Each issue will feature 2-3 stories from guest authors relating to a central topic. Our first issue will have our guest authors answering the question “How did you get to where you are today?” We will also be featuring other editorial content about what’s been motivating and inspiring us lately. If you’re a designer, programmer, marketer, blogger, or even if you work at 7-11—we hope that the short stories we plan to share will leave you motivated and enthusiastic about work, love and life.

The Creative Living Room

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

Part of me wants to see them realize this vision. Apple could use some competition.

We’ve all been there: countless unopened or flagged e-mails, multiple to-do lists, twitter replies, facebook friend requests, phone calls that need to be returned and tons of other items. These things pile up and tend to come in waves.

I’ve been incredibly busy with iwearyourshirt.com as of late and have found a few ways to better my ability to multitask. I didn’t even think about writing this post until I read a similar one at 37signals.com. Here are a couple of my personal tips and observations:

1. Attack things head on, but 1 at a time. You may have 30 separate tasks that need to be done, but start with the most important and break them down individually.

2. Don’t try to check e-mails while doing other things, especially returning phone calls or conference calls. You’ll lose e-mails, forget about them, ignore the call or piss someone off you are supposed to be listening to. E-mails should be focused on by themselves and so should most phone calls.

3. Set aside time daily to do things if need-be. Tim Ferriss (of the 4-Hour Work Week) talks about checking e-mail twice a day and feel free to let people know your schedule. I check my snail mail at nearly the exact time everyday. I leave my laptop (obviously), cell phone and everything else behind. It gives me time to take my dog Plax for a walk and focus on whatever bills or crappy direct mailers I need to read. Bills are important and can easily get neglected in the shuffle (this may sound dumb, but it happens to all of us).

4. Close other programs. I used to leave 10 programs open and try to shuffle through all of them and think I could do it all at one time. My e-mails started to get ignored, to-do lists were growing cob webs, sticky notes were piling up and safari had too many tabs/windows to manage. Again, focus on one thing at a time. If you want to read your Google Reader, close all other tabs, shut down Mail, close the sticky notes, quit Photoshop and spend the time to read your RSS feeds. It’s really okay if you have a couple bold feeds in your list.

5. Don’t obsess over looking at every e-mail that comes in. No matter how many e-mails you get a day, they don’t have to be looked at the instant they arrive in your inbox. Finish what you are working on, complete the tasks you had schedule and let the e-mails sit unopened for 30 minutes or more, it’s really OK!

If you have any tips on multitasking or programs that help you out, feel free to share them in the comments.

All of us at Thought & Theory have come from rather strict 9-5 (sometimes even 8 - 7) jobs at various companies and advertising agencies. While that amount of work never scared us (hell, i think we work longer days now), the lack of freedom didn’t really help the creative process. Now that we’ve been on our own, we’re fortunate enough to have the freedom to work our own hours and make our own schedule.

I can take an hour off here and there to take my mom to the airport, go grab a lunch with an old colleague, hang out with my girlfriend for a bit, go read a book for an hour, etc. It’s changed my life and I don’t know if I could ever go back to a formal 9-5 again.

The misconception about having such a loose schedule is that not enough work gets done. But I can tell you from experience, letting creativity happen on its own has dramatically increased my work quality and output. You’re not forcing work during a set amount of hours and in turn your work doesn’t feel so rigid and forced. I get more done in a concentrated session of 4 hours then I would normally get in an entire day of work at my old jobs. It’s due to the fact I can wait till I catch an idea or brief moment of inspiration, and ride that until it ends instead of staring at a blank screen and creating on the spot.

So given the opportunity, what would you do with your time if you worked flexibly? Or if you do, how does it compare to your previous jobs?

Feel free to post this on your blog and link your response in our comments. The original blog meme originated from: Career Life Connection