Column on Marketing Tribune

Yesterday I wrote my first column for Dutch marketing magazine Marketing Tribune. I will continue doing so once every month. Writing a column is quite a challenge, as I experienced past few weeks. While it’s only a short piece, no more than 500 words, a mental struggle proceeds the first words on paper. It’s one of those things that is cool to do, but is also easy to procrastinate since the next deadline is always 4 weeks away. But the day before yesterday I decided to write about the China National Day, happening today. This gave me a deadline that was just 1 day away, instead of the original 4 weeks. I wrote the piece in a matter of hours and got it over with.

This reminded me of an article called ‘Timeboxing for Creative Professionals’ I read recently, saying “No matter how much time you have for ideation, you can always come up with a good idea.” While I didn’t set a timebox of 30 minutes - as the article points out - decreasing the time-span from 4 weeks to 1 day was enough to increase productivity. Last week I experienced something similar. I had one day to design a visual identity for an event that will take place very soon. I could have spend days or weeks going over sketches and draft designs, but as it turned out, I could also do it in one day.

Now that we deadline is 4 weeks away again, I could wait till the last day to create a short time-span or - preferably - set a short timebox a week in advance to work on it. I hope I will do the latter in 3 weeks or so.