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To live your best life and contribute according to your gifts and interests, you must understand what your most important activities are, and align your time and energy around them.  Obviously, this means you must carefully design your schedule to support your top priorities. 

I've decided, in my case, that means nobody [1] gets to have a magic button they can push that makes me drop the activities that  I've carefully designed my schedule to support.

Consequently, I'm pretty hard to reach.  I don't give out my cell phone number.  When I'm at home, I store it in the other room and I only check it a couple of times a day.  So texting me, if you manage to get my number, won't likely yield a prompt response.  I have all notifications disabled.   The few times I look at Facebook (which is increasingly rare), there will be hundreds of notifications, which largely go unchecked.  I don't have any notifications on email, and I check it only a few times daily, and even when I do check it, if it's important, I will likely want to think it over a while before firing off a knee-jerk response.  I generally respond to email slowly [2].  Calling my home number, if you have it, will in nearly all cases go straight to voicemail.  I've been known to disable the ringers.  Ringing my doorbell won't likely get a response either.  I only open it if I'm expecting a delivery or a visitor.  These things are all "magic buttons" designed to interrupt my schedule.  So I disable and ignore them.

I'm sure that this is frustrating for people trying to reach me.  In fact, I sound pretty jerky when I write it out like this.  But here's the thing: To do our best work, we need calm.  We need space.  We need reflection.  We need uninterrupted time to focus.  Increasingly, modern society is taking those things away from us.  So you must be intentional in your efforts to claw that time back.   If you don't purposefully prioritize your life, other people will prioritize it for you.  I choose to prioritize it for myself.

So, if you've tried to reach me, invited me to "grab coffee", emailed me and asked if "I'm available next week" to hear about how your product can improve my business, I'm sorry if you've been frustrated.  It's just that for me to make my best contribution to this world, I need that time for other things.  And, if you stop and think about it deeply, you do too.

As an artist, a creator, or an entrepreneur, you owe it to the world to do your best work and bring your visions to life. 

In that respect, being hard to reach is a feature, not a bug.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson

BoldBrush/FASO Founder & Art Fanatic

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Footnotes

1.  When I say nobody, my wife is exempted.

2.  I'm rediscovering the joy of slowing down, being thoughtful, and being more deliberate.  What I've discovered with email is that things that seem super important and critical in the moment, if you ponder them for a day or two, you realize that they aren't that important or, that they are symptom of a larger decision you need to make, which will eliminate a whole host of problems.