Time Management for Artists: Rethinking Your Schedule
As artists, we often think of time as something to be chased—an elusive resource that always seems to slip through our fingers. What if, instead of battling against it, rethinking your schedule regularly helped harness your creative energy?
The power of the schedule isn’t just about organization; it’s about reclaiming control over how we work, what we focus on, and even what we avoid.
Schedule what you want to do.
The power of creating the life and business you desire is agency. You have freedom to do as you please. However, we often either don’t know how to use it (we get busy), or we let someone else choose for us (we get lazy).
If we have done the heavy lifting of determining what we want, we can work to preserve the space to do it. We can schedule it. If we want to be in the studio or on our bike, we can put that on our calendar.
The key is to respect the meeting with yourself. We can tell other people that time doesn’t work. Rarely will anyone ask why; it is easier to just move on to another suggested time. Furthermore, when we say no, we quietly become more valuable.
Schedule what you don’t want to do.
When we first start building our own business, we have to do everything within the venture. We need to make our products, grow our markets, build relationships with customers, collect our money, count our money, explore our next creative project, and keep our space and lives together.
There are a lot of things to do, with varying degrees of joy felt when doing them. For those less-than-fulfilling tasks we need to accomplish, we should be our own boss and assign them to ourselves (this is what it means to be a boss—telling someone to do the stuff we may not want to).
When we know the assignment is due, we can schedule time appropriately to accomplish it.
Schedule what you don’t want to do—in small doses.
The detestable tasks (paying taxes, organizing the supply closet) may need to be broken into small, manageable steps to progress toward the goal.
The Pomodoro Technique is a great tool for this. Set a timer (25 minutes, or about what it takes to boil pomodoro tomatoes) and work without distraction. When the alarm rings, you are free to move on with life, or even reward yourself. A couple of things happen in this process: 25 minutes is not much time to endure, yet 25 minutes of focused work can be meaningful. Often, at the end of 25 minutes, our productivity begets energy to continue the work and get closer to being done.
Completing a marathon requires a series of small steps.
Scheduled time is trackable time.
Time is the only resource we cannot get more of (with current technology). If we do not know where our most valuable resource is going, there is a good chance we are wasting it—or at least not being compensated appropriately for it when we determine our prices.
Scheduling (or documenting) our use of time is one of the most helpful tools we have for growing a sustainable business. There is no bank statement at the end of the month to tell us how we spent our time; however, if we keep a schedule, we have an opportunity to review our time expenses. Tracking time enables us to know our real cost and be compensated correctly for it. Awareness of time equals better pricing.
There are many frameworks and tools out there to utilize time. If you’re into artificial conversations, you could likely have a great one with your favorite computational language model (AI).
Rethinking your schedule alone?
Time is difficult to comprehend and difficult to consistently harness to do the things we want.
Getting an outside perspective can help you see how to better align your time with your goals. Whether it’s for creative growth or business clarity, brainstorming with someone you trust can be the catalyst you need to transform your schedule from chaos to clarity. If you’re not joining us for our free virtual coworking sessions already, these are a great opportunity to see what’s working for other creative professionals.
If you are having trouble wrapping your head around your time and how best to use it, reach out to get a coffee with us. The cost of the beverage is on us, and potentially the expenditure of time is a great investment for you.
Banner art credits: Ansonia Clock, c. 1936 is a watercolor and graphite on paper piece by Edith Magnette in the Index of American Design. The graphical style of the Index of America Design makes the individual works a quality of reproducibility that translates easily across modern digital forms. Intentional planning creates space for deeper creativity, turning time into an ally rather than a source of pressure.
