5 Time Management Tips for Artists

Acknowledge the completion of your milestones. After a few weeks or a month, evaluate, honestly, how you’re managing time. Consider aspects of your work like delays, wrong time estimates, and improvements made. Post analysis, if you find that you’ve accomplished your goal, then make sure to reward yourself!

Give yourself a special dinner treat, a restful day at the spa, or a luxurious vacation. This way, by acknowledging your accomplishments, you will feel motivated to keep pushing towards your goals.

Don’t just focus on everything that you have yet to complete. Take some time out to acknowledge how far you’ve reached since you began your artwork. Do your best everyday and be proud of yourself for striving towards your milestones!

What sets those who are able to manage time apart is not some inborn, superhuman power. In fact, it’s simply effective time management.

On reimagining, numerous expectations and incorporating regular art time in your daily life are constant struggles for most artists. We all get 24 hours each day. Being an artist, you need to figure out time allocation for your artwork.

Needless to mention, any time mismanaged is time lost. So, it’s critical for you to ensure that you do the artwork on time and of exceptional quality. Managing your time means managing energy, expectations, and distractions. You are bound to feel overwhelmed by the need of being more focused and productive.

Besides mastering your creative artwork, you also need to learn the art of juggling. This way you'll certainly accomplish your creative goals and be a contented artist at the end of the day.

Here are five killer time management tips for you to boost your creativity:

1. Record your real time.It is critical to know what you can actually accomplish on a daily basis; i.e. your real time. Clock time and your real time are two completely different concepts because the ideal is mostly never the reality. Also, nearly all time management tools only organize ideal hours in a day.

Dedicate one week to noting down on pen and paper your time on each task you perform, nearly minute by minute. After this period, examine what you did and the time you took for each kind of task. This way, you get an insight into how you are utilizing your time, what tasks are productive, and also what tasks are unwanted.

2. Make a full-fledged routine. Consider the different frequencies of your tasks; i.e. daily, weekly, and monthly. Set such blocks on your calendar and make it a habit of doing related tasks at similar times. This way, you remain emotionally stable even while you have to meet tight deadlines. Setting a routine of beginning and ending your artwork at the same time daily aids your sleep schedule, thus keeping you fresh all day.

Spend about 15 minutes every morning chalking out your work plan for the day. An effective to-do list using pen and paper—i.e. a physical list—helps as a constant reminder. Next, prioritize the tasks, keeping only two prime goals for the day. Schedule tasks realistically and try writing down a slightly generous time duration next to each of them.

For instance, writing an email usually takes 10 minutes. However, phone calls could extend up to 30 minutes, and creating a particular image might even take as long as five or six hours.

If your supervisor has assigned work that requires two or three days worth of effort, then delete less important items from the to-do list. Alternatively, request your supervisor to take off work from your plate. This way you prevent burdening your day with unreasonable expectations and hampering your productivity.

3. Give yourself a breather. Go for walks around the block or a garden for five to 10 minutes. Such quick breaks during work let you think about what you accomplished, helping you absorb your day and focus.

4. Identify your distractors. This is an effective way to reduce distractions and move closer to your goals. It is essential that you absolutely focus and cut down on personal distractions when you’re in a creative mode. Identify your personal time-wasters in your normal work routine.

Due to the advancement of technology, you can now use an app called RescueTime that keeps a check on your activities on your computer. Finally, it tells you the amount of time you spent on every application.

When it’s critical to concentrate on your task, give instructions to the RescueTime app to block the time-wasters. In fact, specify what qualifies for a time-waster. Social media and email, for instance, could distract you constantly while you are designing a poster in Adobe Photoshop.

When you’re with your brush and easel, you might even want to shut off your phone or leave it away from your workspace. Constantly indulging in negative conversations with others or utilizing valuable time on fruitless activities hampers your productivity.

5. Keep your reference material handy. When you begin a work session having your reference material handy saves precious time. For instance, you can keep dumping or saving work-related stuff into a Dropbox folder. This way you can also easily show your work progress to your supervisor.

For written material, especially your work-related ideas, use autosaving, or free Windows and Android tools like OneNote. You can even store your frequently visited links here.

Photographs being the main source of art masterpieces, you’d most certainly need reference image libraries with multiple categories of images like people, buildings, and animals, among others.

Doing these killer tips for managing time wisely, you will certainly gain confidence about fulfilling your creative milestones. By evaluating your real time, setting a daily routine of your artwork, recognizing your personal time-wasters, having handy reference material, and always celebrating the completion of your weekly or monthly goals, you can easily convert your to-do list into a menu of productivity and efficiency.