As a creative, I have experienced the eye-rolling feeling of someone putting restrictive boundaries on my artistic process. My husband, who seems able to set a timeframe for work, home projects, and even his master’s thesis and finish the job within whatever time constraints he has, once casually said to me, “Well, just finish that short story in the next hour or two.” I didn’t say the thought that came to me at that moment.
I had been working to revise a story that had promise so that I could submit it for a deadline. That particular week, my husband spontaneously invited colleagues to dine at our house and a friend to stay overnight while working in our area. I set aside planned work time to accommodate the hospitality, as I appreciated my husband’s intentions to expand his relational connections beyond work and work hours. But when it came time to get back to my story, I had narrative problems to solve that took more processing effort than snapping my fingers and writing. I would have loved to finish in an hour, but I couldn’t. How could I explain to him, who admittedly doesn’t write creatively, that I couldn’t just insist that my brain make the necessary leaps of knowledge because I wanted it to? And how, also, could I explain that distilling my normal process of playing with words into a regimented, bare-bones writing exercise just for the sake of finishing extracted all the joy out of the work? He rarely seems to have those struggles. Needless to say, I missed the deadline. And, yes, I’m still married and glad of it. (Love ya, hon!)
But the seeming conflict between the freedom to play artistically and the structure imposed by time (and money) constraints has continued to roll around in my head. How do I help myself and the artists I mentor rein in this problem? How do we meet deadlines, not kill ourselves in the process with frenzied, around-the-clock activity near the end date, and still allow for unfettered creative process that transcends time? One of my favorite aspects of being inside that creative play space is the way the ticking clock melts away into another dimension.
How do we creatives gain a stronger appreciation for time management?
My son Ben, a 3-D visual artist currently away at art school, said to me this morning that his peers “don’t care what they do or how much money it makes them. They just want to feel like they have a grasp on life and enjoy doing what they do.” Then he said, “Time management is often a huge factor between being happy in your work and being not happy.” Exactly.
We often need external deadlines to force us to make creative decisions and bring a project to a close, but few people enjoy the high-stress, low-freedom aspect of the frenzied rush to plate what we’ve cooked up before the Chopped timer goes off. And we certainly don’t like standing before the judges knowing we’ll be the next chef voted off the show because our artistic creation is undercooked.
So consider these arguments for learning and adhering to better time management practices:
1. Rather than hemming us in, planning out and sticking with a set work time creates space in our routine for us to unleash our creative brains.
2. A realistic look at the speed we produce comfortably, and the mapping out of how long a project will actually take at that pace allows us to make decisions to either move/forego deadlines or find ways to increase our pace or the allotted daily time we give a project. Advance planning allows us to stay in control of those trade-offs and decisions rather than be controlled by them. We either manage time or it manages us!
3. With good planning and knowledge of what time the project will realistically take, we can better say no to less-important activities, temptations that will impede us from finishing.
4. When we know our pace and our expected time frame, we now have measurable data to tell us whether we are on track, ahead, or behind schedule. It’s not enough to say, “I will work two hours per day on this project”; good time management requires that you map out what you intend to accomplish in those two hours. You could commit two hours per day for a week to research or ideate and outline your main ideas and then two hours per day for four weeks, at a 500-word drafting plus 500-word revision pace for those two hours, and complete about 20,000 words in that time. Now you have a hittable target. Always leave a little cushion in the schedule for rough days, though. We all have them.
5. Having small measurable goals to hit daily or weekly increases your sense of accomplishment or forces you to acknowledge much earlier on that you’re moving into a trouble zone with real consequences for your goals.
6. Because we often don’t get paid until the work is complete and sold, many writers or artists use a reward/consequence system to make the daily work more tangible. You might set aside past earnings as untouchable unless you continue creating. Each day you pay yourself, say $5 (in a jar or a special account) or $15—or whatever level is commensurate with your artistic income—if you meet or exceed your word count. Repeated days of missed word count requires forfeiture of some or all of that accrued money. When you complete the project, the bank of money is yours to spend. Real-time income from sale of the work funds the “bank” for the next project and not the one just completed. Just getting started? Seed the bank with an investment in your creative career, and then don’t touch that money unless you have earned it.
Learn to look at the steel of time management as a supportive, rebar-enforced foundation for your work rather than as handcuffs to your creative process. While some artistic masterpieces happen in a flourish of spontaneous activity, the most successful creatives know that masterpieces usually evolve out of consistent, plodding play time in our creative spaces.