Time Management for Artist

Hello, and welcome to cowgirl artists of America's podcast, a podcast dedicated to cowgirl artists, I'm CA's founder and your host, Megan Wimberley. I am a working artist myself, and I know personally the level of work and commitment that goes into this business. CA's podcast is all about bringing you resources, information, and encouragement to help you on your journey. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about time management strategies, but before we get started, I wanna let you know something very exciting. Of course, if you're a newsletter subscriber, you already know this big news. So if you aren't a newsletter subscriber, make sure to go to the website, cowgirl artists of america.org and subscribe. The exciting news is that cowgirl artists of America will soon be opening to official membership. This is something that many women have reached out to me about, and we have not been at the point yet of opening cowgirl artists of America.

Up in this way. Enabling official membership is going to open up a lot of doors for cowgirl artists of it's going to enable us to provide better resources and better outreach to help bridge the gap between representation of women and men in the Western art world. If you're like me, you may be listening to this podcast while you're washing dishes, driving, maybe riding a horse painting, but basically you're multitasking. Multitasking is a common way of getting a lot done when you are a busy business owner. And if you are an artist, remember you are a business owner being, or working towards becoming a working artist is a business. And you have to remember to think about it that way. When you run a business, especially when it's first getting, and it's small, you are going to be wearing many hats. You're going to be your social media manager.

You're gonna be your web designer. You're gonna be your own photographer. You are doing everything. It is not just about creating art. You're gonna have to do your bookkeeping and your invoices and your contracts. The, the things to do is never ending. And I know that for me, it can become very, very overwhelming, very quickly. I have had a lot of experiences that have required that I be really good at time management and oftentimes multitasking. And in some ways this can be a blessing and a curse. I was an art teacher almost seven years. And let me tell you being an art teacher or just being a teacher is something that requires so much time and energy and brain power and managing the classroom while you're in the middle of teaching and writing up information that needs to go home to parents, or if anything have happens during the school day, that needs to be reported.

It is a never ending pile of to do. And if you don't multitask and have a really good grasp on how you're gonna manage your time, you're not going to be successful. I think honestly, that's why a lot of first year teachers quit is because it is so overwhelming and they don't have the strategies in place in order to be successful and get everything done. So my first year I just realized I had to set some processes and procedures in place in order to set me up for success. And if I, it to use my phone to remind me every day at the beginning of every class to take my attendance, then that's what I would do. And so having that experience as an art teacher has really helped me to figure out ways to be very, very, very efficient. And so before we get started talking about how to be really efficient with our, our time and our strategies to approach all of our to-do list, I do want to remind everyone that self care is super, super important.

It is so easy to just look at that task list and to just become totally overwhelmed with all of the things that you need to do or sometimes, and I've recently to discovered this with myself is we become so efficient at multitasking that we don't remember to take actual time for ourselves. And so often if I go for a run, I will listen to a podcast or a book that is educational. It could be about marketing business, whatever. And I realized that even my day own time was being utilized in some way to benefit my business. And while it's great to learn, and it's great to continue to grow and improve. And I love doing those things. You have to make sure that you prioritize turning off your brain, taking care of yourself, taking some downtime, playing with your children, your horses, your dogs, whatever it is, make sure that you take time for yourself.

So recently when I've been running, I have not been allowing myself to listen to books or podcasts, and instead I've been listening to music and it is incredible how much more rejuvenated I feel after going out for a run doing that, whereas before it was just coming back and getting back into it. And I really wasn't finding a way for my brain to refresh itself. And it's really important for our brains to have the opportunity to rest and refresh and for our bodies to do the same thing. So I just want to give that disclaimer, before we get started, that it is very important that you make sure that even if you become the most efficient multi Tasker in the world, that you are losing productivity, if you are not taking time to rest. So make sure you rest, make sure you recover, make sure you take days off.

So when it comes to time management, one of the best things that you can do to set yourself up for success is to have good systems in place that you follow in order to stay up to date on all your tasks. This can look different for everybody and what works for you may not work for someone else and vice versa. So it really is a little bit of trial and error, but it is not uncommon for artists to be a little bit more freeform, a little less like rigid with their systems. And it can be easy for you to let something slide. And then you let it slide for a few days and then it's a month and then it's a few months, and then you're doing all your paperwork at the end of the year, and it can be really overwhelming. So when you do find those systems and when you're trying them out, you really have to make sure that you're sticking to them, that you're doing what needs to be done.

And that you're not just constantly being like, oh, I'll get to that later. All of the business side of stuff for your art business is very important. And you need to make sure that you are respectful of the schedule that you make for your self and the procedures that you make for yourself. And if you do get behind that, you find a way to quickly get caught up. And that can definitely be hard. A lot of us are doing multiple things and once we let something slide, just the sheer dread of getting started and being overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done can be Deb. So try something like setting a timer for 30 minutes and you're like, I'm gonna work on my updating, my invoices, my income, an expense report for 30 minutes today. And a lot of times you'll find out that once you get started, it's not so bad and you can do do it longer than what you had planned and then you really can help yourself.

It caught up a strategy that works really well for me, for staying up to date on tasks is to have certain tasks that are reoccurring weekly and monthly, and then reviewing everything quarterly. And so some tasks that you might have that are monthly would be potentially an a newsletter. If you're sending out a monthly newsletter, although marketing standards say to send one out every week, at least that is not my personal strategy, but that is what marketing experts typically recommend. But do your own research find out what works for you. So for cowgirl artists of America say, I have reoccurring monthly task that is to send out the newsletter, I'll post the call for all art. And then I go through the artwork we've received and find out what's going to fit in for the month. And then at the end of the month, I schedule the upcoming months posts.

And so that's like a reoccurring monthly task. And I don't do all my posts in one month just to be clear, but I do get a pretty good chunk of them scheduled out for the whole month. And then reoccurring weekly task asks are things like preparing for the podcast, you know, doing the podcast, recording it and posting it. So I alternate usually on Thursdays, by the way, sorry, I missed last Thursday. There was a lot that I had going on on my art business that I needed to take care of. And so, um, you know, we skipped last week, but typically I work on, um, the podcast every Thursday. And so that's either prepping for it or actually recording and posting it. I prefer to keep track of my finances every month. So having a day scheduled for that, looking for calls for art every month, there's various things that you might do every month and then things that you might do every week and every day.

But just having a schedule that you can go back to that, you know, works for you, that's keeping you on track. That is the first place to start to set yourself up for success with time management. The other good thing about doing it this way is you aren't guessing each week or each day, oh, what do I need to do today? You already know. And if you're using like Google calendar or something like that, you can schedule those events and reminders to reoccur at like at the first of every month or the first Thursday or whatever it is.

As far as social media management goes, I know this can be a huge time suck for a lot of artists. And if you aren't putting in quality work to your social media, it is something that you really do need to do. Utilizing social media is a huge and mostly free advertising opportunity. Of course you can pay for ads, but you don't have to. So having that online presence and being consistent, showing up for your phone followers, making those connections, showing your work is very, very, very important. And if you aren't putting in some work into that, you really need to look at your strategy and see how you can improve it. Learn some of the Instagram things. If you're struggling, of course we have one-on-one coaching and we also have some digital downloads to help with, um, Instagram, but specifically. So I definitely recommend checking those out if that's something that you're struggling with, but that being said, a lot of artists do find it to either be challenging or time consuming or distracting.

And so having a strategy in place for your social media management is super, super important. There can be a little bit of a learning curve to this for. So practice is something that is needed. Don't be so hard on yourself, but get out there and try and learn how to do it. But finding ways to know what you need a post and be expecting it so that you can plan and then making a strategy for that is very important and very helpful. You can also use apps like later, or even from like the Facebook dashboard, the creator dashboard to schedule posts so that you don't have to go every day or three times a week or whatever it is that you're doing. You don't have to interrupt your normal schedule and the things you wanna be doing in order to do those social media posts, you can have them scheduled, know that they're gonna go out and not have to work about it.

It is important to make sure you're engaging with any interactions, even if you do schedule your post. So you will have some weekly and potentially daily maintenance type things where you're engaging with people, but it can help you a lot. The other thing to know about that is if it is a huge distraction to you, knowing when to block out to time for when you're working. So those are a couple of the really big things, but let's talk about something that happens pretty easily with running your own business. And that is just getting so overwhelmed and having so many things to do that. You don't know where to start. You don't know how you're gonna get it all done. You don't know how to tackle it. So this is a strategy I've read about in a few different places. And I think it has a name, but I cannot right now remember what it's called.

But essentially if you take a piece of paper and you can write down all of the things you have to do, you can even, you can do a mixture of your business and your personal, whatever it is, all the things that you have to do, everything's in your head, just dump it, get it outta your brain. Know that it's written down then on another piece of paper, draw a horizontal line and a vertical line to intersect midway in the paper so that you have quadrants. And on the top left quadrant, it's going to be things that are both time sensitive and important on the top, right quadrant. It's going to be things that are important, but not time sensitive. The bottom left is going to be time sensitive, but not important. And the things on the bottom right, are things that are not important or not time sensitive.

And so some of those things are things that potentially you could actually just cut out of your list. Maybe if you've got a really busy week and you know that you wanna clean your house, but it's not time sensitive. And it's not that important. You can like let the house be messy, get your work done. It's okay. When you're doing the strategy, it's really learning how to slim down the to-do list so that you can get accomplished what needs to be accomplished. And sometimes that means letting some stuff go that you don't particularly want to, but you know, for that time it's necessary and that's okay. It's okay to have those times. And sometimes it's really good because it means that you've got a lot going on for your business. So that's great. So obviously when you do the strategy top left corner, so time sensitive and important, those are the things you wanna get to first, like you're gonna work on that as quick as you can just go down the list, getting it done.

Boom, boom, boom. Once you get some of those things out of the way, some of those important, but not time sensitive items might now be time sensitive. So they may need a shift or you can start working on those, those things on the bottom left that are time sensitive, but not important. They may be things that you wanna do. Like maybe there's a concert happening and you know, you've gotta buy a plane ticket to get to it, buy such and state, or you're not gonna be able to go. And when it's not important during this time of super busyness, sometimes again, those are things that it's worth looking at, letting go. If it's something that you think is important for your self care or for your quality time, or it's gonna help rejuvenate and energize you, maybe you do need to bump that up to important because that downtime can really help you to be more productive when you come back.

But again, be really careful because it's easy to get off task, get off target. And then before, you know, it you're super behind on things. So this strategy has helped me a lot, especially because I, I have so many different things that I'm working on and keeping track of. And some of them are not even related to one another. And it can be really, really hard when a bunch of things are due for, for all of the things that I'm working on. And so using the strategy has helped me for one release, some of the anxiety and 10 mention of just holding onto all those things in my head. And it's also actually really helped me to be productive and get the things done I need to get done. And then you just see how, oh, actually I'm like getting through a lot of this pretty quickly.

Some of it not, you know, things can take time and that's okay, but oftentimes you'll be surprised how much you can actually accomplish when you are doing this. And when you are being super, super productive, one thing that I want you to be careful of, and this is a trip that I have fallen into is that sometimes we have these super long lists and we're constantly going from one thing to the next and we are not. So not only not taking time for self care, but we're not taking time to, to acknowledge what we've actually accomplished. And so whatever strategy works for you is fine, but make sure that you are taking time to celebrate your accomplishments. Even the smaller accomplishments can be worth celebrating. So I, as a practice am trying to make sure that I celebrate every time I finish a painting, my paintings are not quick.

They take some time and finishing a painting. I wanna take time and acknowledge. I just finished that painting. I just did this thing. And then like, you know, little tasks that you have for your business, like maybe you've implemented a Instagram strategy and you followed it for a month. That's a huge thing, celebrate it. And you can't actually celebrate these things. So I've actually had a get together with friends to celebrate, finishing a painting. It was really challenging. It took a long time and I definitely was celebrating that. I knew that that was something we're celebrating, but you know, if you finish a big painting, have friends over celebrate mark that occasion that you did that. Because one thing I see is that when I go back and I look at my pages and pages of to-do list, if I haven't ripped them out, is that I've actually accomplished a lot and it can be so easy to not recognize what you've done.

And I think that's really dangerous to our self-esteem and our mental wellbeing, because it's like being on a hamster wheel, constantly running. You're never good enough. You've never the goal. You've never done the thing because you're constantly looking at the next thing gotta do, do, do, do do, and never acknowledging what you have actually done. So take time to acknowledge that it is good for yourself esteem. You can see, whoa, I did accomplish this. And honestly, I think it would be good to make a list, have a spot in your journal where you write down your big accomplishments or your accomplishments you're proud of. And when you're feeling overwhelmed because of your massive to-do list, look back and see all the things you did, because it can be really encouraging to see those and acknowledge those. And to know that you were the one that did them and you can do it again, and you can do the task list ahead of you, that you are capable and strong and totally able to handle it.

I think that goes a long way in helping us to actually be productive and not to just constantly feel stressed and overwhelmed. So the last productivity tip that I just wanna briefly touch on is automation and multitasking. And so I'm kind of lumping those together. We're not gonna talk super in depth about them, but if there are ways you can automate some of your systems, a simple example of automation was the scheduling that I was talking about, where you have events reoccur. So you're not manually going in and doing those, but anything that you find yourself doing consist over and over. Maybe it's making a fax page that you can point potential clients to, or creating some copy and paste things for hashtags or replies or whatever it is. You don't have to make every single response to messages and emails be completely unique. Utilize your templates, utilize things that you know, you're gonna be saying frequently and make it copy and paste that can just save you so much time.

So you're not individually thinking up and retyping what to say to people. You can have that in a notes app. Sometimes you can utilize, um, automated systems. There's a lot of different things you can do. Even in Facebook, you can, and I think on Instagram for everyone, and now I'm not sure if it's everyone yet or not, but you can set up automated responses to people. And finally multitasking. So multitasking can be a two edge sword because studies show that most people are actually not very good at multitasking, and it can actually decrease the quality of both of the things they're doing. So you wanna be really careful how you utilize multitasking. But one of the things I really enjoy doing for multitasking is pairing a task that I don't particularly enjoy, like washing dishes, for example, with an educational audio book or podcast, I have gained so much knowledge this way because it's a reoccurring thing that I need to do.

It makes that task not so boring because I'm learning something and the task is kind of a mindless repetitive thing. And I don't really need to be using my brain very much to do that task. So it's not like it's diminishing the quality of anything I'm doing. I hope you found today's podcast on time management. Helpful. If you haven't already signed up for a newsletter, please make sure that you do that. We've got more big announcements coming. A lot of things in the works right around the corner, ready to be released. I'm so, so excited. So make sure you sign up for that. Follow us on Instagram or Facebook. And if you like this podcast, we really appreciate you leaving a review.