Making Time For Your Art: 5 Tricks to carve out blocks for your creative work.

There's no magical time in the future when all conditions will be 'perfect' for you to create: you need to deliberately carve out time for your art.

Seven years ago, I wrote a version of this post for Medium, and it went a bit insane. ‘Viral’ doesn’t really cover it. Many similar articles have popped up in its place in the years since, but here is one of my most-requested tips from people asking, “How do you fit it all in and still find time to draw for yourself?”

The reason I’m sharing it with you today is that the most essential part of being an artist truly is finding time to draw for yourself. It’s so easy to shove it off to the side ‘until conditions are perfect’, but the truth is: If you’re ever going to get around to making the art YOU want to make (and reading these posts!), you’re going to have to have a disciplined system, and stick to it.

Preface:

Being a freelance cartoonist sounds like a fun job. But I’ve learned over the past 20 years that if you want to pay the rent and create art for yourself, it means you’re going to need a system. Paying the rent with your art also means taking on a lot of work that often has a deadline, which you need to balance with your personal art-making time— and if, like me, you have inattentive ADHD with chronic time blindness, you’re going to need two things:

1. A clock somewhere in your eyeline from your workspace.

2. A calendar.

The clock can be your phone in ‘nightstand’ mode, or a physical clock on the wall, or a tablet— but it needs to be clearly visible. The calendar can be a physical calendar or a digital one, but it, too needs to be visible. Keep it on your screen as much as you can.

Tip: If you use a Mac, then you’re working, use an app called “MeetingBar” which shows ou the thing you should be working on right now in your taskbar along the top of the screen.

So, how does the system work?

On a given week, I do a daily cartoon, regular New Yorker cartoons, I do stand-up comedy shows all over the city, write two Substacks, draw caricature commissions, illustrations for the Waking Up app, do live drawing at events around the city, take care of my Frenchie, and somehow find time somewhere in there to exercise, sleep, and attempt a date. If it sounds like a lot of work, it is.

The short answer is:
Realistic attention management.

The longer answer is: I have a system that works around my brain and subverts any tendencies to procrastinate — especially during periods of extreme willpower depletion.

One of the biggest productivity revelations I had in the last 20 years while working freelance and trying to juggle a million different projects was to work directly from a calendar, not a To-Do list.

This was my ‘weekly’ to-do list I used to work from… unsuccessfully

To-Do Lists VS. Calendars

I worked from a To-Do list for a long time, using a page each day to cross items off. It felt good to run a line through things as I got them done, but sadly, I never really got as many done in a day as I should — or could have.

Some tasks take longer than others, but all tasks look the same in a list. Seeing them in a calendar gives you a more realistic idea of how long tasks will take to get done.

I’m not anti-list¹. If you need to write down all of the things you need to do in a list to get them out of your head (especially before sleep on a Sunday night), then, by all means, do so. But once they’re down on that list, start plugging them into your calendar to give you an actual idea of how much time you have to do them.

Knowing you have assigned these tasks a time and date to be completed, you will be freed from the anxiety those unfinished tasks create in your mind. This nagging anxiety is known as The Zeigarnik Effect.

The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological phenomenon describing a tendency to remember interrupted or incomplete tasks or events more easily than tasks that have been completed.

If you’re anything like me, you probably fall into the ‘dreamer’ category of time psychology. The dreamers are the ones who have a poor ability to predict how long something will actually take, show up late to things, miss deadlines and generally end up having all their work snowball into Friday afternoon. (See: Parkinson’s Law.)

I’ve had an ongoing, futile feud with the inexorability of time since I was very young, and it continues to this day. The following measures go some way to subverting my perception problems.

This is a basic look at my template day, which is variable but a starting point to help me plan:

Trick #1: Copy & Paste.

To remedy my old dreamer tendencies, I now make a habit of ensuring that on completion of a task, I adjust the calendar event to reflect the ‘actual’ time it took. ie. I may have allowed 30 minutes, but it took an hour. I may have thought it would take an hour, but it took 45 minutes.

I then copy and paste those similar or identical tasks that I’ve completed before when I’m scheduling for the week ahead. I usually do this on Sunday night. It gives me a realistic idea of how much time I actually have to get everything done versus looking at a blank calendar. (Note: I’ve tried working from the freedom of a blank calendar… don’t do it. It’s not pretty.)

If you have repeating tasks each week, as I do, you’ll be able to copy and paste the entire series of repeating tasks that accurately reflect the time it takes to do them. For instance, I used to have to write comic strips, ink and colour them, I had to sit and draw up my batch for the New Yorker each week, Record an episode of the ITSIT podcast, and, lastly, I knew I would always have to go into the New Yorker from 11am — 12:30pm every Tuesday to pitch my batch. These things are repeating items on my calendar, and I blocked out the exact time it took each time (including travel time if needed).

IMPORTANT:

1. For tasks you’re doing for the first time (or larger tasks broken into smaller tasks), allow for Parkinson’s Law: ie. figure out how long you think it will take, then double it. It’s much better to have slack than to try and borrow time from other tasks.

2. If you have a task that takes place away from your office/studio/home, create a block called “Travel” and put it on either side of the event:

   

   Why not just add the travel time to the event block itself, you ask? Sometimes, it helps to know when an event ‘actually’ starts, so if it’s at 7pm and your time block says 6pm because you planned for an hour of travel, you lose the information on when it actually kicks off. So, it should look something like this:

   

   

   Trick #2: Colour code your calendar.

   To give you a clearer idea of the kind of work you will be doing in a day, it can help to colour code the kind of work that needs doing. You get a clear, concise 10,000ft zoom-out view of exactly what kind of work you’ll be expecting to get done.

   

   (Yes, the ❤️ is what you think it is, and it is used with depressingly seldom frequency.) The one for Unilever is an interchangeable calendar I have for LARGE projects that stretch over a long time. I rename it depending on the project.

   For instance, some work I do needs me to be on my laptop, some need me to be in my studio with my drawing equipment, and some things don’t work and need their own calendar, like going to the gym, stretching or a medical appointment.

Trick #3: Know how long to block distractions.

I use the Focusme app on my phone to block websites I know I habitually go to when I’m procrastinating, and SelfControl.app for the Mac to similarly block websites and social media on my laptop until the job at hand is completed. These are timer-based apps, and I know from the calendar how long to set each one.

Trick #4: Bundle similar jobs or ‘mindsets’.

If you know you’ve got a bunch of admin (emails, invoicing, QuickBooks, blog posts etc.) and you know it’ll be basically the same mindset and toolset for all of them, block those tasks together. If they don’t require the same amount of energy as, say, the really big project you have to start, leave them for later in the day when your energy is a bit lower.

If you need to move to a different desk for drawing than you use for writing emails, then bundle your drawing desk activities together, and bundle your emails desk activities together. I even have different colour-coded calendars for the two kinds of tasks, to make it easier.

Tip: If they’re high-priority tasks, shift them to earlier in the day so you give them your full attention. Your energy and willpower wain throughout the day, so be sure to get your M.I.T. done first thing before anything else.

Also, be aware of your own individual habits and energy patterns. If you’re more focused and creative in the morning, schedule your creative tasks for then. If you’re more productive in the afternoon or the late evening, switch to then. Obviously, deadlines sometimes rob you of the luxury of scheduling things for your optimum times, but do this when you have the opportunity to.

If there are certain days of the week that you know you’ll be more available to get certain kinds of things done, schedule all your admin tasks for that day or all your creative things for that day.

For example: I do all my Admin on Mondays when I’m most focused and I’ve just had a relaxing Sunday. I do my best creative work on Tuesdays, so I block that out for drawing and other creative work. On Wednesdays, I return to the desk and do invoicing, bookkeeping, answering snoozed emails, etc.

This is a very unhelpful clock.