Becoming an Artist Part III: Time Management and Burnout
Hello, my Devils.
This is part three of this ongoing series about the ups and downs of becoming an artist for fun and profit. Time management is probably the most important skill that takes a lot of time to learn and figure out. Nothing in this part is the primary rule or even the best way to do it, but this will help give you a starting point to figure it out on your own.
Finding Time
Tempest Fugit., and thus, its management is probably the most important thing you will have to learn when becoming an artist. First, however, you got to find the time to do it. There is only so many hours in a day that you can do things, and you spend a third of that unconscious so it will feel daunting at times; especially when the real world likes to well *gestures at everything* but I'm here to tell you, its not as bad as you think and there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Sit down, take a breath, and think about what you do throughout the day and week. Write down your responsibilities. Responsibilities are things that you must do, they are expected of you and others may depend on you completing these tasks, like, going to work, caring for your children (both the human and non-human varieties), and managing the household in some way. After writing that down, figure out how long it really takes you to accomplish these, and how often every week you do it. I assume you don’t sweep and mop the house or give your puppers a bath every single day and I assume doing dishes doesn’t take you four hours to complete.
Once you have an idea about your responsibilities, you can easily see a regular block of time where you can squeeze in your craft. Easily you can find maybe three hours out of the day between responsibilities to squeeze in some painting here, some molding there. Maybe even a full day with nothing that generally goes on and you can just make a day of doing it, but once you have it figured out; YOU MUST ADD IT TO YOUR SCHEDULE. IT becomes planned and other activities that you normally plan around your responsibilities must also be planned around your craft.
Keeping a Schedule
A key to this is to maintain the schedule. By keeping it regular, you can easily adjust and plan around it. Eventually everything else will fall into place as you develop a routine, allowing for you to enter you flow faster and even anticipate issues that you may have down the line and adapt.
Burnout Prevention
As you spend more and more time working on your craft, you will start to edge closer and closer to burnout. The best way to deal with it is to prevent it as best we can with regular breaks in your work schedule. Having a weekend where you do not work on your craft for consecutive days and do other things you enjoy will go a long way in this. Regularly scheduled hiatuses to have small vacations from these tasks give you something to look forward to.
Occasionally taking time for yourself to expand your skill sets and the like, essentially changing things up a little bit, will also help.
Burnout is caused by too much repetition of tasks that requires a level of focus and interaction, think a retail worker is in near constant state of burnout if they don’t have any paid time off to do whatever they like, or how some college students that show a lot of promise early in academia will suddenly just crash after years of intense study.
Soothing a Burnout
Even with the best laid plans, burnout will happen so what should you do?
The best solution to a burnout is to close your commissions, struggle and complete the obligations you already have, and just take a break. Most of your fanbase will see it for what it is, especially if you are very communicative and so on, and will still follow and support you through your hiatus.
After your last commission is complete, take some time to yourself. Do what you want to do. Look into projects that you wanted to try or do some experiments to increase your skills. Or just play some videogames for a week, but in any case, during that time slot that you normally dedicate to doing your craft, you instead work on yourself and do some selfcare, even if it’s just a nap.
A week into your hiatus, sit down and evaluate your time usage and see what possibly cased the burnout to begin with, sometimes it’s just something you can’t avoid, other times it can be something as simple as you happen to take on too many projects at once. In any case, come up with a plan about going back to work and slowly start transitioning in when you start to feel better.
I know this part isn’t nearly as long as some of the others, but time management in the end can only really be figured out by you. But next time will be something with a bit more meat to talk about, cultivating a fanbase.