How to be a disciplined artist

Creativity and productivity don’t always go together, but without being disciplined, how can you, as an artist, make things happen?

Resist extensive project craving

As artists, we often become obsessed about a project and a long period of time. It’s like a craving for creativity that’s eager to be fulfilled. It’s all well and good to be passionate about your project except when following happens:

• You might exhaust your energy and abandon your project half way through
• You might be ignoring all your other tasks that are more urgent and crucial to your success
• You lose sight of your bigger picture after exhausting yourself

If these ever happen to you, it’s worthwhile to think about a different way to spend your craving. At the end of the day, leaving you wanting more is better than abandoning the project all together.

Build an appetite for different tasks

There are a lot more things you need to be doing apart from your art project for your art career (or any career) to succeed. But sometimes you just don’t have the appetite for things like sending an email or writing a proposal. When that happens, you have to somehow find the interest to complete these tasks. Here are few things you can do about it:

• Plan tasks weekly. Sometimes finding a good spot to do something in a week is easier than forcing yourself to do something in a particular day or hour
• Observe your energy level throughout the week. Start on less enjoyable / high stress tasks as soon as you spot a good burst of energy
• Find a weekly routine (or monthly) and use habit to build an appetite for different kinds of tasks

You will do your best work when you are listening to your inner voice. Take advantage of your energy level and get things done while they are more desirable.

Schedule everything (unless you can complete it under 2 mins)

In any given week days you might be getting new tasks via emails, Facebook and before you know it, you are procrastinating. It’s great to keep yourself open for new opportunities, only when you fail your earlier promises. Sometimes there might be an urgent task which seems more important at the time, and you thought “since I’m here I’ll just quickly do this and get back to my current task later”. And before you know it, you day has finished without completing any really important and urgent tasks. The reality is, you always treat your future self better than your current self, and if you give yourself time to prioritise everything, you will end up completing more important stuff more often by the end of the week.

Focus on one thing at a time

I know it’s easier said than done. I have been there. My mind wonders all the time. I could be working on something, and then the grass start look greener in the other tasks. And then I switch between tasks, which leads to nothing gets done at the end of the day.

There are numbers of ways to help you focus on a particular tasks

• Treat your task like a person. Imagine you are have a meeting with this task and you promise to take an hour. What do you do in the meeting? You focus on the person (task), you don’t pick up phones unless it’s more important than this person (tasks), and you have to have a very good reason if you want to postpond it.
• Schedule your tasks like meetings. Once you start to treat your task like a person, you will start to realise you have very limited time throughout your day. “Can I finish submitting a proposal this week? Let’s see, I have an opening on Thursday afternoon at the moment, if I can’t finish it by then, I probably have to turn down some other tasks on Friday.”
• Review your tasks daily, or even hourly. Deadline may change, things might become more important on Tuesday than Monday. Postpone everything that’s not realistic and move forward anything that can fill a small time slot. This will free your mind and make it less stressed, therefore more motivation.

So, are you a disciplined artist? What sort of system do you use to prioritise and to get things done? Do you struggle to keep focus? Let me know in the comments and perhaps I can learn from you too.