After ten years of helping artists, here are the 3 best time management tricks for artists.

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This week I’m offering you the best tips on how to be more productive, and more successful. This tip is three things that we know work for artists when it comes to managing your time.

I’m John Paul Fischbach. I’m the chief alchemist and C.E.O., here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. So welcome to this week’s hot tip which I’ve titled “More productive, more successful” So as an independent artist, now next to your talent, your time is the most important thing you have. So being able to effectively manage your time means being more productive, and ultimately more successful, right?

So I want every artists to be successful, and one of the key principles to success is being productive, and being productive means being effective with your time. So the incubator is 10 years old now, you know, we’ve seen which things work, and which things don’t when it comes to managing time as an independent artist. So here are the top three things that work for artists.

Number one, absolutely, is scheduling and deadlines. So schedule everything. One of my coaches said to me, “Jump all of it’s not in your diary, then you’re bullshitting me.” If you have something to do, give it a deadline, and schedule it. Put it in your calendar, if it’s not in your calendar, if you haven’t set time aside for it, it’s not gonna happen. And then give everything a deadline. Give every task you do a deadline. If you think this should take you half an hour stick to it, if you think that should take you an hour stick to it. Give yourself a deadline. Scheduling and deadlines the number one thing that’ll work for artists.

Second thing, do an hour’s work before you check your email. Please, please, please I know it’s a hard habit to break. It’s the first thing you look at in the morning, right? However, when you do that other people start to control your day, right? So you can find a dozen things that need to get done. Well, sometimes this will take half a day, or even longer, right? And then you go to bed feeling like you didn’t achieve anything. So please, the thing that I want you to do is when you get to work, whatever work is to you, the studio, or the office, the desk, resist that urge to check your email, and instead look at what you need to get done today, and then take the most important thing, and do at least an hour’s work on that task. Get started with you in control of your day, then after an hour, you know, doing what’s important then you can check your emails because you’re in a way better head space to decide when and how to deal with a dozen new things, okay?

The third thing that absolutely will work for independent artists is write your to-do-list the night before. This is a really simple one and it’s ridiculously effective because what happens is, right, we get to the office, or into the studio, we check our emails, right? Then we check in with others, then we have an impromptu meeting, then eventually, we realize that we’re hungry, so we grab some lunch, and then before we realize it it’s noon, and you need to get some work done, so you make a quick list of a couple of things, but by then the day is slipping away, right? So you know how that pattern happens, right? So what you have to do is get into the habit of writing your to-do-list before you go to bed. So doing this has to just become part of your routine, right? You put on your PJ’s, who wears PJ’s sorry, you brush your teeth then you write out your to-do-list for the next day. That’s what you wanna do.

So let’s review. Scheduling and deadlines absolutely, do an hour’s work before you check your email, and third, write your to-do-list the night before. So what I want you to do this week is pick one of these three because these work. I’m telling you these are the top three things that work for artists, pick one of them, and do them. Now if you want to get more detail about how to manage your time, and be more successful then you need to look at the A.S.A.P. program, because in that program we’re gonna review the actual the top seven tips for artists to manage your time, be more productive and more successful. So when you need real practical advice and help for your arts business, come we’re here for you www.auspiciousartsincubator.org.