How I Make Time For My Art
This week we're talking about time management & WWII Era Art
Kelsey Rodriguez
February 02, 2023
From making the actual art, creating and posting content on social media, answering emails, fulfilling orders, taking product photos, and so many more tasks, it can often feel like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.
While I’m no expert on time management or productivity, this week I’d like to share what works best for me. This edition of the newsletter will be an expanded version of this week’s main channel video.
My Extremely Simple Time Management “System”
I’m going to be honest here — the usual stuff like bullet journals, to do lists, strict time blocking and routines, those things seldom work for me.
I can generally be trusted to get my main priorities of the day done, but too much on my plate can easily turn me into an anxious, overwhelmed mess.
As such, my “system” (if you can even call it that) is extremely simple:
Set your main priorities — what are the 1-3 most important things in your life right now? This could be this year, this month, or today.
Identify your schedule constraints and responsibilities.
Schedule constraints are the unmovable parts of your weekly routine: your 9-to-5 job, uni classes, picking the kids up from school, etc.
Weekly responsibilities are things that have to get done eventually but the when/where is flexible. These are things like homework, grocery shopping, household chores.
Make a Plan.
Using the information you gathered in steps 1-2, identify the parts of your day/week where you can actually work on your priorities.
When are you reliably free and actually have the energy to work on things? If no time like this exists right now, how can you rearrange your schedule to create it?
The key here is to schedule your priorities, to deliberately go out of your way to make time for them.
How I Apply This System In Everyday Life
Using this system, I identify my main priorities on a daily/weekly basis, and pick one main goal to focus on for the day.
With a SINGLE clear objective for the day, I can laser focus in on one task and get that dopamine hit of achieving it to use toward the other things I need to get done.
But remember what I said before about all of the tiny little extra things we have to do as artists? Things like answering emails, packing orders, etc?
Those tiny little tasks are what can often end up completely devouring your day. They need to be zealously guarded against to prevent them from creeping into the time you spend on your main priorities.
What I like to do is to write down these tasks as they come up, and then completely ignore their existence until my main objectives for the day/week are completed.
Then I take out that list, sort them into categories based on room, software, etc (to avoid context switching) and get them done in blocks. I personally use Akiflow for this bit (they sponsored this week’s video but did not pay to be mentioned in the newsletter, I just like them).
Looking for a more detailed look at how I structure my days? Check out this week’s video.
Feel free to reply to this email and let me know how you prefer to manage your time!
Art In The News: A Jewish family is suing the Guggenheim over ownership of a Pablo Picasso painting.
In 1916, Karl Adler, a German Jewish man bought the Picasso painting “Woman Ironing” from a prestigious gallery in Munich. In 1938, he sold the painting for $1500 (over $30000 in today’s dollars), a fraction of its value, to help his family escape Nazi Germany.
Now, several of his descendants are suing the famous museum, claiming ownership of the work and pointing to the 1938 sale as evidence that it was sold under duress. Had their family not been subject to persecution by the Nazis, the lawsuit claims, they never would have sold the painting at such a low price.
The Guggenheim is defending its right to the painting, asserting that the transaction was fair, and that they spoke with Karl Adler’s son, Eric, in the 1970s, where he reportedly raised no concerns over the painting’s provenance.
But the art dealer, Justin Thannhauser, that Adler both originally bought the painting from and eventually sold back to, is a controversial figure. Many of the transactions he was involved in have come under immense scrutiny for his tendency to purchase art at a fraction of its value from Jewish families looking to escape the Nazis. Some say he was their savior, while others look at his actions with a bit more skepticism.
Provenance (aka ownership) issues such as this one are not at all uncommon for art sold during the WWII era. The Nazi regime had entire military units with the specific task of confiscating, hoarding, and in some cases, destroying, cultural artifacts. The lasting legacy of this continues to be an ongoing issue for museums and institutions around the world.
It may take years for this specific case to unfold, but I’ll keep my eye on it.
That’s all for this week.