pg 283-310

The reading on pages 283 to 310 in Jackie Battenfield’s book, “The Artist’s Guide: How to Make a Living Doing What You Love”, discusses how to properly manage your time. She says you are the only person who will truly care for your art forever. In order to properly market your art work to the masses, you need organization. Organization is the key point to success. Even if your studio or home is messy and chaotic (to “encourage creative flow”), your time should not reflect that. Time is a great human resource and you have to use it wisely. Battenfield gives advice to create a calendar with all upcoming and future events in order to organize everything and not forget anything. As tedious as it might be, it is necessary. I can related to that advice because I am prone to writing lists and marking events in my calendars (I own many calendars and planners) because it is impossible to remember everything. Creating an outline of events, even if they only go as far as a month, is an efficient way to organize your time. It also will relieve stress and give higher quality to your work.
The first issue to address is time management. Time is a nonnegotiable factor when creating art work. If you run out of paint, you can always buy more, but once you run out of time, there is no way to change that. So, in order to achieve your goals, planning and using your time wisely is the only way. Artists are commonly known as free-spirited, timeless people, but that is not the wisest thing to do. You do not always have to go with what stereotypes say. The three piece of advice Battenfield gives for time management is keeping track of your time, assign each activity a category (like personal, work, family, finances, etc) and analyze your information.
Taking note of how much time it takes to do even the simplest of tasks is important because then you can devote a certain amount of time to certain tasks beforehand. Personally, I am constantly looking at a clock or watch because I take into consideration that some things may seem quick but once you do it, it turns out that it takes a little longer than expect and creates a domino effect of forgotten and uncompleted tasks. You also have to realize that some downtime is needed amidst the important tasks. Your schedule is constantly changing so it’s important to write down all appointments and change some things around if needed. Battenfield gives more advice on how to create records and organizing supplies and such. She also suggests getting help from someone if the tasks are too overwhelming from either an assistant or getting consultation from experts in certain fields that you do not know. Overall, this chapter is useful to anyone who chooses to manage their time. Time management is a tricky thing to do when there are countless tasks to complete but it must be done.