Advice #1: Make a schedule and stick to it.
What does your day look like? If you don’t really have a set day to day routine, get one now. Even if you don’t have a day job you have to treat this hustle like it is your day job and day jobs have schedules. Let me give you my starting point. I have to be at school at 7 a.m. and I work until 2:45 p.m. I do all my days running after school, whether that be grocery shopping or trips to the post office, whatever it may be on the list for that day, and then I get home between 4 and 4:30 and start making dinner. My wife will normally arrive home with the youngest around this time while I have to pick up the high schoolers from practice around 5. We eat dinner as a family and then settle in for the night. The youngest goes to bed around 8:30 or 9 and My wife and I soon follow suit. You may ask yourself in that schedule of a day I did not see any art time. That’s right there is no art time because that is my starting point. That is what my day looks like if I am just a teacher and a father.
So about 3 years ago I made a choice. Either wake up early or stay up late and schedule a time to create my art. So I wake up at 3 a.m. (see photo) every day including weekends and I work until 5:30 a.m. on weekdays and as long as I can on weekends on nothing but art. My family knows that’s my time to work and they have learned to respect it. Now they wake up and ask me what I have made for the day expecting great things every day from me, that is actually quite a check and balance for me because if I haven’t done much they tend to be a little disappointed in me. It takes a bit of persistence and discipline but once you have set your mind to the practice you really make incredible use of the time.
I wake up and brush my teeth. I come downstairs and put on a pot of coffee and while the coffee brews I get out my chosen work for the day and the supplies that I need and set up my work area, make a cup of coffee and start cranking out work.
Along the same lines of staying on a schedule, I make detailed chronological lists with dates and times to keep myself on pace to get a great deal of work completed in a relatively short period of time (see photo). This list is for a Con that I have July 10-12 in Cape Girardeau and you can see that I have the list planned right up until the day before. The only thing that is not on the list is packing the car. Days and dates are a whole part of the schedule because you have a show deadline, or a convention deadline, or a meeting deadline, or something that you have to have work done by, and without the dated list there is no way to keep yourself pumping out work in a machine-like manner and on schedule.
Understand as a producing artist you have to keep the end goal in mind which is the production of many art pieces. My philosophy on production is really what drives me to create and that seems like a good place to pick up next month.
Until then, keep hustling!
Sean
