Scheduling Studio Stamina

 “Oh, no! I forgot how to paint.”

Does this ever happen to you?

It happens to me when I’ve taken a break from my regular studio practice. It happens when life gets too busy.

If I’m away from painting for more than three days my saboteur tells me I can’t do anything worthwhile.

That’s when I feel like I don’t know how to get started again. My anxiety builds. I dread going into the studio because I’m afraid I’ll make a terrible painting, and sometimes I do.

I eat.

Doubt creeps in.

I eat more…

As art-makers what we want to do more than anything is make art.

Why is it then that we will sometimes do anything to avoid the studio?

Have you ever found yourself to be estranged from your studio? Maybe you’ve been on a trip or had too much other work to do. It can be crippling to be away for any period and try to re-connect with your art process.

Anything can derail you – health issues, family commitments, vacations, downtime, too much Instagram, feeling overwhelmed, really anything that breaks your normal routine.

Spending the long hours required to make our work is a muscle we must exercise to strengthen. My friend Jenni calls this Studio Stamina. And it is built minute by minute and day by day.

Confidence can erode slowly as the practical concerns of life creep in and crowd out creative time. It happens when our device-driven lives eat up the reflection time required for creative generation.

It can happen with fear. It can cause fear.

So, what do we do about it?

We must find ways to re-engage and protect our time in the studio and our will to be there.

For the past couple of years, life has little by little crept in and gotten in the way of my previously productive studio routine. I forget how much I’m already doing when I say “yes” to new opportunities. Soon there is no time to paint, or if there is time, I’m afraid to start again. Instead of going to the studio, I surf Instagram.

This year must be different.

Schedule your commitment

Two approaches to staying in the studio are immediately obvious. One is the external approach, like making a schedule and sticking to it, or using rewards and such. The second relies on an internal locus of control such as being excited about doing work for a new show. Here I’ll look at the external one.

I have a lot of experience with the scheduling approach because I’m so bad at it. I create schedules regularly, but I seem to be genetically incapable of sticking with one for any length of time. This probably comes from years of self-indulgent wandering from one thing to another.

Wandering is profoundly unproductive.

In university they had scheduling forms where you could fill in the classes you were taking or teaching and any other activities you had. It was handy, and I still use this format but now I do it on excel. It’s similar to what Michael Hyatt does.

My old schedule

This is a wishful thinking schedule I made a while back.

Originally, the dark blue studio blocks got darker as the day went on. The first few hours were inviolable “brush time”. The next two hours were bonus time, and push goals included a final hour, depending on what else was going on. Once I made the first three hours a habit, I could add another hour a day and incrementally work up to spending most of those dark blue blocks of time in the ‘brush zone’.

It should have worked but it failed miserably.

One reason is that my part-time time job (the brown areas) really has no fixed hours. I work on-call much of the time, so it is not easy to fit it into a rigid schedule.

Another reason is that it doesn’t work for me to paint in the mornings. Time management gurus will tell you to do your most important work when you have the most energy. For me, that’s the morning. But, I can’t focus in the studio if I have work for my job or other responsibilities pending. I’m worried I’ll loose track of time and find it hard to focus.

I need what Agnes Martin called ‘a holiday state of mind’ to be productive. So, flipping the studio time to the afternoons works better for me.

Now I’ve taken on a new space and have open gallery hours, so I have to account for that as well.

Here’s the latest version of the schedule. It’s less idealized. We’ll see how this one fares.

Schedules really do work for most people.

How do you schedule your art-making time and what challenges do you have staying in the studio? Let me know in the comments.