Can I schedule my way into freedom?
So here it is, an artists talking blog and, I suspect, a sobering experiment on why it is that big chunks of time supposedly available to make work become little titbits of time hemmed in by other necessary and not-so-necessary activities.
This blog came about because I thought I had a lot of time available to get into the studio in April. It’s also a result of reading a recent Oliver Burkeman column on procrastination and Guilt Hour – a scheduled hour every week used by (I can’t remember but I’m almost sure) some kind of new media company, where everyone sits together at a big desk and works on the tasks they feel most guilty about not having completed. The idea is that scheduling the guilt means it is contained, and doesn’t leak out and infect the rest of your week. His extra note is that the things that present the most resistance are usually the most important things, so if you can identify your areas of greatest procrastination you are also identifying your areas of greatest priority.
And on a related note, there is the phenomenon of creative procrastination – constructively avoiding doing what you really need to be getting on with; I have spent today making some long-overdue amendments to my website and starting this blog instead of getting upstairs and playing with my tempera
My granny used to say that she could get everything done if she had unlimited time for a week, and I feel the same. For a long time I’ve wanted to clear my mending pile, and I’ve had a fantasy that if I had the kind of life where I could spend a day a week mending, all would be well with the world. At a recent residency, I wondered about just bringing my mending pile in and seeing how far I got with it over the two weeks, then exhibiting the mends. So, since I’m only due to be working one or two days a week in April, this seemed an ideal opportunity to test my theory, and in theory mending one day a week would leave plenty of time to make other work – not that I don’t regard the mending as part of my practice, and I will of course document it and tweet about every darn like a good 21st century art worker.
Since today was a day I’d told myself I would make work come hell or high water, obviously it was the perfect day to start by planning out my April schedule, check email, find an email that spurred me into sorting out my website, and start this blog. And the schedule is sobering. I’ve colour coded it – yellow for days off, green for paid employment, grey for research (I booked a trip to London some time ago), blue for collaborative time with a group of artists I recently got involved with, red for studio time and peach for mending. And my month is looking like –
5 days off (slacker!)
9 days of paid employment
5 days research trip
1 admin day
5 art group days (we don’t have a name yet…)
2 mending days
and a whopping three whole days in the studio!
So, my task is to find out how closely schedule and reality mesh. It’s not very likely that I’ll get all my admin done in one day, especially if I want to apply for anything at all. I accept that this lack of time even when there should be lots of it is partly down to my choices – to go to London (but could I really miss Ice Age Art and Schwitters and Manet and Cage…?) and to spend a week working collaboratively – which I’m sure will be fruitful. But it is sobering to find, even at the beginning, that my time is so constricted. And helpful to remember that art activity doesn’t begin and end in the studio.
Still, if I manage three days in the studio, it’ll still be more than I managed last month…
