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Time Management

Time management is often a struggle for artists. How do you manage your time?

Thomas “Detour” Evans:

I’ve been getting better about putting stuff in a calendar and trying to space things out more. I guess my number one tactic or defense now, to help me keep a good schedule, is turning down a lot of projects or activities. To stop doing things that clutter my schedule so that when I’m up in the studio, I only have a couple of things to focus on.

Really, it’s just the calendar and everything in my head. It’s not the best thing, but I’m so hands-on and every day is different and you never know where it’s going to take you. I could get a call later today about Beyoncé wanting me to paint her portrait or something, or someone wants me to do a mural. So now I’ve got to move shit to the side, now I’ve got to reschedule because it’s a good paying job and I can reach a whole new market, so let me figure that out.

Everything is sort of up in the air month to month, for the most part, other than maybe a couple of projects. So it’s really hard to keep a schedule and that’s why I haven’t had an intern or an assistant here because I don’t know what I’m going to do from day to day.

James Temte:

Time and managing time is definitely the biggest challenge. Because there are a lot of good things going on, so how do you manage time in a way that you don’t get burned out and you remain healthy and have friends?

Also knowing when to say no. You can say no because you’ve already said yes to something that you care about, and that is something I have to keep telling myself. I care about this so I said yes to it, so I have to say no to these other things.

Lindz and [Jon] Lamb:

Lindz: We work seven days a week. That’s an unfortunate part because we don’t really have weekends or spare time. But I’m in love with this lifestyle with him so it’s okay.

Unless we’re on a wall, we’re at the studio and working the print business — we’re following up with inquiries for mural jobs or proposals that are currently out, looking at the marketing plan to make sure that some of those tasks get hit throughout the week. I do our to-do list, maybe not every day because they change sometimes minute to minute or depending on what traffic we have in the studio. We might have artists stop by and then we don’t get as much done that day.

Dawn Gerety:

Oh god, I need help with that too. [Laughs]

I just put the first fire out first. It probably comes down to commitments and timelines and deadlines.

Every year I have a homemade calendar that I call the “Super Book” and it’s my whole life. I’ve probably had this calendar for 25 to 30 years. Each year I have one and it’s everything. In the back of it I purposefully put about 100 pages of blank paper. I’m a list maker so it’s just all my lists of everything. That’s my northern star for life. If I lost the Super Book, I’d be lost.

[I have] nothing [digital]. You sent me a calendar invite [online] and I’m like, I don’t know what to do with that. [Laughs]

Drew Petersen:

The biggest struggle and challenge of all of it is time, and I think that’s true for everyone in every industry no matter what you do. You are never gonna see my 10 bullets of “How to have a productive day,” because I’m not that good at time management.

Patrick Kane McGregor:

I’ll get a lot of people who want to do commissioned portraits and then I’ll stack those up for the wintertime and do all that in December and January and February when it’s really cold. Then in the summertime I do all the mural fests I can.

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