Time, and where it goes

I’m not one for New Year’s Resolutions - happy enough with my weight, like my bad habits exactly where they are - but this remains a reflective time of year well suited to self-scrutiny.

One of the more useful books I read this past year was Jackie Battenfield’s indispensably practical The Artist’s Guide: How To Make a Living Doing What You Love, which clearly and rationally lays out definitive actions artists can take to better manage their working lives. In her first chapter, Battenfield does favour January as a clean slate from which to formulate an action plan, but I was inclined to undertake a few of her strategies somewhat earlier.

Out of morbid curiosity as much as anything, I followed her advice in the book’s section on Time Management (pp. 287-295 for those of you reading along at home) and grudgingly tasked myself with tracking my use of time over a sustained period. Horrible though it was, her reasoning was sound enough that I was compelled to at least try:

Your artistic imagination may be infinite, but your time is not. You can’t make the day longer than twenty-four hours or a week longer than seven days, although you may have learned how to burn the midnight oil. Since you can’t create more time, you need to learn how to restructure and use it more gracefully. Don’t buy into the idea that because you are an artist, you are incapable of devising a schedule or that doing so will inhibit your creativity. If you think about what a chaotic or disorganized day keeps you from doing and achieving, you may be more motivated to work on managing your time.

I had hoped to keep this habit up for a solid month, but only managed 18 days before the constant accounting filled me with a paranoid self-loathing, no matter Jackie’s instruction to “Write down everything without judgment or cheating. No one else needs to know that you were mesmerized by YouTube for three hours.”

Time spent watching various forms of Star Trek, November 12-30: 9 hours, 45 minutes.

Besides learning alarming things about the depths of my nerdish depravity, the 18-day exercise did reveal a few interesting anthropological habits of the unself-employed artist/writer worth sharing.

1. I logged as many hours of dedicated studio production time as I did watching various Star Trek films and episodes (9 hours, 45 minutes). For the record, I do find that unacceptable, and not because I need to be watching more Star Trek.

2. Compared to that paltry time spent drawing, I invested 25 hours, 30 minutes in studio-driven administrative tasks - predominantly grant-writing and residency applications, as a slew of deadlines happened to coincide with the end-point of this exercise. Yet again, there is something flawed in the idea that I spent more time writing about my art than I did making it.

3. An average application for a residency program, comprising documentation and a site-responsive proposal, took approximately 3 hours, 40 minutes to complete with the use of existing documents (i.e. I already had my CV and jpegs on hand).

4. The time I spent attending meetings related to my Board commitments at two artist-run centres was exactly equal to the time I spent showering and dressing every morning for the duration of this exercise (9 hours, 30 minutes).

5. The time I spend researching art-based content on various blogs and websites (8 hours, 30 minutes) is roughly equal to the time I require to translate that content into posts on this here blog (8 hours, 40 minutes).

As gruesome a study as this was, the solid facts do make a more substantial basis for improvement come the New Year. It would be nice if hours of paid work in my life (2 hours, 25 minutes) eventually superseded the time I spent walking my puppy (4 hours exactly), and if dedicated studio time occupied a larger time block than those consumed by, say, morning coffee (20 hours) or drinking the pub (14 hours, 30 minutes). Though I would still argue for the pub as an essential part of my work-life balance.

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