Artists Need to Stay Productive — 3 Quick Tips

Skill is irrelevant if you are not persistent.

The world is fast. The world wants your attention. The world needs for you to be productive if you want to be heard.

Here’s 3 ways to boost your productivity this year.

We need to keep reminding ourselves of these essential truths, especially as artists.

1. Daily Work

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” (Anthony Trollope, Novelist)

JK Rowling wrote everyday for 5 years to finish her book. If you want to finish a big project or be the best, you will have to work at your craft a lot.

A lot of us won’t be able to achieve this. That is okay. You don’t lose if you fail achieving your dream.

You lose if you never attempted in the first place.

Find the best time to finish and start your work

In between classes and after work I’ve been noticing that my creativity and productivity is at its height.

I tend to do most of my writing after I have finished a shift or finished a class. For some reason I am most productive at this time.

Know yourself! What times are you most productive? Focus on these times. Forget what other people tell you. You will have to adjust.

For certain seasons you may be the most productive in the morning, in different seasons in the evening.

It will change. So adapt. Life is all about adapting to external circumstances. We can’t control anything. Only the amount of work we put into it.

Agree to do the smallest amount of work possible.

Just start. This is one of the most important things you could do. I keep 25 drafts at all time. When I feel like finishing up some I finish them. And I have now published 90 blog posts and write for 6 publications on Medium.

2. Volume of Work

“The most important possible thing you can do, is a lot of work. . . . It’s only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to be able to close the gap.” (Ira Glass)

Most people can only pinpoint a handful of Picasso’s work. His archive however consists of 1,800 paintings, 2,800 ceramics, 12,000 drawings — not including prints, rugs, and tapestries.

The more compositions an artist made increased the likelihood of him making an actual hit by a huge percentage.

Start creating!

The Self-Awareness Onion

1. Simply Understanding Your Own Emotions

2. The ability to why we feel certain emotions.

Why do we feel angry? We can change it once we understand the root cause.

3. Why do I consider this to be success/failure?

How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?

Our values determine the nature of our problems , and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.

Pleasure is a False God

Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed.

Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose.

Physical Needs

Once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food, shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero.

In India, an extra ten thousand dollars a year would affect your happiness a lot. But if you’re sitting pretty in the middle class in a developed country, an extra ten thousand dollars per year won’t affect anything much — meaning that you’re killing yourself working overtime and weekends for basically nothing.

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” — Freud

I hope you enjoyed this quick series of points on how to be more productive as an artist.

My main source of inspiration from this blog post was from a fabulous TED talk, that I recommend wholeheartedly.

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keep reflecting.