The Time Management Technique that Works for Busy Artists

Do you struggle to manage your time?  I have so many things I'm juggling every single day and making the right actions on the projects I really care about can actually be hard to figure out.  Enter, the MATRIX. I want to tell you about the magic time management matrix that has changed my business, my art, and my life. 

As an artist and business owner, I am ambitious, and also I have a million ideas.  I need a system of categorizing my ideas so I'm not overwhelmed all the time, or working on non-relevant projects. 

By the way, if you are an artist who wants to sell your work, you should download my free 4 page worksheet on Pricing your Art Made Easy!  It's one of the hardest things to do, but I have a system so go to www.josielewis.com/pricing to get your download.

Back to time management! Steven Covey wrote the famous “7 habits for highly effective people” back in the 80s.  In this book, he described the genius time management matrix has transformed my art business.

Here are the broad strokes, in the matrix,  There are 4 categories: important, not important, urgent, not urgent. Everything we do falls into a combination of two of these. 

There's not important and not urgent, like doom scrolling or playing solitaire.

In the not important and urgent category there would be things that demand my attention but don't actually help moving my goals forward, like irrelevant meetings or commitments I should have said no to. 

Urgent and Important category includes things like a customer service issue or website crash.

The most important category for me is the not urgent and important, which for me developing complex initiatives and strategic planning. 

I recently got a comment from an artist who sums up this matrix very well. River Bank art studio on Instagram said, "I started selling my art a year ago… I don't have an email list yet, I really need one! but I am currently having to chose between fulfilling existing orders or developing an email campaign strategy and the art wins the fight every time.  But I need to think long term and get on it!"

This person gave a great real work example of two of the categories.  Fulfilling the existing art orders is important and urgent.  Developing an email list building strategy is important but not urgent.  It takes REAL discipline and foresight to carve out the time for the important and not urgent category.  But the future value of the successfully working on the items in that category is so significant it is worth it and probably even essential to maintain the long term business growth and success.

Often times the urgent interferes with this important, so I have to work VERY hard to defend it.  Right now, something in that category for me are responding to comments here on @the_josie_show, which can slip by, but it's super important for me to both see what people are saying and to answer questions or give individual encouragement, because I'm trying to go deep here on the josie show and that means I need to connect relationally with YOU as much as I can. That's just one example!