Ten Reasons You’re Always in a Tizzy

Time is an elu­sive thing we never think we have enough and yet we all have the same amount…24 hours/day. So why do we never seem to have enough and why as artists do we seem to always seem to not only be in over­whelm but also have a hard time fig­ur­ing out what’s important.

So what fol­lows are the ten most com­mon rea­sons artists seem to always be in over­whelm mode and some sug­ges­tions of ways to pre­vent the madness.

You don’t pri­or­i­tize your time and your work.

One of the best ways to get out of over­whelm is to set your­self down and fig­ure out your pri­or­i­ties. As a small busi­ness try­ing to sus­tain itself, your busi­ness should be your top priority.

So…prioritize your work in what­ever way that works for you. Set your pri­or­i­ties by month and week and day if possible.

You don’t have mea­sur­able goals.

In order for pri­or­i­ties to work and make it eas­ier to know what to do when, you need to have goals, and you need to have a way to mea­sure them. Both long term and short term goals will help you but they need to be spe­cific, achiev­able and not so many that the list gets ignored out of anxiety.

Your goals should be mea­sur­able so set them with your pri­or­i­ties in mind and give your­self clear steps to achieve them.

You don’t have self imposed deadlines.

Hav­ing dead­lines around our work is a great moti­va­tor, but as small busi­nesses we may not have many dead­lines imposed from out­side. So we need to set our own based on our pri­or­i­ties and goals.

Make your dead­lines achiev­able by cre­at­ing mini-tasks to get done in a 3–4 hour period. Select the tasks to do based on your pri­or­i­ties and he larger dead­line. Goals that are to com­plex, or not spe­cific enough will lead to avoid­ance, mak­ing the pur­pose of the goals worthless.

You don’t know your work process or have a clear workflow.

Take some time to think about how you work, what steps you need to go through before each of your pieces is com­plete. So, fill­ing your inven­tory holes may be a dead­line and the steps needed  to make each piece is your work flow.

Know­ing your work­flow gives you infor­ma­tion about time and allows you to know what needs to be done when and allows you to set more real­is­tic pri­or­i­ties, goals and dead­lines and in the process reduc­ing your chances of falling into overwhelm.

You have no idea what you are going to make from day to day.

If you know your work­flow, inven­tory needs, and pri­or­i­ties you will then be able to walk into our stu­dio know­ing exactly what you need to do. So when you do sit down to work you won’t have your cre­ative juices pol­luted with crazy energy …you’ll be free to create…and that’s the whole point of all this.

You think plan­ning will destroy your cre­ative mojo.

Plan­ning is often the bar­rier to know­ing what you will actu­ally do when you get to your stu­dio, caused by the mind­set that cre­ativ­ity has to be “spon­ta­neous” in order to really be cre­ative. How­ever, it is hard to be cre­ative with a bazil­lion thoughts zoom­ing around your mind tak­ing you away from the present moment which is a mind free of distractions.

The irony is that plan­ning your work by using pri­or­i­ties, goals etc. will actu­ally set your cre­ative juices free.

You don’t want buy­ers to dic­tate your creativity.

This is the old com­mer­cial­ism argu­ment repack­aged, it is often an avoid­ance ruse by those  used if you aren’t all that seri­ous about your busi­ness or haven’t fig­ured out who actu­ally likes their stuff. It is a gen­uine trap to look out for because it sneaks your focus away, and before you know it you’re run­ning in cir­cles blath­er­ing nonsense.

If you  have a good match between you and your mar­ket you’ll have a lot less drama and a lot more sat­is­fac­tion and focus.

You don’t see your­self as a business.

If you don’t see your­self as a busi­ness and you don’t want to sup­port your­self through your art then it will be very hard to do any of the things I’ve cov­ered so far. Sadly, this is also a result of  the same fears of “com­mer­cial­ism” talked about above.

If you do see your­self as a busi­ness and want to con­tinue using your pas­sion to sup­port you then you need to learn and use the tools nec­es­sary build your busi­ness into what you want it to be.

You love run­ning around in circles.

Run­ning around in cir­cles is also a very good way to avoid things like build­ing your busi­ness. The dra­matic dis­trac­tion doesn’t help us get our work done and does lit­tle more than increase our blood pres­sure and blow away any cre­ativ­ity we had tucked away.
Get­ting rid of drama opens up space for your cre­ativ­ity and focus to blos­som keep­ing you grounded and out of overwhelm.

Don’t think you deserve success.

See­ing our­selves as suc­cess­ful is espe­cially hard for artists because we have been edu­cated for cen­turies that art has no value, that it is friv­o­lous worth­less stuff that isn’t needed. That mind­set puts a lid on on cre­ativ­ity and pre­vents us from see­ing our­selves as viable busi­nesses. So it is pretty obvi­ous that we want to keep our­selves run­ning around always in a flus­ter so we can avoid the pain of our suc­cess.
That this mind­set is crazy mak­ing is an under­state­ment and the let­ting go process can seem over­whelm­ing in itself and yet by let­ting go one lit­tle step at a time we can free our­selves of overwhelm.