WHY MULTITASKING MAY BE KILLING YOUR ART BUSINESS
If you’re anything like us, you were probably taught that multitasking is an important skill to have if you ever want to be successful in business and life. After all, doing multiple things at the same time surely saves time and increases productivity right? Well, not really. In fact, multitasking may actually be killing your art business one additional task at a time.
WHY MULTITASKING MAY BE KILLING YOUR ART BUSINESS
Let’s think about this scenario: You have just one hour to work on your new painting, so you go to the studio and start painting, but soon your phone dings with an email notification. You check it and write back, and then decide to check your Instagram real quick. After posting a photo of your new painting in progress, you see a post with a link to an article on art business tips, so you click through to that. Before you know it, the entire hour is gone and you’ve barely made a dent in your painting.
Sound familiar? This type of multitasking is called context switching, which means bouncing between different unrelated tasks, and it eats away at your concentration and the time you have to spend on any one particular task. This is because our brains aren’t wired to concentrate on many different things at the same time. Each time you switch to something new, your brain has to recalibrate to focus on the new task, and by the time you get back to the original task you started with, you’re completely off track.
In fact, studies show that it can take up to 25 minutes to get back into the flow of a project once you have been interrupted or switch tasks. In addition, research shows that people who multitask take 50% longer to accomplish a single task and make up to 50% more errors than people who stick to one task.
So how do you avoid the trap of context switching? Here are a few things you can do to try to keep your art business on track and growing:
BATCH YOUR TASKS
Batching means grouping similar tasks together over a set time period. The idea is that you can complete more tasks that are alike because your brain doesn’t have to make too much of a leap between each task. Some examples of batching for your art business include making Mondays marketing days where you only work on social media, content creation, blog posts, etc. Tuesdays to Thursdays could be your studio days where you just paint, draw or create, and Fridays could be your days to meet with clients or collaborators. You can also try the Pomodoro Technique to set aside blocks of time to concentrate on one task, a group of similar tasks, or break up a larger task.
TURN OFF YOUR NOTIFICATIONS
Nothing is more distracting when you’re trying to get things done than a Smartphone, tablet or computer that never stops dinging. And we all know how easy it is to answer just one message and get sucked deep into the Internet rabbit hole. If you’re serious about getting things done, do yourself a favour and disable your notifications and designate specific times to check your email and social media. Set up an out-of-office reply that says you’re in the studio and will be checking your emails at specific times like 10 am and 4 pm only. You might have a bit of FOMO going on at first, but trust us—your productivity will drastically improve.
MAKE A 3 MONTH PLAN
Planning ahead is definitely important for accomplishing your goals, and we find that a 3-month plan is ideal for big projects because it gives you enough time to really focus on what you want to achieve and take the steps to get there, plus it gives you a sense of urgency that you might not feel if you set your end goals too far in advance. For example, at the end of three months, you might want to have a certain amount of paintings finished, exhibit at a particular gallery, or have your artist marketing framework like your website and social media in order.
HACK: Here at Creative Founders we love using Asana. We sit down and plan out everything we need to accomplish in Asana and set ourselves a timeline and roles. Yes, it can be a lot of work, and usually takes a whole day, but to be honest, it is totally worth it. And once we have our plan in Asana, we absolutely love how it gets us focused as well as gets us out of our inbox as all tasks are managed in the program instead of email!
What are your thoughts on multitasking? Do you have any tips for staying focused and being productive?
