February 2010 Contents
I. Scheduling and Drama
II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room, and the Shrink’s Couch
III. Friends in the Media: When you feel like reading, listening, or surfing the web
IV. Newsletter and Info: Share this newsletter, subscribe, or unsubscribe

I. Scheduling and Drama
Scheduling is important. Every artist who promises to deliver work uses schedules to get it there on time. I propose, though, that while being on time is important, time pressures can be optional.

Consider the role of drama. Having humans race against the clock is a way to spike adrenaline and keep you on the edge of your seat (the hero defuses the bomb as the seconds tick down: 3, 2, 1 . . .).  Realizing when we’ve let such drama into our lives gives us the choice of dialing it back (or keeping it high if we want the excitement). For example, I once got into the habit of eating drippy fast food while driving to noon appointments (the clock is tick, tick, ticking). Much as I liked the successful drama of making it on time, food stains on clothes gradually convinced me to change my ways.

A second contributor to time pressure is difficulty in estimating enough time for what we need to do. The less accurate you are, the more the adrenaline pumps in. Even though experience with a task area can make a difference, you can probably think of areas where you’ve always been more and less accurate in your estimates. I am not so good at estimating how long thinking tasks take but I’m pretty accurate in predicting the time for monthly bill paying.

Then, as artists, our delight in spontaneity may also lead to wildly different times needed even for humdrum routine tasks. Make a few mental notes of those tasks in your creative life that you have a routine for and those that are wide open for the urge of the moment. How spontaneous do I really get in my bill-paying? Why was I avoiding boredom using the drama of juggling messy fast food and noon appointments?

Finally, there is what I call the “optimistic vision”. Many artists have times when the next work to be made is quite clear in their visual imagination. The excitement of a vision whose details fairly sparkle in your mind’s eye can sweep the artist away a bit. This is great energy for starting creative work, but may outshine early warning signs of problems to come and be a setup for underestimating time needed.  If the glow is too bright, we are less likely to build in time for redoing parts gone wrong or for the experimentation needed to get the effects so clearly envisioned.

I’m proposing that visual artists have some built-in tendencies that lead to underestimating the time it takes to do our thing. We’ve all heard the advice to schedule in time for meltdowns and unexpected technical problems. Think about your own patterns of underestimating time and how they can set the stage for time pressure in your work. And maybe even a dash of drama.