Stop Getting Overwhelmed: Boost Your Productivity With Purposeful Workflow

February 10, 2023

It didn’t take me long to realise that being an artist is less about art and more about running a business.

The sheer breadth of tasks meant that if I didn’t get organised and efficient, I would be quickly overwhelmed.

Sure, I make art. But since I don’t have a super wealthy patron to pay me a monthly retainer and take care of everything else so that I can just paint, I’ve got lots of other things to do. Social media, making sure my products get printed, diving the internet for mockup templates, the list goes on.

That’s why I do this thing called batch working. I focus on a certain type of task and devote a block of hours, sometimes days, on completing that.

Let’s say I’ve committed to two social media posts a week on Tuesday and Saturday. Rather than waiting till Tuesday and Saturday to take those pictures and write the captions, it is far more efficient to set aside a day or two for photo taking and writing captions. Then I’ll use a scheduler app, such as Later to schedule all my posts for the whole month. Now I’ve cleared all my social media commitments for the month, thus freeing my mind to focus on other things.

I also like to use an old school scheduler that I write by hand, it helps me plan out all my work and I can see my monthly to-dos all set out clearly on paper. Such as this blog post, it wasn’t written 2 days before I have to hit publish. I batch write all my blogs ahead of time, usually I do them one month before but if I’m super creative I can batch write 4 blog posts in one go and have them all scheduled to go with auto-publish. That is 2 months worth of blog content done and dusted so I do not need to think about it anymore. That frees up brain space for me to work on other aspects of my creative business.

For example when it comes to blog writing, I break it down into several steps that I accomplish over a few days.

Brainstorming - I use this chance to brain dump all my ideas and write down all the pointers for each blog post.
Making cover pages - I batch make all the covers on Canva and download them for use.
Writing - This is when I sit down and collate all the notes and pointers from step 1 into cohesive passages.
Proof reading + scheduling - After all the above are done, I sit down and check the content before I schedule them for publish.

As you can see the broad task of writing a blog is now split into bite sized tasks that can be categorized separately so that I can finish parts of it at my own pace.

Of course, it is not a one size fits all method, you can’t necessarily batch work an entire month of fresh pastries. But if you find yourself getting overwhelmed, take a moment to list out your tasks and see which of these can be accomplished through batch working, perhaps you could set aside 1day just for labelling and folding of your pastry boxes, 1 day just for photo taking, 1 day just to write content. Focusing on them and getting them done all in one shot means you can free up your mental space for the next bit of work. Breaking down the tasks into bite size portions is crucial because it allows you to categorize them so it is easier to complete them as part of batch working.

Try it out and let me know how it goes.

Recommendations

Scheduling apps: Iconosquare , Later , Planoly

I use Later for all my Instagram scheduling. I am on the free plan which doesn’t allow me to auto-publish videos but I simply use a placeholder photo and write up my captions as per usual. Then I activate the post reminder, which will ping an alert on my phone to remind me when it’s time to publish the post. I go to Later to copy and paste the captions into IG and manually publish the video on IG by myself. It’s a bit of a workaround but it isn’t too troublesome because all the content has been pre-written already.

Analog Planner

I use Mossery for all my planning needs. It is my preferred form on planning and there’s plenty of writing space to brain dump ideas when I need to.

Digital Planner: Google Calendar , Good Notes , Asana , Trello

If you prefer digital ways of tracking and managing your schedule, here are some apps to consider. Google calendar is probably the most underrated app out there to plan your tasks. You can even colour code events/tasks to categorize them so you can see with a glance what type of work are your doing today, example red for creative work, yellow for admin, green for research etc. If you have a team, you can consider using Asana and Trello because they offer team boards where you can track each team member’s work flow and assign tasks. You can colour code the tasks and even check finished items off the list. Good Notes is great for people who want to enjoy the writing process on a digital platform. Great for creative sketches and planning to journaling, it is a super flexible tool because it’s designed like a analog notebook except it’s now in digital form, so it can become whatever you need it to be.

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