It's probably not news to you that our shared culture of consumption can lead to time wasted--and artists are no exception.
Research shows that 40-45% of our daily actions are comprised of habits we've formed, good or bad. Bad habits eat away at our time to develop as people and as artists.
If you’re looking to increase the time you have available to invest in your art practice, you may want to look at your habits.
When you successfully track, eradicate, and replace a habit, you find that the time spent on a less-than-fulfilling pastime like social media scrolling is suddenly available.
How to make more time for your art practice by eliminating time-wasting habits:
Track the bad habit
If excess screen time is your definitive culprit, there are plenty of (ironically digital) apps dedicated to monitoring and reporting, and even controlling your device usage. Try these out for size.
To monitor time spent doing anything, take notice of when the habit begins, time the duration of a session spent doing it, and log it for later analysis. Again, there's a built-in app for that on most smartphones.
Eradicate the bad habit
After analyzing the potentially embarrassing amount of time wasted on an undesirable habit, take actions to eliminate it. Small, consistent actions, accountability and affirmations are key to this.
A few suggestions:
Replace the bad habit
This is key to making a bad habit-turned good stick.
To truly make more time for the activities you want to do, you must make it easy to replace the current bad habit with the desired new one.
For example, if you'd like to spend more time in the studio instead of binge-watching Netflix after a long day, set up your environment to make it easier and more rewarding to remember and commit to artistic development—an inspired, dedicated space to work, maybe even with some aromatherapy candles and mood music--it needs to feel like a reward each time you choose the desired habit.
What habit are you ready to eliminate and replace? Share your intentions in the comments, and you're one step closer to making more time for your art practice!
Research shows that 40-45% of our daily actions are comprised of habits we've formed, good or bad. Bad habits eat away at our time to develop as people and as artists.
If you’re looking to increase the time you have available to invest in your art practice, you may want to look at your habits.
When you successfully track, eradicate, and replace a habit, you find that the time spent on a less-than-fulfilling pastime like social media scrolling is suddenly available.
How to make more time for your art practice by eliminating time-wasting habits:
Track the bad habit
If excess screen time is your definitive culprit, there are plenty of (ironically digital) apps dedicated to monitoring and reporting, and even controlling your device usage. Try these out for size.
To monitor time spent doing anything, take notice of when the habit begins, time the duration of a session spent doing it, and log it for later analysis. Again, there's a built-in app for that on most smartphones.
Eradicate the bad habit
After analyzing the potentially embarrassing amount of time wasted on an undesirable habit, take actions to eliminate it. Small, consistent actions, accountability and affirmations are key to this.
A few suggestions:
- Write down your specific intention to eliminate or restrict the habit, and keep it somewhere you can look at it every day.
- Proclaim that you are the type of person who does not partake in such a habit.
- Keep yourself publicly accountable by sharing your intention with another person or group.
Replace the bad habit
This is key to making a bad habit-turned good stick.
To truly make more time for the activities you want to do, you must make it easy to replace the current bad habit with the desired new one.
For example, if you'd like to spend more time in the studio instead of binge-watching Netflix after a long day, set up your environment to make it easier and more rewarding to remember and commit to artistic development—an inspired, dedicated space to work, maybe even with some aromatherapy candles and mood music--it needs to feel like a reward each time you choose the desired habit.
What habit are you ready to eliminate and replace? Share your intentions in the comments, and you're one step closer to making more time for your art practice!
