Productivity Hacks for Illustrators - Beginner Level

May 22

In my work as an art coach, I often get asked how to improve motivation and productivity. In some cases, I can serve as an accountability partner for my students, but having one instructor who you see on occasion be your ONLY tool for productivity is not necessarily gonna cut it. As a notoriously productive artist, I’m compiling my best productivity tips into a series of posts for beginner, intermediate and advanced level productivity hacks in your art journey. Let’s get going.

Beginner Productivity Hacks

When I say beginner productivity hacks, I do not mean they are for beginner artists (although they can be!). These tips are for anyone who is just starting to improve their creative output or has struggled with other productivity tools. While this post is from an illustrator’s perspective and aimed at fellow illustrators, it can easily be adapted to other art forms.

Tool 1: Inventory of Time

I often hear that people don’t have time to make more art or have limited time to accomplish all the artistic projects they dream of. We all have a finite number of hours in the day, and infinite potential demands on our time. The good news is, there’s a name for this in economics, and it’s called scarcity. Economics is defined as the study of scarcity: how we (humans) try to meet infinite needs and wants with finite resources. And the second piece of good news is that my first degree was in economics.

So let’s think like economists for a second. To improve your time use, you must first understand what inputs (time) you are working with to create what outputs (activities). Simply put, what are you doing with the 24 hours you are given each day?

This first tool is straightforward and is an exercise in self-understanding as much as productivity. Track your days for one week. To the best of your ability, keep track of what you did during each hour of each day for seven days. Don’t try and make the week the most incredible stand-out productivity week ever. Just let it be a normal week and keep track of what you do. Likewise, don’t do this while you are on vacation, or you'll look like you have NOTHING but free time.

At the end of your week, break your activities into three categories:

Essential and optimized
Essential and non-optimized
Non-essential

Essential and optimized tasks can’t be changed. This might include things like going to work (as long as you leave on time), picking up kids from school, or going to the dentist. We can’t borrow time from these tasks.

Essential and non-optimized are tasks that need to happen but you could run them more efficiently. For example, you need to go grocery shopping but maybe you take longer than you need to when you don’t bring a list or go to the store during the busiest hours. We can borrow time from these tasks if we need to.

Non-essential tasks are everything else. Watching TV, scrolling social media, chatting with friends, and going for a walk. Importantly, it’s not that these tasks are unimportant. These tasks deserve time! And they are often the most enjoyable parts of our day. If art is not your money-maker, art is included in this list. But this is the easiest place to borrow time from. And my guess is, some obvious time drains will make themselves known to you immediately (maybe binge-watching TV shows or scrolling social media?)

That’s it. That’s Tool 1. You don’t need to take any conscious action toward productivity at this point. Knowledge is power, and this is to help you get more knowledge about your days.

Tool 2: Start With Baseline

What is the minimum amount of art creation you could do in a day that would still satisfy you? Ten minutes? Five minutes? One minute?

Great, start there.

This tool will take place over a week, just like the previous one.

Choose your minimum art creation and be really, really generous with yourself. Don’t say that at minimum one hour will satisfy you if you spend no time on art creation. Obviously, you can live just fine without one hour of art creation, right? So imagine a worst-case scenario, a very busy day where it was still essential you do a little bit of creation and use that time.

Let’s use 5 minutes per day as our example. For one week, you will create for only 5 minutes per day. But give yourself an extra 2-3 minutes for reflection at the end, so take that time into account, too.

It may be helpful to decide in advance on an easy activity you can do in five minutes, so no time is spent staring at a blank page during those precious minutes. Some ideas include:

Gesture figure drawing, either 5- 1 minute poses or 1- 5 minute pose
A simple art game like my Nouns + Adjectives exercise
Drawing an object around you (maybe even a quick self-portrait in a mirror!)

Next, make sure your basic tools (sketchbook, pencils…) are on hand. Ideally, you can do this during the same 5 minutes every day, but worst case scenario, if you forget all day, 5 minutes before bed is fine! Do the exercise in bed!

Again, force yourself to only do 5 minutes per day (this is why the exercise is best for productivity beginners). After the five minutes are up, quickly reflect on the experience. Try answering these questions in jot notes, on a voice memo, or out loud to a friend or partner, planning to spend no more than 2-3 minutes on the answers:

How did I feel during the 5 minutes?
After the 5 minutes, did I want to keep creating?
Compared to other chunks of time during my day, how do these 5 minutes rank on a scale of 1 (bad time, didn’t like it) to 10 (best time, best thing I did all day)?

At the end of the week, your collection of answers should help you form a clearer picture of why you want to spend time creating. Did it relieve stress? Bring joy? Feel playful? Turn out to be the best thing you did all day?

Once more, knowledge is power.

And if you find that those 5 minutes were not enjoyable, well, that’s information, too. That sounds like a future blog post, but it could be that some part of your creative process is not working for you, and that’s why you aren’t making time for it.

Tool 3: Connect Creation to a Daily Task

Okay, the final beginner productivity hack is to connect your daily act of creation to something you do daily (or almost daily).

An excellent option for this is when you work a job with coffee breaks. Maybe you have a 10 or 15 minute slot of time during every weekday where you can step away from your desk (or cash register, or counter…) and take 10-15 minutes to rest.

Tell yourself that coffee break time is drawing time. ALWAYS. Make an appointment with yourself that can’t be broken. If a co-worker wants to chat during the coffee break? Great! Let them know you will be drawing, but are happy to multitask. If you need a snack? No problem! Eat and draw.

The intention is to be a bit crazy about it. Be that weird coworker always drawing on their break (I’ve been that coworker at many jobs). Or that roommate who insists on drawing with their cereal in the morning. Incorporate it into a family bedtime routine - after dinner, we have a bath, draw for fifteen minutes, then read a book, and tuck into bed.

The goal for this tool is simple: start to see art-making as an essential and non-negotiable part of your day. Just like you must take your coffee break, eat your breakfast, or do your bedtime routine, you must draw. That’s just how it is.

That’s it! Those are the first three productivity hacks I recommend for beginners who want to start including more creative output in their daily lives. Hopefully, you noticed the pattern that you are first trying to change your mindset around creativity: