The life of a creative solopreneur is one of constantly being pulled in two different directions. Direction 1: the creative stuff! The reason you’re a creative entrepreneur in the first place! This is the creative, artistic, innovative, unique work that you do and that brings you joy and fulfillment and that fills your soul. Direction 2: the administrative necessities of running a business. The emails, the project management tasks, the invoicing, the paying of bills, the managing of finances, the managing of your project schedule, the writing of copy for your website and for your marketing efforts, the scheduling of your marketing outreach and your business social media presence. The list of administrative tasks probably feels endless sometimes, and it constantly demands your attention! Those two directions are opposites, and yet both are your responsibility. You are both a creative and a business administrator. You are both a maker and a manager. How do you manage the juggling act of being both? Today, we’re going to figure that out together.

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Hello, and welcome to episode 34 of the Starving Artist No More podcast! I am so very glad you’re here. I’m your host, Jennifer Jill Araya. I’m a musician and actor, and I’m a coach to other creative entrepreneurs like myself who are working to figure out what it means to grow and thrive as artists in this hustle-and-bustle world.

Today, we’re going to be talking all about what it means that you are both a maker – a creative – and a manager – the administrator in charge of your creative business. Those two identities both absolutely belong to you if you are a creative entrepreneur, if you currently make your living as a freelance artist, but those two identities can feel at times like they are in a major, fight-to-the-death kind of conflict! Being both a maker and a manager is hard work!

On the manager side of things, one area where just about every creative entrepreneur struggles is in the area of financial management, and before we get too far into this maker vs. manager discussion, I wanted to let you know about a free resource I have available to help you figure out your business finances. It’s a guide titled “Say Goodbye to Feast or Famine: Three Financial Must-Haves for Creative Entrepreneurs,” and it’s available, absolutely for free, on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. If you struggle with the financial part of being a manager, this guide can help. It breaks down three essential elements of how to manage the finances of your creative business so that you can grow and thrive within your creative work. Just visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, and fill out the contact form to have the guide sent right to your email inbox. If finances give you problems, I really think this guide can help.

Ok, back to the main focus of this episode: maker time and manager time. How to be both a maker in your business and a manager in your business. You are both, whether you recognize it or not, and being both is a tricky, tricky thing!

The basic concept of maker and manager time comes to us from the world of computer programming. The first reference I’ve found to this concept, and the one I’ve always heard others call back to, is a 2009 article by computer programmer and investor Paul Graham.

In his article, Graham describes the conflict between the schedule that is most helpful to managers, to bosses within tech companies, and the schedule that is most helpful to their team members, the makers, the computer programmers and software engineers that the managers are in charge of. The managers in this context are constantly in meetings, constantly talking to this person or that person to oversee the design of the technology the company is producing. They’re meeting with other managers to decide on technical requirements, and they’re meeting with their team members to tell them about the decisions that have been made and to delegate the various coding tasks to the team members most able to handle them. They’re going from one thing to another and taking care of business. As Graham says, the manager’s schedule “is embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.” That’s the manager’s schedule: the day is broken up into lots of discrete tasks, and you’re constantly rotating from one task to another, and no one task takes up much time.

Contrast that schedule, full of tiny little blocks, with a maker schedule, which Graham says is the schedule needed by the engineers in a tech company, the people who are actually writing the millions of lines of code that will together comprise the software product the company is selling. For makers, or computer code writers in this instance, long stretches of time are necessary. As Graham says, makers “generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.”

In other words, computer programmers need larger units of time to really dig into the details of the work they’re doing, to sink into the flow of the coding process and focus on the work in front of them. They need time for what author and computer scientist Cal Newport calls “deep work.” (In fact, Newport feels so strongly about the necessity of deep work that he has a book that is titled “Deep Work.” It’s a good book, and I highly recommend it if you’re interested in learning more about the concept.)

If makers are allowed to make on their “deep work” schedule with lots of long stretches of time, and if managers are allowed to manage with their little chunks of meetings or tasks that last an hour or less, then everything goes great! The managers get done what they need to get done, and the makers get done what they need to get done. The problem comes when managers schedule meetings in the middle of a maker’s long stretch of deep work.

My husband, Arturo, works as a team lead software engineer for a Fortune 500 company, and he always complains if he has a meeting scheduled in the middle of the morning or in the middle of the afternoon. “That breaks up my day!” he tells me. When he only has 30 minutes or an hour between meetings, it’s not enough time for him to get his coding deep work done, and scheduling a meeting in the middle of his deep work time keeps him from ever getting into the flow of his coding work. In fact, Arturo has at various points during his career worked for teams that had one or more dedicated “no meeting days” each week, or days when no one was allowed to schedule any meetings with the computer programmers so that those maker employees could sink into the flow of their deep work. Since Paul Graham originally wrote his article 12 years ago, an understanding of the differences between maker time and manager time has filtered through the technology world, and so companies are taking steps to make sure that maker software engineers are able to get the kind of maker, deep work time they need.

I can hear you telling me right about now: Jennifer, this is all very interesting, but you’ve been talking about computer programmers and software engineers, not artists and artisans. What does this have to do with me? I don’t have a boss. I don’t have employees to meet with. And I’m not writing computer code.

Yes, those things are all true, but this concept from the world of technology does actually apply directly to you and your creative business. And finding a balance between the maker and the manager is perhaps even more important for you and your solopreneur creative business than it is for technology companies. Because in your creative business, you are both maker and manager, and finding a balance between the two is the only way you can ever hope to stay on top of your creative work and your business administrative work.

Allow me to explain. When you are working in your business, when you are doing the creative work that you are paid to do, you are a maker. You are creating something new and innovative and unique to you and your artistic sensibilities. In this instance, you are akin to the computer programmer writing lines of code. You are functioning as an employee of your creative business, investing the time that is required to create the product your business sells.

To do this kind of creative work, you need long stretches of time. You need to be able to sink into the task and find a state of flow and a joyful release of your creative energy. Interruptions to those long stretches of time will pull you out of the creative state of mind you need to be your best artistic self. When you are working in your business, you are the maker, and you need maker time.

But creative work is not the only type of task that you need to do as the owner and operator of your creative enterprise. You are also the manager, the boss, the CEO.

Yes, I just called you a CEO. As a creative entrepreneur who runs your own business, you are a CEO. You determine the direction of your creative company, and you are the person ultimately responsible for the health and well-being of your business.

As CEO, just making the product and working in your business isn’t enough. You also need to work on your business. You need to pay the bills and manage the finances, to coordinate with project collaborators and correspond with your clients, to handle the project management and the product delivery, to schedule your marketing emails and write your social media posts.

If you have any contractors you work with who handle any of those tasks for you, that’s great and can be very helpful, but that also means that rather than doing the tasks yourself, you need to communicate with your contractors or employees and manage their workload, delegating tasks to them and giving them the information they need to be successful as they complete those tasks for you.

All of these types of tasks – all of the CEO tasks that are part of working on your business – are small, discrete tasks that generally take an hour or less to complete. They run on manager time.

Both maker time and manager time are necessary for your creative business to thrive. And unlike in a technology company, where the maker and the manager are different people, in your creative business, you are both. Your business needs both maker tasks and manager tasks, and both types of tasks are your responsibility, as the artist and CEO behind your creative business.

But there’s a fundamental conflict between maker time and manager time. Maker tasks require long, uninterrupted stretches on your calendar, and manager tasks need lots of little small blocks of time stacked one right after the other. They are fundamentally different.

When one person is responsible for both types of tasks, both types of time, how do you find any kind of balance?

Usually, I see creatives really struggle to find any kind of balance. They are continually behind on one kind of task or the other. They either spend so much time on manager tasks that they never actually get their creative work done, or they spend so much time on maker tasks that the administrative side of their business is a mess. Or they go in spurts, having lots of maker time one week and getting lots of creative work done but neglecting everything admin, followed by a week of only manager time, when they get nothing creative done at all but instead try to catch up with all the project management and business administration tasks they neglected the week before.

I must admit that I’m sometimes guilty of that. I sometimes fall into the trap of prioritizing maker time over manager time, or vice versa. I sometimes forget that I need to handle both types of tasks. It’s never fun when I get sucked into those wild swings in the types of time I schedule for myself, and I find myself there a lot more often than I’d like.

But there is a better way. I always tell my coaching and workshop participants that “you get what you schedule,” and the better way is to schedule both types of time for yourself. If you need to be both manager and maker, and if you get what you schedule, then schedule both manager time and maker time. Give yourself the time to be and do both.

Often, when I get to this point with the artists who are working with me and who are hoping to build their creative enterprises into thriving artistic businesses, the artists do the equivalent of throwing up both hands and yelling, “Stop!” They tell me that they don’t have time to be both! In fact, they can’t be both manager and maker. There just aren't enough hours in the day!

And it is entirely possible that you don’t have time to do ALL. THE. THINGS. that would normally be expected of both manager and maker. In fact, that’s likely. That’s where outsourcing as you’re able can be super helpful, as I talked about back in Episode 22. But before you jump to outsourcing as a solution, make sure that you are being efficient and effective with your own time. In other words, make sure you are batching your tasks.

Batching tasks simply means grouping like tasks together so that you’re able to get them done more efficiently. At its best, batching tasks means getting rid of all distractions not related to the specific task at hand so that you are fully focused on the task in front of you, meaning you are also more effective at that task. Your work is better, and you get it done more quickly. Those benefits might sound too good to be true, but if you’ve never done it before, batching your tasks really can make that significant of a difference.

Back in 2013, author and Stanford professor Clifford Nass was on NPR’s Science Friday, and he stated the following: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking. So in our research, the people who say they're the best at multitasking because they do it all the time. It's a little like smoking, you know, saying, I smoke all the time, so smoking can't be bad for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.”

Just like the “starving artist” is a harmful myth, our ability to multitask is a harmful myth. Neither of those things exist. You do not have to starve to be an amazing, innovative artist, and humans can’t actually multitask. Instead, what we do is what Science Friday host Ira Flatow calls “multiswitching” in that Science Friday episode. We think we are multitasking, but we’re instead actually switching quickly back and forth between the tasks in front of us, and we lose some of our concentration and some of our effectiveness and all of our efficiency every time that switch happens.

In a recent Medium article, author Aman Bhatia sums up the situation: “Multitasking makes you feel productive, single tasking gets shit done.”

So, don’t try to multi-task. Let yourself do one type of task at a time. Focus on that one type of task until you get all the tasks of that type done (or at least all of the tasks of that type done that you’re going to get done today), and then move on to the next type of task. Don’t mix and match your tasks. Batch them.

If you were an employee of your business, your boss would give you a task, say the creative task of narrating an audiobook, and you would focus on that task until you were finished. While you were working on that task – narrating that audiobook – you wouldn’t also have to deal with the project management aspects of that task. You are the employee assigned the task! You’re not the manager in charge of the task!

So, allow yourself to be only the employee while you’re doing your creative work. In this instance, allow yourself to focus solely and completely on crafting the very best audiobook you can. While you’re in that creative headspace, let go of everything not related to the act of creating that stellar audiobook. None of that matters in that moment. Your only job is to work in your business as the maker, the employee, creating the excellent finished product that your business will sell.

Later, after you’ve stepped out of that creative energy, you can become the manager. You can become the boss in charge of project management and communication with the other people involved in the project and the deadlines and the deliverables. But in a corporate environment, the manager is never going to be involved in actually creating the product – they’re only involved in managing the product’s creation. So let yourself live in that manager space, focused on details and technicalities.

Even within your various manager or maker tasks, batching similar tasks together can be helpful. I like to batch the recording of auditions. I need to be in a certain headspace to create an excellent audition sample, so once I get in that headspace, I want to record all my auditions at once! I usually set aside 2 mornings each week to take care of auditions.

I also batch my pickup work. As an audiobook narrator, I have to record what are called “pickups,” or corrections of the mistakes I’ve made, for every book I narrate. If I’m in the headspace for pickups, I want to stay there! The deadlines for my pickup files don’t always allow for this, but when I can, I will record pickups for two or even three books on the same day to keep my focus settled into one place, on one type of task.

And of course, when I’m actually recording the audiobooks that are my main work as a creative, I let go of everything that isn’t directly involved in the deep work I’m doing. I mute my phone, ignore my email, and sink into the story in front of me. All the rest of the world can wait.

Those are tasks I batch as my maker self. As my manager self, there are even more like-with-like tasks that I can group together. Emails are an obvious example! I spend about 20 minutes right before lunch each day answering quick emails, and I usually spend about the same amount of time on emails in the afternoon, before I finish up for the day. Any email correspondence that will take more than that will wait until Friday afternoons, which is the time period each week that I set aside for my manager tasks.

I also batch together my financial tasks. I take care of my business finances on the 1^st and 15^th of every month, or on the business day closest to the 1^st and the 15^th. That’s when I send invoices, pay my bills, follow up on late payments, balance my checkbooks, handle my financial recordkeeping, make the transfer to pay myself my salary, make any budget adjustments that are needed, etc etc etc. When it’s not the 1^st or the 15^th of the month, I know that I don’t have to worry about finances, because I’ve got time reserved for those tasks, time that I’ll be able to focus with concentration and intentionality. I’m not going to miss anything because I’m grouping tasks together that are similar in nature, and because I’ve got time scheduled to do that work.

Because I know that I have time reserved for these manager tasks, they don’t intrude on my concentration during my maker time. Remember, you get what you schedule, and if you schedule time to get those manager things taken care of, then you can create with a free and focused mind during your scheduled maker times, knowing that the manager stuff will get done later, efficiently and effectively, during your manager time. And because I’ve scheduled my maker time, during my manager time I can focus on all those little admin details that are part of running a business, resting assured that I will be able to be my very best creative self and do excellent creative work during my maker time.

When you’re acting as a manager, let go of your maker tasks and focus only on the manager duties in front of you. When you’re acting as a maker, let go of your manager tasks and focus only on the maker duties in front of you. Batch your tasks to get them all done faster, more efficiently, and more effectively.

The batching schedule that I just mentioned works really well for me. It’s not perfect. Sometimes something will come up on a Friday afternoon and I don’t get my normal weekly manager time. Or, sometimes the 1^st or the 15^th fall on a really busy maker day for me, and I have to move those tasks to a different day. But because I have a basic schedule framework that I know works most of the time for me, based on lots of trial and error and adjustments over the years, when scheduling bumps happen, it’s not a big deal.

If Friday afternoon is going to be spent working with an audiobook director, I can move my “Friday afternoon manager tasks” to Thursday morning instead. If the 15^th of the month is going to be spent coordinating with my co-narrators for an upcoming project, I can switch those tasks to my schedule on the 14^th or the 16^th instead.

Because I’ve set up schedule “guardrails” for myself around how I handle the batches of maker time and the batches of manager time, I’m able to be flexible within those guardrails when bumps in the road pop up. I can easily navigate around them while still staying centered within the schedule “guardrails” I use to focus myself and my work.

This is the schedule template that works for me. Maybe your schedule template will look completely different. Perhaps you would prefer to spend an hour every morning, or maybe every afternoon, handling manager tasks, rather than putting it on all one afternoon each week, like I do. Or maybe you have other life commitments, like picking your kids up from school or extracurricular activities, or caring for a family member, that limit the time you have available to work within your creative business. Those kinds of commitments will limit your flexibility within your own schedule guardrails, but flexibility is still possible, and I firmly believe that it is possible for you to find a schedule template that will work for you most of the time and that will give you a point of reference to navigate from when those bumps pop up.

Finding the maker and manager schedule that works for you might take lots of time and lots of trial and error – I know it did for me! And the schedule that works best for you will likely change over time as you change as an artist and as a person, and as your life circumstances and commitments grow and evolve. But you can settle on a schedule that works for you and that allows you to be both the best maker you can be and the best manager you can be.

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Thank you so much for being with me today for this episode of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I so value and appreciate you journeying with me on this path of creative entrepreneurship. I hope today’s discussion helped you look at the many tasks in front of you with a bit more understanding and insight.

If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode, and I always appreciate ratings and reviews as well. If you have a creative friend or colleague who you think might be interested in this episode, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! And if you have any questions for me or if you’d like more information on how to work with me, visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. All the details about my coaching and workshop offerings are there, and you are always welcome to reach out to me via the contact page with questions or comments. I can’t end the episode without saying a giant “Thank you!” to my husband, Arturo Araya. In addition to his work as a software engineer, as I mentioned earlier in this episode, he also does freelance work as an audio engineer, and he is responsible for making the episodes of this podcast sound as fabulous as they do. Thanks, Arturo!

As a creative solopreneur, you are both maker and manager. You must work both in your business and on your business. It is a lot to juggle. We’ve not chosen an easy path in this life as creative entrepreneurs. But you can do this. You are capable. It starts with recognizing your dual roles within your business, batching tasks together so you can be effective and efficient in the work you do, and scheduling time for those tasks. You are both maker and manager, and your creative work is better for it. I can’t wait to see what you create!