The life of a creative entrepreneur is a busy one. There is a lot on your plate on any given day! You need to do the creative, artistic work that your business is built on. But you also need to reply to emails, manage your marketing, handle your business finances, and deal with project management tasks. Like I said, it’s a lot! In that mess of tasks in front of you, how do you figure out what is most important for you to do right now, today, this week? How can you set daily, weekly, and monthly priorities within your creative work so that you know that the most important tasks are always getting done first? Let’s discuss.

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Hello, thriving artist, and welcome to the Starving Artist No More podcast! I am so glad you’re here with me today. I’m artist and business coach Jennifer Jill Araya, and I’m really excited about today’s discussion of how to prioritize your work tasks within your creative business. This topic is one that comes up a lot in my coaching and workshop programs, and I really hope it’ll be helpful to you as well.

But before we dig into that, I do want to let you know about a free resource that’s available for you on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. Something else that comes up a lot in my coaching and workshop programs is the difficulty of managing business finances, and this free resource can help you with that. It’s titled, “Say Goodbye to Feast or Famine: Three Financial Must-Haves for Creative Entrepreneurs,” and the guide gives you exactly what it sounds like: three focus areas within your business that, if you implement them, can begin to smooth out the flow of income into your business so that you’re not plagued by the feast or famine roller coaster anymore. I really think this guide can help you get a handle on your business finances. Just visit my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, and fill out the contact form to have the guide sent right to your email inbox. I hope it makes a difference for you.

Ok, now that you have that little bit of info, it’s time to dive into today’s topic: how to prioritize your work tasks. If you keep a running to-do list, you probably have a LOT of items on that list. I know I do! And the artists who coach with me often ask me, “How do I know what to do first? How do I prioritize this giant list of tasks?” In this episode, I’m going to share with you the way I help my students answer that question.

The place to start when answering that question is always by asking yourself what you need to be the best artist and the best person you can be. In other words, before we even think about that giant to-do list, the first step is to prioritize you.

For example, I know that, if I’ve not worked out or moved my body in some way in the last 24 hours, I’m not going to be able to focus on anything. I won’t be able to be effective or efficient in my creative work or in my business admin work. It’s just not going to happen! So before I even begin to think about which specific task on my to-do list is going to come first, I make sure I take care of my physical self, because that is what allows me to have the mental focus and energy to be my best artistic self.

What are the things you need in your life to allow you to have the mental focus and energy to be your best artistic self? Perhaps what you need most is time with your family or partner. Maybe you need to play with your kids for half an hour every day, not because they need it (although they might) but because you need that time to play and have fun and connect with those you love before you can create with freedom and joy. Perhaps you need some time to meditate each day. Maybe you need a certain amount of sleep each night. Or maybe, like me, your biggest personal need is to move your body in same way before you can get your mind thinking in a creative and innovative direction.

Several years ago, the amazing audiobook narrator and coach Andi Arndt shared with me a mantra that she uses to prioritize herself within her creative work, and it’s this: “Every day I will make time to prepare and enjoy healthy food, and I will make time for exercise, hydration, rest, and play.” I have since made this my own personal mantra as well, and I even have it printed out and posted on the walls around my office and my recording booth. (In fact, I made an adult coloring page out of it. The coloring page version of the mantra is not anything fancy or artistically beautiful – I’m not a visual artist! – but you are still welcome to print it out and use this mantra for yourself as well.)

If you’re not sure where to start when prioritizing you, perhaps the focus areas in this mantra can help get your brainstorming juices flowing. The mantra points out the need for healthy food to fuel your body, and the need to have time for exercise, for hydration, for rest, and for play. Food, exercise, hydration, rest, and play. Which of those five areas is most important for you to be able to do your creative work? And how can you make sure that this area is #1 in your priority list each day?

When you start by prioritizing you and giving yourself what you need to be your best, you’re able to focus as you do your creative work, which contributes to a better finished project. You’re able to focus as you do the administrative work required by your business, reducing mistakes and helping you get that work done more quickly. By prioritizing you, you make everything else that you do better. Taking time to care for yourself is always time well-spent.

Now that you hopefully have some ideas as to how you can make sure you’re able to focus and be your best as you’re doing your work, let’s figure out how to prioritize that work. In the mess of that giant to-do list you’ve got in front of you, how do you know where to start?

The concept I have always found most helpful when I’m facing that huge task list is that of the Eisenhower matrix. I start by figuring out how important and how urgent the individual items on that task list are.

You’ve probably seen an Eisenhower matrix before, even if you didn’t know that’s what it was. It’s a chart, a matrix, with 4 boxes that you can use to prioritize tasks based on how important they are, and how urgent they are. The concept comes from a quote attributed to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

On one side of this matrix, there’s a gradient that goes from “not important” to “important,” and on the top of this matrix, there’s a gradient that goes from “not urgent” to “urgent.” You end up with four quadrants: things that are not important and not urgent, things that are urgent but not important, things that are important but not urgent, and things that are both urgent and important.

Each week, when I’m looking ahead to the work I want to get done in the following week, I think about my work in terms of those four categories. And tasks that are both important and urgent are the tasks where I focus my attention. They are my highest priorities. Only once those tasks are completed do I look at the other tasks on my plate.

A concept I’ve found really helpful as I think about what is important and urgent in my work is what I call MITs, or “Most Important Things.” Labeling a task as an MIT is an easy shorthand to let yourself know, “Hey, this task really matters! It’s something that I have to get done right away.”

Each day, I write down 2-4 things that are my MITs for the day, and I make sure to schedule those tasks for the time of day when I have the right amount of energy for that kind of task.

As I’ve said in previous podcast episodes, you get what you schedule. So schedule your MITs for the time of day that is the right time for you to get those tasks done. If one of your MITs is a creative task that’s going to take you three hours to complete, set aside those hours at the time of day when you’re going to best be able to focus and be creative and innovative. If one of your MITs is a business admin task that isn’t going to take a lot of concentration but that still definitely needs to get done, schedule that task for a time of day when you’re not normally able to focus as well.

The basic idea behind MITs is that, because you’ve evaluated your tasks according to the Eisenhower Matrix qualifiers of how urgent and how important they are, you know every day and every week exactly which tasks are of the highest priority for you, what are the things that you absolutely must get done to allow for the continued good health of your creative enterprise. And then you schedule time for those tasks. You identify them as a priority, and then you schedule time so that you’re able to get them done. Honestly, out of all of the concepts and ideas for how to prioritize your work tasks that I’m going to talk about in this episode, MITs have been the most helpful to me.

During the time of the day or week when you have less energy and less focus, schedule the tasks that are easier for you. That’s why I spend every Friday afternoon on my manager tasks, the tasks related to project management and the administrative side of my business. My creative work, the time I spend recording in the booth and working on my artistic projects, takes a lot of energy from me, but my admin tasks aren’t quite so energy-intensive. So when Friday afternoon rolls around and my energy is shot and all I want to do is close up the office and take off for the weekend, I end my week with those slightly easier administrative tasks. I get to cross them off my to-do list (and enjoy that little rush of dopamine that comes with each check mark), I and close out my week on a nice, easy note.

Another way that I follow my natural energy is by getting up really early. Most days, even on weekends, I’m up and running by 5am. The early morning time is when I’m most energized and focused and excited to take on the day. By contrast, late afternoon is not my time. Creative work just isn’t going to come out of me at 4:30 pm. So I structure my work day and my weekly schedule to take advantage of my early, energetic mornings.

One of the six components of a thriving creative business, which I discussed in detail back in Episode 16, is supportive habits. Allowing your workday and your work week to follow your natural flow of energy is absolutely part of establishing supportive habits for you within your creative work.

As you’re going through your creative week this week, I encourage you to notice your energy levels. When during the day are you most easily able to focus? When is focus on your work completely impossible for you? As the week goes by, which day of the week is most “blah” and most low-energy for you, and which day do you wake up immediately ready to jump into the tasks ahead of you?

Get curious! Be a detective about yourself and the natural rhythm of your schedule. And then, since you get what you schedule, schedule your MITs at a time of day and a time of the week when you are going to best be able to get that specific task completed.

For me, if I’m looking ahead at my week and realize that one of my creative projects for the week is going to be a huge challenge for me, I’m going to make sure that I structure that week’s schedule to maximize those early morning creative hours, since that’s when I’m going to best be able to focus on that work. If one of my other MITs is a big project management task that’s going to take some time and thought, but still isn’t going to require as much of my focused energy as my creative work, then I’m going to schedule it in the afternoon (possibly on a Friday afternoon, if it can wait until Friday), since that’s when I like to turn my attention to those admin tasks.

Follow your energy, and schedule your MITs for the time when you know you’ll be able to do them with maximum efficiency – speed – and effectiveness – quality. By combining MITs with your knowledge of how and when you work most productively, you can establish a task schedule that helps you be your best.

The one place where this MIT and Eisenhower Matrix process breaks down is with the tasks that are important but not urgent. These tasks are the big tasks in your business, the ones that have the potential to really change things for you, but they’re not urgent because they’re not related to projects you have on your plate right now. They’re often long term planning tasks, or perhaps tasks that will allow you to expand into a new type of product or service. These are the biggest, most important tasks in your business, the ones that will allow you to plan and direct the future of your creative work. But because they often relate to the future of your business and not to where your business is right now, they don’t ever rise to the level of  “urgent,” and so they get put off and put off over and over again … and never get done.

These tasks are the $10,000 per hour tasks in your business. Not necessarily because the tasks earn you $10,000 right away, but because by doing them, you open yourself up to the possibility of earning much higher rates in the future, rates that wouldn’t be possible for you without first doing those big, important (but not urgent) planning tasks. Their potential impact is huge, just as huge as the label of $10,000.

The first reference I could find to the idea of having $10,000 per hour tasks in a business is an article from all the way back in 2005 by author and game developer Steve Pavlina, but this concept was more recently made popular by Khe Hy of Rad Reads, and I’ll link to both places in the show notes.

The basic idea behind the concept of $10,000 per hour work is that the tasks that you do within your business have different financial and reward values. All work tasks are not created equal. Khe Hy divides work tasks into four levels: $10 per hour tasks, $100 per hour tasks, $1,000 per hour tasks, and $10,000 per hour tasks.

Some tasks, like responding to emails and sending invoices, are tasks that are related to administrative details of work you’ve already been hired to do, and so they don’t bring in much, if any, additional income to your business. Those are $10 per hour tasks. Their impact is not very big. Yes, they’re necessary, but they’re not going to change things for you in any big way.

The next level of tasks are the $100 per hour tasks, which include the tasks related to the project management of the creative work your business sells. $100 per hour tasks are things like communicating with your project collaborators, planning and making decisions about a specific current project, and actually doing your deep creative work. These tasks have a lot more impact – 10 times the impact, in fact – than the $10 per hour tasks, but they’re still related to the work that you’re already doing, projects you’ve already been hired to be part of. Again,  they are necessary, especially since the $100 per hour category includes a lot of the artistic work that makes your business a creative business, but they’re still immediate tasks related to work you’ve already got on your plate.

$10 and $100 tasks are important, and frankly, especially if you are a solopreneur creative, most of your time will probably be spent on tasks at these levels.

But if you spend all your time here, you won’t ever be planning or growing within your business or as an artist. $10 and $100 tasks are all about the here and now, the work you have in front of you at the moment. These tasks are important, and they are urgent. But if those are the only types of tasks that ever get your attention, you’re missing a lot. Where’s the marketing and outreach for future projects? Where’s the ongoing artistic growth so you can improve and evolve your artistic skills? Where is the planning for the future of your creative work and the dreaming of what is possible for you in the future? At the $10 and $100 levels, it’s completely missing!

That’s why tasks that are worth $1,000 or $10,000 are so very important, even if they never rise to the level of urgent. Tasks at the $1,000 level are related to developing the possibility of future projects. This includes your marketing and networking tasks, reaching out to potential new contacts within your creative industry, the people you would like to work with at some point in the future. Tasks at the $1,000 level also include a lot of your ongoing growth activity, the things you do to help yourself grow and evolve as an artist and which help your work stay relevant as your creative industry changes over time.

And tasks at the $10,000 level are tasks that have the potential to make a huge difference to your future, even if they don’t make much difference now. Getting training that will allow you to offer a whole new type or level of creative work to your customers is absolutely a $10,000 task, as is doing the thought work necessary to develop a business plan and business goals. Creating new demos or samples of your artistic work is another type of $10,000 work, as is attending workshops and conferences that are learning opportunities and that allow you to market and network with new people within your creative industry. Working on developing your business’s sources of asynchronous income, as I talked about all the way back in Episode 8, is also $10,000 per hour work.

The tasks at the $1,000 and $10,000 levels are asynchronous tasks, in a way. The financial reward that comes from you completing these tasks is not going to come right away, like it is for tasks that are at the $10 and $100 levels. It’s going to come in the future, asynchronously from when you actually do the work.

When I sent an invoice, a $10 per hour task, money will be coming into my bank account right away. When I complete a project that I’m currently contracted to complete, a $100 task, money will be coming in very shortly (as soon as I send the invoice for it, so back to the $10 task). The reward for $10 and $100 tasks is synchronous, coming to me at the same time or almost at the same time as when I do the work.

But when I attend an industry conference and spend time doing in-person marketing and networking, a $10,000 per hour task, there’s no direct and immediate financial reward. Sure, I know that I might get some future work from those interactions, asynchronously, but that future work is not assured. When I send out email outreaches to people I would like to work with, a $1,000 per hour task, I’m opening up the possibility for future collaboration with those people, but it is not assured. When I take a full workday to review and update my goals within my business, a $10,000 per hour task, I’m not doing any of the creative, artistic work that my business sells, so I won’t be bringing in any actual money on that day. When I take a workshop that is going to cause my artistic skills to stretch and grow in some amazing ways, another $10,000 per hour task, I’m actually spending money paying for the workshop fee, not making money in any direct way.

But even though I can’t draw a direct line from “I did this and it made me X amount of money,” all of those higher level tasks are the tasks that allow future work to come to me. The impact that these upper level tasks could potentially have is huge, meaning they are incredibly important. I’ve said before that the amount of work flowing into your business is directly proportional to the amount of marketing and networking flowing out of your business. Marketing and networking are higher level tasks. They aren’t tasks that have a 1:1 ratio of time worked to money received, the way your creative work does. If I spend X number of hours in my recording booth and produce Y number of finished audio hours, I know I can charge Z amount of money and have that money in my bank account shortly. There’s an immediacy to that lower level work that just isn’t there for the upper level work.

But if you don’t do the upper level work, the marketing and networking and the ongoing growth and the planning activities, then future work won’t be there. You won’t have any projects to work on, because you didn’t do the important but non-urgent planning ahead tasks.

This is why you want to schedule some upper level planning and outreach tasks for every week. My personal goal is to spend 25 minutes every workday on either a $1,000 or a $10,000 task. I don’t always get that done – sometimes my creative work and admin tasks -- $10 and $100 work – just require all of my workday, and I just don’t have those 25 minutes to devote to future planning and asynchronous work, to $1,000 and $10,000 tasks. But because having that higher level planning time every day is my goal and because I schedule it into most of my work days, it usually does happen.

My advice to you is to incorporate at least one $10,000 per hour task and one $1,000 per hour task into every work week. Perhaps on Monday morning, as you decide what your MITs are for the week, you pick those two upper level tasks, two  tasks that are important to the future of your business but that aren’t urgent in the way that sending invoices and doing the creative work required by your current projects are urgent. And then schedule time for those upper level MITs. Manufacture a bit of urgency around them. You already know they’re important, and by adding them to your weekly MIT list, they have now become urgent as well. Schedule time for those big-impact tasks so that you are planning and providing for the future of your business.

Thank you so much for spending time with me for this episode of the Starving Artist No More podcast. I hope that today I gave you a helpful framework for how to think about your priorities within your creative business. I know these are the concepts that help me as I prioritize the many tasks on my plate as a creative solopreneur!

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes, and please also leave me a rating and a review with your podcast player of choice. And if you have a creative friend who you think might enjoy today’s episode, please share it with them. Sharing is caring! If you have any questions for me, if you’d like to suggest a topic for a future podcast episode, or if you’d like more information about how you can work with me, all of that information can be found on my website, www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com. As always, a huge shout out of gratitude goes to my husband, Arturo Araya, who is the audio engineer for this podcast and who makes sure I sound good as you’re listening to me.

As you think about the tasks you have before you within your creative business, begin by prioritizing you. Your business runs on your creative energy, so your first priority should always be doing the things that will help you be your creative best. Thinking of how your tasks fall on the Eisenhower Matrix in terms of their importance and urgency will help you figure out the order in which to do your work. Choosing MITs, Most Important Things, will call attention to the absolute must-do items, and scheduling those tasks according to your natural energy rhythms will help you get them done with maximum efficiency and effectiveness. And each week, be sure you’re spending some time on those $1,000 and $10,000 tasks, the upper level tasks within your creative work, the long term planning tasks that aren’t going to make a difference for you right now but that have the potential to have a huge impact on your future. By scheduling time for the immediate and for the long term, you’ll make sure that you and your business are healthy and thriving for years to come. I can’t wait to see what you create.