034: Maker & Manager

Starving Artist No More

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?

In this episode, you will learn:

• What Maker Time & Manager Time are in the context of computer programming, and what they have to do with our work as creative entrepreneurs.
• What it means to your artistic work that you are both the Maker and the Manager within your business.
• How to identify your Maker tasks and your Manager tasks.
• Why batching tasks is important and can help you both in your creative work and in your business administration work.
• How to develop a scheduling template that will help you get all of your creative and business tasks done with ease and freedom.

In this episode, I reference this article by Paul Graham, and I refer to the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. I mention this episode of NPR's Science Friday, and I quote from this Medium article by Aman Bhatia. I also reference Episode 22 of this podcast, Outsourcing for Creatives.

A full transcript of this episode can be found here. Full transcripts of every episode will always be available at the Starving Artist No More Blog.

Thank you for listening. Please feel free to reach out to me at www.StarvingArtistNoMore.com, with any questions, comments, or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.