Master Your Energy to Get More Art Done

For artists juggling creative work, social media, and the endless demands of modern creative practice, there never seems to be enough time. The instinct when falling behind is to find more hours, push harder, grind through. But this approach fundamentally misunderstands what actually determines productivity.

The critical distinction lies between time and energy. Time passes at a constant rate regardless of what happens within it. Energy fluctuates throughout the day, and matching tasks to available energy levels transforms how much actually gets accomplished. This shift in perspective opens up possibilities that simply adding hours never could.

Energy Determines Everything

Energy in creative work encompasses motivation, inspiration, focus, and mental clarity. When energy runs high, tasks feel manageable and progress happens naturally. When energy depletes, even simple tasks become burdensome. Unlike business productivity literature that treats all work hours as equivalent, artistic work operates across a spectrum from high-focus cognitive tasks to meditative, almost automatic physical work.

Consider the difference between storyboarding a comic and doing the final rendering. Storyboarding demands full cognitive engagement, the ability to write, think, and make decisions simultaneously. Rendering often becomes sublimated, automatic, almost like the ancient activities of weaving baskets or picking berries. These fundamentally different activities require fundamentally different energy states. The same hour spent on storyboarding in the morning might produce five pages. That same task attempted in the evening, after energy depletes, might yield two pages at best.

The Three Productivity Levers

Getting more done comes down to three approaches: finding more energy, deploying energy more effectively, or becoming more efficient with available energy. Most instincts point toward finding more time, but this puts the cart before the horse. The counterintuitive insight is that efficiency should come first.

Building rituals and habits around work eliminates the energy lost in transitions. The on-ramp and off-ramp, those moments of getting into and out of creative mode, can consume half of any allocated work session without proper systems. When ritual becomes automatic, sitting down to create simply triggers creation rather than requiring willpower to overcome inertia. Only after establishing efficiency does deploying energy across the day make sense. And only after understanding both does finding more time become worthwhile, because then it becomes clear which pockets of time will actually prove valuable for which types of work.

The Artist's Unique Position

Standard productivity advice often fails artists because it assumes all work resembles knowledge work. The hustle culture mandate to crush it and push through ignores how emotional resonance with creative work shapes the work itself. Grinding through exhaustion while creating art tends to produce art that carries that exhaustion.

Artists exist in a unique position, doing work that spans from intensive cognitive effort to meditative physical craft. The same person might spend morning hours wrestling with composition problems that demand full mental presence, then spend afternoon hours on color work that allows for listening to podcasts or conversing with others. This range is a feature, not a bug. Understanding it means accepting that not all productive hours look the same, and that chilling out with menial art tasks serves a legitimate place in the creative day.