Is This Worth My Time: How Artists Can Turn Worry Into Purpose
When I start a new project, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it may look like and how I will go about bringing it into reality. Throughout that process, a mischievous question pops up. Is this worth my time? As someone who has several projects going on at once, it can become overwhelming to know where to put my time. But looking at where I am at within my creative practice, I don’t want to hone down and focus on one project with the same medium, craft, and style. Operating with a hyper-curious mindset creates a blurry focus when prioritizing ideas and projects. If you are anything like me, you want to work on new ideas and learn new skills but worry that may cause you to never get your creative career off the ground. Most of the time when I question my time investment, it ends up steering me to never start or finish the project. Funny enough I started writing this article at the beginning of 2024 when thinking about New Year's resolutions. Well, fast forward 8 months and I am still mulling over my time investment with this article. In the past I looked at this question as a creative obstacle that I needed to disregard, but knowing that even when I have the best intentions to ignore it, I still struggle with it. So in an attempt to curb this time investment insecurity, I spent more time thinking about why this question pops up and how I may use it to further understand where to put my priorities.
Time is so valued within our lives we use “financial terms” when talking about it. We save time, spend time, and invest time. This is because time is our most valuable asset. We don’t know how much we will get and it doesn’t matter if we want to spend it, it gets spent. We know that creative endeavors can eat up a lot of our time and that comes with the risk of taking time away from other places in our lives. We spend time at work, hanging out with family and friends; we even spend time when sleeping! This worry starts to double down when we don’t exactly know if the project will “payoff.” Benefit us like having a buyer for the finished artwork, getting noticed by a record label, or winning a new client. When we pursue a creative career, we have stake in the projects we pursue and we hope that it contributes to our overall goals. Wherever doubt enters within our creative process, we might ask ourselves questions like “Is this a good use of my time?” or “Could my time be better spent somewhere else?” or “How much more time should I spend on this idea?” We may spin our wheels on whether we dedicate the time to bring our idea into reality. Knowing how to navigate this insecurity is something I have tried to figure out every time I take on a new project. Staying optimistic about it, I think we can trick ourselves into viewing the worry of time to help better understand our relationship with time and our creative process.
As humans, we have a funny relationship with time. Time is something we protect just as much as we waste. For some odd reason when I think about my lofty creative goals, I become very concerned about where I invest time. That level of scrutiny isn’t present when I scroll through social media or binge-watch videos. Recognizing this ironic hypocrisy, the difference between thinking about creative goals and scrolling social media is the feeling of worry itself. I am not worried about time when doing mind-numbing activities but I am worried about time when it comes to my creative practice and development as an artist. In that case, we could reframe the feeling of worry as the feeling of care. When you ask yourself “Is this worth my time,” it’s acknowledging you care about it. When we worry about time, it can generate a stuck or delayed mindset. When reframing to the idea that we care about our time, it can start to convert the feeling of delay into an actionable attitude. To put it simply, when we care for something, we take care of it. Caring pushes us to find a solution. Now the questions stated before transform to “Do I care about this project?” or “Why should I care about pursuing this idea?” or “Is there another project I care about more?” These questions provide a better opportunity for us to have a focused reflection on our intent behind a project. As creative people, we oftentimes learn something new about ourselves while creating the work, which is a reflective practice in it of itself. If we are to question our time, we should give ourselves a chance to better understand our intent rather than ask ourselves haphazard questions that leave us more worried than settled. Identifying that we care is creating value. Having a defined value behind a project or idea produces purpose and motivation to get started.
The next time you find yourself attempting to determine whether something is worth your time, ask yourself if you care about it. Take this as an opportunity for reflection to kick off your creative process. It's important to know that when reframing the feeling of worry to the feeling care, it isn’t always going to bring you a conclusive answer. It can however lead you to another question that you wouldn’t have got to if you had stuck with the worry. Creative expression will always be a good use of any artists’ time, but that doesn’t mean we will always be able to overcome our time investment insecurities. Dive deeper, reflect more and I promise your projects will feel more valuable, important, and worth your time.
