Structuring an Art Practice with ADHD

I'm restructuring my employment working model first

Photo by Simone Hutsch on Unsplash

I’m a corporate bod between 9-5, artist 24/7: My plan is to go from full time office working, to hybrid/remote working, which will free up more time and space for my art practice. Since 2021, I’ve managed to fit it all in whilst:

• working full time,

• having a little child,

• having a kidney transplant and

• other life events

Now I’m putting all of my effort into leaving my current role, who praise ‘campus working’ as the key ingredient to collaboration and therefore maximising productivity (profits). I’m sick of it. I hate the open plan office, I come home every single day frazzled.

So, with the new job search progress, I’ve had many multi-stage interviews and 4 company rejections in the past couple of weeks. I have another final stage interview on Friday 5th June. Wish me luck!

My aim is to secure a hybrid working role, even fully remote. This will open up time for my art practice.

How hybrid working life will be life changing

• Hours of communting time slashed

• I could make art during lunch, or go for a walk

• More time with my daughter in the evenings

• Most importantly, head space

• Not be frazzled every evening

Going into the office is 5 days per week, 48 weeks per year is killing exausting me. I often feel guilty about this as it’s not like I’m doing backbreaking manual labour for 12 hours a day. But fuck it, you know, It can be useful to get some perspective from others less fortunate, but I’m not playing that game any more, I don’t feel great being in the office for 39 hours, especially when sometimes there’s no work to do, but you still have to pretend to be busy, it’s modern day madness.

I think it might be my age, where you tend to see the bullshittyness of the modern workplace, or more specifially the so called rat race. We’re pretty much trapped in a cycle, and I know, before you say, ‘we’re free to leave our jobs’, technically yes, but a) The job market is batshit of late, and b) it’s too risky to leave without a plan B.

Now, how can I structure my art practice? Let’s start with…

Blindspots

We all have blindspots, and that’s totally ok.

I can be hyperfocused on tasks and that feels like it consumes my entire life at the time, and totally forget said project a day later, thanks to Shagun Singh for pointing it out here.

“ADHD, particularly in combination with the cognitive load of parenting two small children, doesn’t just make it hard to focus. It makes it hard to hold the whole picture in your head at once. I can spend three hours deep in research for a UX client and emerge having completely forgotten that I was supposed to be applying to a light festival whose deadline is tomorrow. I can be genuinely excited about building a new indoor piece on Monday and feel no connection to that excitement by Wednesday, because Wednesday has its own demands.”

Shagun Singh

I can’t tell you how relieved I felt reading that paragraph above, I start too many things, especially since working with AI tools over the past year, it’s super quick to make web prototypes now, but also super quick to waste your time, yet feel super productive.

That said, I am not lazy, I’m not stupid, I’m not incapbable of big things. Now I see that it’s a ‘bigger picture problem’, or perhaps a priorities problem. Shagan goes on to say…

”The standard advice, prioritize, focus, do one thing at a time, isn’t wrong exactly, but it assumes a kind of linear executive function that I don’t consistently have access to. What actually works better, I’ve found, is externalizing the system. If the priorities live in my head, they’ll be overwritten by whatever is most urgent or most interesting in the moment. If they live somewhere outside my head, in a map, a workflow, a structured plan I’ve written down, they survive the interruptions.”

Beth Raps also talks about structure and containers a lot, and it’s having an outer shell for your creative practice, where it can fit neatly inside, this can be imaginary, just so it feels coherent.

(I urge you all to read Beth’s book, Structure Magic)

“Structure Magic is a guide to manifestation and mental freedom through structure.”

What a clear one-liner.

Next week, I will tell you how the interview went, and how I have put some structure around my new art practice. I crave something external to house of of this mess in my head.

Living with ADHD?

T’ra for now.

SLART

If you’d like to support me…