ARTISTS' PROFESSIONAL TOOLBOX ::
Creating a Personal Workplan

It's the beginning of a new year — the perfect time to look ahead and create a plan for what you'd like to accomplish. Developing an action strategy for the year is one of the most useful tools and investment of time an artist can make.

Dream Big
The first step is simply to take a moment to fantasize about the upcoming year. What would you love to be able to accomplish? What do you want to do? Imagine that it's a year from now and you're looking back - what would make you the most proud of having achieved?

Write It Down
Write it all down. It doesn't matter how big or small, or whether you think it's possible or not — the important thing is to first just write down everything you'd like to accomplish in the next year. Put each accomplishment on a separate index card or sheet of paper. This is still part of the brainstorming phase, so don't pass any judgment over your dreams. It also doesn't matter if your thoughts aren't in complete sentences. Or, if it's easier for you to draw pictures or make collages out of photos to represent your ideas, that's fine, too — just get it all down on paper.

Prioritize
Now go through all of the achievements you've imagined and start to prioritize them. If you were given the chance to realize only one item on your list, which one would mean more than anything? Make that your top priority. Go through your dream list and continue to prioritize your goals until you have your top 3 — 5 for the year.

Make Them Achievable
This step requires you to look at your top goals, starting with the most important one, and shape them into realistic yet inspiring aspirations. Which one of us wouldn't want to sell a sculpture for a million dollars, or get a novel published that becomes a Pulitzer-prize-winning best-seller? To realize your aims, however, you need to craft them based on where you are in your artistic career at this point. What's the realistic version of your goal? If you've never sold a single sculpture before, perhaps a realistic variation would be to sell at least one piece at a price that more than compensates you for the time and materials you put into it (which may be only a thousand dollars as opposed to a million), or if you have yet to finish your first novel, perhaps your aim could be to finish it and develop a concrete marketing plan to get it sold. This step is about taking that big idea and making it workable, while at the same time making sure that it still motivates you into action.

Visualize It
Take a moment to reflect upon each of your achievable aspirations. Really picture what it would be like to make it happen. Put yourself in the shoes of a successful artist. Visualizing what the experience will be like to succeed in your endeavors is a way of creating a positive self-fulfilling prophecy. All too often, it's easy to tell ourselves we can't do something or we'll never succeed. Imagine the possibilities if we actually believed we could reach all of our goals.

Put It Out There
Post your top aspirations somewhere prominent and visible — a personal reminder to yourself about what you're going to accomplish this year. Let the people around you know what you're working on. Inspirational speakers often talk about the power of putting things out into the universe — consciously or unconsciously, it helps us find the connections and become aware of the opportunities that might help us get to where we're going.

Plan for It
Sometimes the big picture seems too overwhelming. We're actually intimidated by the idea of going for what we want. Where do we even begin? Take your top goals for the year and map out what steps need to happen in order to get there. If you're a new actor in town and your goal is to get your foot in the door of every professional theatre, one step to get there may be to create a list of all the professional theatres in the area with contact information, season info, casting policies, etc. Another step may be to find out what the local standards are for marketing materials (headshots, resume, postcards, etc.) and update yours to fit. A third step may be to take a local casting workshop to find out the ins and outs of the local theatre scene, and so forth.
Then put each step in order of what needs to be completed before the next step can be started. Whatever your discipline or experience level, do your research and ask questions so that you can create a realistic plan for each of your goals. By breaking your big goal down into bite size pieces, you'll have much more confidence in taking on each piece.

Timeline
Take each of your action strategies and timeline them into your calendar. Be realistic. If you know that you'll have major family obligations during the spring or are taking a vacation in the summer or will have a hectic workload in the fall, take that into account. But in order to stay on task with your goals, it's important to make appointments with yourself to actually get everything done. If your goal doesn't have a specific deadline, then basically take each step in order and give yourself your own personal deadlines. Be sure to allot sufficient time for each step. There's nothing more self-defeating then creating impossible deadlines that don't take the balance of your life into account. Build in cushion time so that you'll be prepared for anything that happens.
If your goal does have a specific deadline, then it might be easier to work backwards from the deadline date. For instance, if you're a choreographer and want to submit a piece for consideration at Bumbershoot or On the Boards, work backwards from the audition date or the date the application is due. Take each of your strategies starting from the last one and again, giving yourself a realistic amount of time for each step, plot out what dates you'll need to accomplish each one until you have a starting date.

Just Do It
Each small step you take will get you one step closer towards your goal, but the most important thing is to take action. It's easy for people to complain about why there aren't enough opportunities or enough time or enough money, that they don't know the right people or just aren't as lucky. But the reality is, luck is more about attitude than anything else. If we want to get somewhere, the only way to get there is to just start walking, one step at a time. We may not get there overnight, but we'll get a lot closer with every step we take.