A beautiful Sunday afternoon is just around the corner. Though cloudy and quite windy outside, it’s still a day, where many will find time to be with their family and loved ones or just hang with friends. After all it’s Funday. But what about all the self-employed professionals, by which I mean artists, of who many don’t even know the actual day of the week. Not because we are such woke bohemian beings that we see time as but another social construct and the illusion it is, but because we work every day.

Be it holiday or weekend, it doesn’t matter, we do our thing regardless. And while others may be going at it in 8 hour intervals with 16 hours of leisure time in between, we hardly know the concept of the 40 hour workweek. Well, those of us, who really like what we do and occasionally find ourselves working 13 hours straight without noticing the day has turned into night and don’t have the luxury of producing the kind of art that looks good on posters and artist prints or it just takes too long for any alternative form of income to work with our art.

Now this isn’t just a romantic idea of the quirky artist who tinkers all day and drinks all night, but an observation of reality. To survive you probably need a fixed part-time or full-time job to support your basic needs like, well, food. And heating. Maybe Wi-Fi? And after the 4, 6 or 8 hours of labour we come home to work some more. But it’s not really work, more work/play that swings between boring and exciting and creative and necessary.

And if we would decide to look for answers regarding time management online, we might find famous entrepreneurs telling us about hustling all day, all night and maybe even inventing a time machine just to be able to get some work done yesterday while we’re at it. And while this is a way of getting enormous amounts of work done and probably the only real way of getting ahead of the curve, I have my questions about the application of such work/work balance (life comes after 40 anyway) for us creatives. Because I can’t have a bad day at an 8 hour job only to come home to do extraordinary creative work and be innovative and fresh and precise and everything else, at the same time.

I can see how number crunching, reading graphs and analysis can be done without us feeling great (while of course the results would vary). But is creative work something that we can just turn on? Something where we can just sit down and start creating like nothing exists apart from our creation? I have my doubts. Not because I want to be cuddled by life and given a blank every time I want to paint a pretty picture, but because unless there is a secret to turning emotions on and off, I have my doubts about the popularity of Sunday Funday hashtags among serious artists. But hopefully I’m wrong.