Are You Hustling or Truly Making Time for Your Art?

Do you ever feel like there’s never enough time for your art? Like you’re constantly chasing the clock?” ⏳You want to create, but life keeps getting in the way. You tell yourself you’ll make time for your art later: after work, after chores, after the chaos settles. But later never seems to come. Instead, you find yourself feeling guilty, overwhelmed, and stuck in a cycle of wishing you had more time.

What if the problem isn’t time at all?

Many artists fall into the trap of hustling for their art: pushing, grinding, and racing against the clock, believing that’s the only way to get anywhere. But hustle is exhausting, and more often than not, it leaves us feeling burnt out rather than inspired.

There’s another way.

Instead of hustling, what if we learned to find time for our art? Not by squeezing it into an already packed schedule but by shifting our mindset and aligning our creative practice with what truly matters to us?

Today, I want to break down the difference between hustle and truly finding time for your creativity, because they are NOT the same.”

We’ll explore:

• The difference between hustling and finding time for your art.
• How values-aligned activities, like art, can actually create more energy and time.
• Why rest is essential for creativity (with insights from Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry).
• Practical strategies for shifting away from hustle and into a sustainable, fulfilling creative practice.

Hey there! 👋 I’m Carrie. Here on Artist Strong, I help self-taught artists learn how to draw or paint anything they want. To date, thousands have joined the community.

👉🏽👉🏽👉🏽 If you feel like gaps in your learning hold you back from making your best art, sign up and watch my workshop, “How to Create Art from Your Imagination.” It’s completely free, and the link is in the description below.

What Hustle Feels Like

Hustle has a distinct feeling:

• Like you’re always behind. You constantly feel like you’re not doing enough or running out of time.
• Like you’re in a race. Your creative process feels rushed, pressured, and results-driven.
• Like art is another box to check. Instead of being a nourishing, expansive experience, making art starts to feel like an obligation.

For many artists, hustle feels necessary. There’s a pervasive belief in creative industries that if you really want to succeed, you have to work harder than everyone else. But what if this constant striving is actually holding you back? I see this directly in my practice as I navigate problems around perfectionism when I constantly assess the quality of the work I do instead of staying focused on the task at hand.

Maria Bowler, a writer and artist who explores rest as a radical creative practice, challenges the idea that more output equals more success. She urges artists to rethink the way they approach their time. Instead of focusing on doing more, she encourages slowing down and paying attention to what truly supports creative energy.

This perspective is echoed by Tricia Hersey, artist and founder of The Nap Ministry, who frames rest as an act of resistance against hustle culture. Hersey argues that our worth is not measured by productivity, and that reclaiming rest is a way to reconnect with intuition, imagination, and deeper artistic expression.

Bowler and Hersey’s work reminds us that art is not a race, it’s a rhythm. And when we stop forcing ourselves to “keep up,” we actually open the door to deeper, more meaningful creative work.

I’ve always struggled with understanding how much I can accomplish with the time I have. And I had a real naive understanding of what I’d be capable of with a newborn when my little one was born in 2020. The internal pressure to keep hustling despite recovering from major surgery, feeding my child, and getting no sleep was real. But my body and infant made it clear just how much I had to slow down.

It was really uncomfortable for me. Much of my life I’ve tied my achievement and any success that comes from it to my identity. To step back bigtime from professional goals and focus on my family was what I wanted AND it was the hardest thing I’ve done personally because of my identity rooted in perfectionism.

It was during this time I started to hear more people talk about The Nap Ministry, for example, and I started to realize my hustle behavior was another way my perfectionism expressed itself. It was time to do something about it.

What Finding Time Feels Like

If hustle is about pushing harder, finding time is about allowing creativity to have space in your life. It’s about shifting from scarcity (“I never have enough time”) to alignment (“Art is part of how I move through the world”).

Finding time for art looks like:

• Slowing down. Instead of forcing yourself to create on a rigid schedule, you start noticing the moments that naturally invite creativity.
• Getting curious about how you already use time. You begin questioning whether certain habits or activities support your creative goals, or if they’re just filling space.
• Replacing low-value activities with art. Instead of mindless scrolling or watching another episode of a show you don’t care about, you use that time for something that actually nourishes you.

In a recent interview, Maria Bowler on Off the Grid Podcast discussed the idea that values-aligned activities create more energy. When something deeply resonates with us, when it matters, we don’t have to force ourselves to do it. It fuels us.

Tricia Hersey takes this idea even further. She believes that rest itself is generative, that when we allow ourselves to slow down, our creativity deepens. Hersey often speaks about how daydreaming, napping, and simply doing nothing are not wasting time but actually vital to accessing our fullest creative potential.

This is a game-changer. Because instead of treating art as something you have to find time for, you start seeing it as something that creates more time and energy in your life.

How to Shift from Hustle to Finding Time

Step 1: Change Your Mindset

The way we talk about time shapes the way we experience it.

Instead of saying:
🚫 “I don’t have time for art.”

Try saying:
✅ “I haven’t made this a priority yet.”

This shift is powerful. When we stop blaming time and start taking ownership of how we spend it, we gain the ability to make different choices.

Tricia Hersey encourages artists to stop tying their self-worth to productivity. Instead of viewing rest as a luxury, she suggests reframing it as a necessary part of the creative process. Rest is not separate from art, rest is what fuels it.

Step 2: Audit Your Time

Before you make any changes, take stock of how you currently use your time.

For two days, track your activities in a notebook or phone. Write down everything: scrolling, eating, working, zoning out, watching TV. At the end of the second day, review your list and ask:

• What activities energized me?
• What activities drained me?
• Where am I spending time on things that don’t align with what I actually care about?

This isn’t about guilt, it’s about awareness. And once you’re aware, you can start making small shifts.

One thing that’s helped stop me from the mindless scrolling is to buy a Brick. Brick is a physical device you can use to block social media apps on your phone. I set my phone to be default blocked so I must consciously go unbrick it to comment on Threads or Instagram. It’s made me way more aware of how often I absent mindedly pick up my phone during the day. And I’m trying to sit in that time and be present, or pull out my embroidery or a sketchbook instead. 

Step 3: Start Small (James Clear’s Approach)

One of the biggest mistakes artists make is thinking they need huge blocks of time to create. But best-selling author James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, argues that small, consistent actions lead to lasting change (I have a post talking more about this here).

Instead of saying, “I need three uninterrupted hours to make art,” start with:

• 10 minutes of sketching.
• One brushstroke a day.
• Writing one sentence in your journal.

Clear emphasizes that habits are formed through identity. If you consistently show up even in small ways, you reinforce the identity of an artist. Over time, this consistency compounds and suddenly, you find that you do have a creative practice.

This is the kind of thing I do inside Self-Taught to Self-Confident, where I guide people through filling in any gaps in their skill so they confidently express themselves through unique, original art. We have an entire section dedicated to starting small and how to make choices moving forward that reflect our unique vision and voice for our art.

👉🏽👉🏽👉🏽 If that sounds exciting to you, you can learn more when you sign up for my workshop “How to Create Art from Your Imagination” for free. You’ll enjoy a taste of my teaching, learn more about the program, and get a special 7-day enrollment offer when you sign up. Use the link here or in the comments below.

Step 4: Prioritize Values-Aligned Activities

The biggest takeaway from all of this? Making art isn’t stealing time from other things, it’s giving time to what truly matters.

Instead of fighting for time, start noticing how art already fits into your life. Maybe it’s in the quiet moments before the house wakes up. Maybe it’s during lunch breaks, in the car, or in the space between tasks. Maybe it’s something you choose to prioritize over another activity that isn’t serving you.

The goal isn’t to force yourself into a rigid schedule: it’s to let creativity breathe inside your life as it already exists.

Hustle drains us. It makes art feel like a never-ending race, where we’re always behind.

But finding time? That’s different. That’s about slowing down, noticing the space that already exists, and making small shifts that align with what actually matters.

I have hustled for most of my creative life. The great irony is I’ve made my most awarded works in moments where I slowed down and allowed space for my creativity to breathe and grow. And now, with less time than ever for my work, I’m making almost every single day of the week. 

This is something I’m still in the process of moving away from personally. I hope this conversation gets you thinking about how you use the time you have and what might you do differently if it’s not matching your goals and values you hold as an artist.

I’ll leave you with this:

Which mindset do you recognize in yourself? Are you hustling for your art, or are you making space for it in a way that feels natural and sustainable?

Hit reply (or comment below) and let me know, I’d love to hear your thoughts. 🎨✨

As always, thanks so much for watching. 

If you enjoyed today’s video, please like and subscribe. I’ll be sure to link the artists and authors I’ve referenced today in the links below. 

Remember: proudly call yourself an artist.

Together we are Artist Strong.

 

Links to authors and artists today:

The Nap Ministry: https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/

Maria Bowler: https://www.mariabowler.com/makingtime

Off the Grid Podcast: https://offthegrid.fun/podcast

James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/