Art activities annual calendar

I am still working on the detail of my art activities for 2009. Instead of just having my activities as a list, I am putting together a calendar for the whole year. As a visual artist, I like to see things… visually and with a calendar and some colour coding, it all becomes much clearer.



When working on my calendar, I realised that one of the things that was holding me back was the fear to book an exhibition and discover later that it clashed with another family commitment.

I see several advantages to using an annual calendar:

• You can put your “big rocks” in and then see the time you have to do other activities


• It makes planning easier because you can review the future months at a glance and working back to see what needs to be done before an exhibition date, for instance.


• You can make sure your marketing activities are well spread over the whole year. If one month is too busy, then you may want to move some items around.


• The visual aspect, with colours, makes gap obvious. Are your exhibitions all in the first part of the year? Then you know you need to get to work to book some dates for the second part of the year.


• If you have a new opportunity coming your way, you can quickly check if it fits or not with your existing commitments.
  
  

What goes into your calendar?

This is a non-exhaustive list of items that could go into your calendar:

Start with your personal commitments:

• Vacations


• Family’s events (yours, your wife’s or partner’s and children’s ones)


• Days out
  

Recurrent activities:

• Sending your newsletter


• Blog entries


• Articles you write


• Christmas / end of the year cards


• Promotions you want to run


• Updating your website
  

Specific art events:

• Exhibition already booked


• Open studios days


• Workshop you plan to attend


• Shows or exhibitions you want to go to
  

The tools you need

The tools you need already exist.

• You can use a large wall calendar, but make sure you see the whole year at once (don’t use a calendar that has a page per month).
  


• An A3 version can also be used. You can print one from Duct Tape Marketing. See the article: Create Your Marketing Calendar Today


• Another solution is to use an Excel spreadsheet. The good news is that Michael Hyatt created a template you can use. See the article Creating an Annual Time Block by Michael Hyatt. The great advantage of Michael’s template is that, by entering the date of the first of January for any given year, all the date will be updated automatically (even for leap years).

Art marketing Art exhibition Calendar Art activities calendar Michael Hyatt Duct Tape Marketing