Creativity thrives in freedom, but without a structured workflow, projects can quickly become overwhelming. Work management is here to help you, fellow creatives, stay organised in the process.
Work management is the methodical organisation of workflow. Without it, you run the risk of missing deadlines, poor collaboration, and burnout—and this applies to multiple sectors and industries, including creative ones.
So, let’s look at the four reasons why work management plays an important role in creative environments.
Jump to:
Why Work Management is Important for Creatives
1. Stay on Track and Meet Deadlines
Juggling multiple projects at one time without a system often leads to missed deadlines and staying up late for work. Why exactly is missing a deadline so serious? The world still turns without you anyway- that much is true. However, therein lies the problem.
This mismanagement of time and energy likely leads to the piling up of work, which in turn postpones future processes, affecting the outcome of a collective’s efforts. By assessing what each project or piece demands of you and how much time is needed for each one, meeting deadlines becomes much less of a daunting task.
While the organisational part of creating art isn’t the most exciting, it isn’t something to be neglected. It is hard to figure out how much time is needed for the completion of a creative task since you can’t exactly predict when inspiration will run dry.
But there are tools to that can help you organise your work and make the entire process easier for you. Most work management tools provide clear timelines, task prioritisation, and automated reminders for you to deliver your work on time.
TESSR creative work management tool provides different features that allow you to create a more conscious workflow to stay on track and on timeline. From setting reminders through notifications to ranking tasks by priority, time management can slowly become a daily habit.
2. Prevent Burnout and Sustain Your Creative Flow
Much like any other job, artists are not exempt from burnout. While there are reasons both tangible and intangible for demotivation, poor work management can play a part in it. Creatives often have tasks and ideas in abundance, so much so that it’s hard to keep track of.
It’s likely for creatives to jump to different projects without completing a previous one. At this rate, you’ll find yourself in a slump. Stress and unnecessary pressure extinguish creativity.
If you find yourself running into similar issues, start by collating all the projects you have in store. Note down the deadlines for each and approach your work chronologically. Poor work management leads to last-minute scrambles, stress, and exhaustion during the process.
With a structured plan and approach, you can have a balanced workload, avoid overcommitment to certain projects, and maintain a sustainable creative process. Project management tools can assist you in doing so by helping you better understand how your day should be planned out.
Features such as completion percentages or customisable project metrics can help you fall into a healthy work rhythm, avoiding burnout and even motivating you when you find yourself getting closer to the target. You may want to fall into old habits, but keep consistent, and your progress will reward you.
3. Strengthen Collaboration for Better Results
Collaboration can be challenging. This is especially true when things are done online; we lose context like body language and tone. Without efforts to engage in constructive communication and positive relations among coworkers or teammates, opportunity is lost. Moreover, creative work is mostly a team effort that requires seamless collaboration.
The benefits of it are discussed in the research article from Harvard Business Review, ‘How Creative Collaboration Can Strengthen Relationships’, “positive social relationships facilitate creativity...teams that have members who like each other and get along tend to produce more creative and innovative solutions.” When creatives put their heads together, oftentimes the product of it is innovative.
We’ve well-established that investing effort in maintaining healthy communication and collaboration among all members is beneficial for the whole team. Work management systems like TESSR can help centralise the team's communication, feedback alignment, and document/asset sharing, thus reducing confusion and ensuring everyone is aligned toward the same vision.
In an online-based working environment, managers can look out for tools that provide features like expressive text functions with emojis, voice recordings, and annotations. Applications that provide these create the conditions for effective collaboration.
4. Feel Heard and Valued
Now, this could be more for managers and supervisors. Task allocation is important for an efficient workflow. Without clearly assigning tasks to members of a team— or to the right members of a team— artists may dispute.
Additionally, when creative work gets lost in miscommunication or bottlenecks, contributors may feel unheard or undervalued. Take a team of animators as an example. Conflicts about responsibility or accountability over a certain scene may arise from the lack of concrete task delegation, or tension between teammates could arise from a stagnated workflow. Both of these are avoidable if processes were managed effectively.
Allocating work with data-based approaches can help create a smooth workflow—a function that can be found in project management applications like TESSR. Work management tools ensure transparency, making sure your ideas, efforts, and contributions are acknowledged and respected. Transparency is the key element of this feature, helping managers gain insight into their team’s workload and performance; from there, they nurture the team from the place of understanding.
5. Free Up Mental Space for Creativity
There are times when creatives have a lot on their plates. This leads to worry and anxiety about project deadlines, task assignments, and resource allocation—even tracking revisions based on feedback. Everything can feel overwhelming at times. With the structured workflow that a work management platform offers, creatives can free up their mind from distractions and focus on what they do best: creating art.
6. Improve Client and Stakeholder Satisfaction
No more guesswork or endless back-and-forth discussions about project progress or whether the team has addressed feedback. Everything is well-documented within the project management software.
Moreover, a well-designed work management system built for creatives like TESSR truly understands their biggest struggles. By streamlining communication, ensuring well-documented progress with TESSR Woohoo, and keeping projects on track, client and stakeholder satisfaction levels increase significantly.
Conclusion
To conclude, you may not get work management perfect the first time around, but practise makes perfect. Start now and build new habits that can help you create a healthier relationship between idea and execution - with your own strengths and talents, exercising this only means that there'll be more room for you to grow and excel.
Project management applications, like TESSR are optimised to make hiccups in workflow a non-issue. Features like assigning tasks, managing deadlines, tracking progress, and effective communication systems are in place.
>> Sign up for TESSR today by clicking here! There’s a package for every creative.
Author Bio
From Malaysia, Leia Emeera is a writer at TESSR, and a published author. She has been putting pen to paper ever since she learned how to, and has an anthology to her name, titled 'Ten'. Leia loves music, games and her beloved labrador retriever, George. She aims to further her studies in English Literature and Creative Writing the moment her gap year ends. 'Till then, you will find her sitting behind a desk, writing with TESSR.
Connect with her on LinkedIn: Leia Emeera
Comments