How To Organize Your Creative Projects Digitally

As a freelance artist, it can be difficult to manage the less creative aspects of your business, especially when you’re focused on creating the best art you possibly can. However, it’s extremely important to keep track of your clients, project deadlines, and meetings because unlike a typical “9-5” job, you are both the boss and the employee. This article is going to focus specifically on how to manage your client projects, set deadlines, and schedule to-dos all in one digital space that can be accessed via desktop browser or iPhone app.

This method leverages an already existing application, Notion , which is a customizable framework that allows individuals/teams to build digital workspaces and workflows. If I had to describe this application to a new customer, I would say that it’s a cross between Google Docs, Microsoft Excel, and your favorite digital calendar, but with the added ability to create custom dashboards, websites, documents, or systems. There is a slight learning curve when working with Notion, and so I’ve developed a free template you can import into your Notion account to start organizing you projects immediately. For installation instructions and a more in depth explanation of all the features within my template, check out this video on my YouTube channel that will get you up to speed. The rest of this article will detail the core features of my template and teach you how to add new client projects and schedule to-dos.

Adding New Projects to Your Database

Once your Dashboard is opened, navigate to Work > Service Projects > Project Archive.

This page is essentially where you will keep track of all your current and past creative projects. Under the “Not Started” Tab, click the “+ New” button to create a new listing. From here, you can name the project whatever you’d like - for example, I’ll name this new project “BMW Website Photos”.

Setting Deadlines and Important Properties

If you click on the actual project block that you just created, it will open up a larger menu that lists properties about the project such as “Status”, “Priority”, and “Type”. If you click the “Status” dropdown, you can select which stage the project is in (Not Started, Next Up, In Progress, Completed, or Posted to Social Media). If you select the “Priority” dropdown, you can select how high on your priority list you would like to set the specific project to (Low, Medium, or High). If you select the “Type” dropdown, you can select what type of project this is (Photography, Graphic Design, Video, etc…). These properties will be important to set for filtering and sorting purposes, so don’t immediately write them off as it could save you a lot of time down the road.

To set a deadline for a project, simply click on a project block and select the “Due Date” dropdown to assign a deadline via the inline calendar.

Changing Views, Filtering, and Sorting

Once you’ve added all your projects, you can display them in different ways by changing the current view. To do this, click the “By Status” button to filter by Status (default view mode), “By Priority” (from high to low), or click the “More…” button to view “All Tasks” (full list of projects) or “Due Dates” (calendar view).

To filter your projects by Name, Status, or Deadline, simply select the “All Tasks” view and click “Filter”. From here, a dropdown menu will allow you to filter your projects in whichever way you choose - I personally use the “Type” filter when trying to search for a specific type of project (for example, sorting the type by “Graphic Design” allows me to see all of my current and previous graphic design projects and hides all other projects that may be related to photography or video). I also use the “Due Dates” filter which allows me select a specific day and then returns a list of all of the projects that are due on that specific day, week, or month.

You can also click on the magnifying glass icon to search for specific keywords. For example, I could search the phrase “Tutorial”, which would return a list of projects that have the word “Tutorial” in its name which would allow me to see all of the video tutorial projects I’m working on currently or have worked on in the past.

Lastly, you can sort your projects by “Date Created” or even “Alphabetically” by selecting the “Sort” button and clicking on the corresponding dropdown.

Adding To-Dos

If you navigate back to the homepage of the template, you will see a section titled, “Top 5 Things I Need To Do Today”

Simply select the “+ New” button to create a new to-do entry. You can name it whatever you like, for example “Set follow up email to Client X” or “Send Deliverables to Client X via google drive link”. Once you’ve created your to do list, you can check the “Completion” box to remove the entry after you’ve completed the task.

Concluding Thoughts

While managing tasks, setting deadlines, and organizing projects are considered the unsexy parts of your creative business, it is necessary to keep track of these things throughout the days, weeks, or months respectively. I hope that this write up has helped elevate your workflow and organized your business processes in one central place. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out via my contact page. As always, have a great rest of your day!