In 1481, the monks of San Donato in Florence commissioned a young, promising artist named Leonardo da Vinci to paint The Adoration of the Magi. They paid him a generous advance. He had a clear deadline.
He never finished it.
Instead, Leonardo disappeared into a decade-long research spiral, obsessing over horse anatomy, the physics of light, and the behavior of water. To his patrons, he was a procrastinator. To the monks, he was a breach of contract. But to art history, that “lost time” turned out to be the quiet incubation period for the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo experienced time differently from the people waiting on him.
If you’ve ever felt guilty about spending a week deep in research while your inbox is filled with unanswered emails, you might recognize something of yourself in him.
Time Perspective Theory
Why did Leonardo struggle to ship, while his contemporary Michelangelo, despite endless complaining, managed to paint the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling in four years?
Part of the answer comes from psychology. In the 1990s, Philip Zimbardo developed Time Perspective Theory1, which posits that our relationship with time is a strong predictor of professional success and personal well-being.
When I first encountered Zimbardo’s Time Perspective Theory, it immediately resonated with my own experience of time. I have ADHD, which often comes with what psychologists call “time blindness.” Even when I track my hours carefully, I can still fall into a research rabbit hole and not emerge for days—or sometimes weeks. I might start reading about a material process or historical reference, and suddenly an entire day has disappeared.
Awareness alone doesn’t always fix the problem. The internal clock simply works differently. Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI), identifies five distinct ways people orient themselves to time:
Past-Negative — Focused on regrets and past failures. A strong predictor of lower achievement.
Past-Positive — Nostalgic and tradition-oriented. Emotionally grounded, but can resist change.
Present-Hedonistic — Lives in the “now,” chasing flow, sensation, and immediate experience.
Present-Fatalistic — Feels that outcomes are predetermined, so why bother planning?
Future-Oriented — Driven by goals, planning, and the willingness to delay gratification.
Most people are a blend of these. But creative people tend to cluster heavily toward the present, which puts them in direct conflict with a market that rewards future-oriented behavior: meeting deadlines, sending cold emails, building five-year plans.
Understanding where you fall isn’t about diagnosing a flaw. It’s about choosing the right tools for your natural wiring.
Disclaimer: The application of ZTPI specifically to creative professionals and artists is more of an extrapolation by me than a direct finding of Zimbardo’s original research.
Six Temporal Archetypes in the Art World
Artists often operate in Kairos (qualitative time), while the market operates in Chronos (quantitative time).
1. The Researcher — Leonardo da Vinci
Present-Hedonistic with bursts of Extreme Future Vision
Leonardo lived in a state of flow state time distortion. When he was absorbed in the present moment of discovery, how a muscle moved, how light bent through water, future deadlines felt like distant, irrelevant noise. His brain was built for depth, not delivery (sounds familiar).
The risk: Work goes unfinished. Opportunities expire.
The gift: The insights gathered during those long, wandering periods often become the foundation for something truly original.
The lesson (a big lesson for me): Research becomes procrastination if it never ends. I recognize this pattern intimately. My own working rhythm often oscillates between deep immersion and sudden awareness that far more time has passed than I intended. Between ADHD-related time blindness, raising two small children, and the demands of writing this newsletter each week, I sometimes find that the hours available for “Future-Oriented” work—outreach, marketing, networking—shrink quickly.
The result is movement, but slower than I would like.
2. The Opportunist — JR
Present-Hedonistic
The French street artist JR doesn’t wait for gallery representation or five-year plans. He shows up in conflict zones, pastes massive portraits on walls, and walks away before the city tears them down. For JR, success is measured in the electricity of a moment.
The risk: Important strategic work gets neglected in favor of the next exciting thing.
The gift: Extraordinary responsiveness. The ability to act before the opportunity closes.
The lesson: Not every creative life requires a 20-year plan. Sometimes it requires the courage to act fully in the present before the light changes.
3. The Archivist — Theaster Gates
Past-Positive
Theaster Gates reclaims history through his art. He repurposes abandoned buildings and forgotten objects, turning neglected spaces and materials into living cultural institutions. His raw material is time itself, specifically what’s been lost or left behind.
The risk: Getting stuck in the past and curating instead of creating.
The gift: A creative voice with genuine weight and rootedness. Work that carries memory.
The lesson: If you find yourself constantly drawn backward, your nostalgia might be your greatest asset, as long as you use it to build something new.
4. The Endurance Artist — Marina Abramović
Present-Moment Endurance
In The Artist is Present, Abramović sat in a chair for 750 hours. She treats time as something to be inhabited, not managed. By refusing to rush, she forces both herself and her audience into a transformed state of consciousness.
The risk: This orientation can make conventional career-building feel meaningless or impossible.
The gift: The ability to sustain focus and presence longer than anyone else is willing to.
The lesson: Sometimes “moving forward” has nothing to do with speed. It’s about the willingness to stay in discomfort with a single idea, a single project, long after others have walked away.
5. The Hidden Artist — Vivian Maier
Present-Fatalistic
Vivian Maier took over 150,000 photographs in her lifetime. She showed them to no one. She worked as a nanny, shot obsessively in her private hours, and died without recognition. She wasn’t unaware of the art world; she simply didn’t believe she had access to it.
The risk: The work never leaves the private sphere.
The gift: Absolute creative freedom. No market pressure, no compromise.
The lesson: If you find yourself thinking “nothing I do will matter anyway,” that’s the Fatalist trap. The work matters. But it can’t matter to anyone if it stays hidden. You have to borrow some Future energy, just enough to hit send.
6. The Strategist — Olafur Eliasson
Future-Oriented
Olafur Eliasson runs a studio of 100 people. He thinks in terms of decades. Before a single brush touches canvas, he’s already mapped out the engineering challenges, the institutional partnerships, and the legacy of the project. He is, in essence, an artist who also runs a company.
The risk: The pressure of constant planning can crowd out the spontaneous, intuitive work that makes art meaningful.
The gift: The ability to execute at scale. To actually finish the things you dream about.
The lesson: Professional success in public art requires a future-oriented approach. You have to see the finished project clearly in your mind before you start work.
Future Time Perspective and Professional Success
While Leonardo’s deep-dive approach made him a genius, research shows that for the rest of us, Future Time Perspective (FTP)2 is the primary engine of professional success.
FTP is the ability to connect your current, boring actions (like sending an outreach email) to your long-term, exciting goals (like a solo exhibition). In the art world, high-FTP artists excel at:
Career Adaptability3: They can pivot when “life happens” because they have a mental map of where they are going.
Backward Planning: Calculating production, drying, and shipping times relative to a fixed exhibition date.
Proactive Personality: High-FTP individuals don’t wait for “inspiration”; they create the conditions for success by taking action today to benefit their “Future Work Self.”
Toward a Balanced Time Perspective
If you find yourself stuck in the “Researcher Loop,” you don’t need to become a rigid, clock-watching machine. Instead, you should strive for a Balanced Time Perspective.
The most successful contemporary artists—from Olafur Eliasson4 to Theaster Gates5—act as their own “Temporal CEOs.” They allow themselves to be like Leonardo in the studio (Fluid/Present), but they use the ZTPI “Future” lens when they step into the office.
This idea has become increasingly relevant in my own practice. Between studio work, writing, and parenting, my days are rarely long stretches of uninterrupted time. More often, they are fragmented into small windows. If I rely only on my natural creative rhythm—which tends toward immersion—I can easily spend an entire week in “Researcher time” without advancing the practical side of my work.
The solution I am experimenting with is treating one small portion of the day as “Future Time.” Even an hour devoted to outreach, applications, or planning can change the work's trajectory over months.
Ask yourself these three questions to audit your own temporal relationship:
Is my “Now” serving my “Then”? Are your current daily habits (or lack thereof) building the career you want in two years?
Am I using “Research” as a shield? Am I deep-diving into a topic to avoid the “Future-Positive” task of putting myself out there?
Do I have “Time Blindness”? Am I constantly underestimating how long a task takes? (If so, try the 1.5x Rule: take your best guess at a timeline and multiply it by 1.5).
A Brief Temporal Self-Assessment
Artists often operate in Kairos (opportune, qualitative time), while the market operates in Chronos (quantitative, ticking time). For many artists, the problem is deeper: it’s Temporal Cognitive Dissonance. This is the guilt and identity crisis that happens when your “Researcher” brain feels like it is “betraying” your art by doing “Entrepreneur” work.
Take a moment to look at your last week of work. Were you a Researcher lost in the physics of light? An Archivist mourning a past style? Or a Visionary paralyzed by a 5-year plan?
Understanding your archetype is the first step toward Balanced Time Perspective. It’s the realization that you can be Leonardo in the morning—polyphasic naps and deep inquiry included—as long as you have a system to be the “CEO” for one hour in the afternoon.
Working With Your Internal Clock
Whether you’re a Researcher who gets lost in depth, a Flow-Seeker who lives for the present moment, or a Strategist working 18 months ahead, your temporal style isn’t a problem to fix.
The history of art is full of people who succeeded wildly on their own internal clock—and people who never got to share what they made because they couldn’t bridge the gap between their creative life and the world waiting to receive it.
Leonardo took decades. Michelangelo met his deadline while complaining the entire time. Vivian Maier never sent a single submission. JR worked overnight and walked away at dawn.
There’s no single right way to move through time as an artist. There’s only the question of whether your system is working for you or whether you’re working against yourself.
Which archetype resonates most with you—the Researcher, the Opportunist, the Archivist, the Endurance Artist, the Hidden Artist, or the Strategist? Or some combination of all of them?
Great article.
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I LOVED this post. Especially the links you make between the different archetypes on different artworks. I might just approach my day a little different today as a result. Thank you 🤍