My desk in my studio last year...can't wait to move into my new studio soon!Hello, readers! It's been awhile...my apologies! I am getting ready to go back to school over here (a week from Wednesday--we start late on the quarter system) and checking things off my to-do lists.
I'm still working on my 30-day-challenge but I'm not going to post about it every day, and I'm actually rewriting some of my rules. It was stressing me out too much to do a blog post on it every day and was limiting my creativity. It might be good for some people but for my way of working it was just too much. So, instead I'm going to make a post about it once a week, highlighting what I did the previous week. These posts will appear on Mondays starting next Monday.
I will go ahead and be honest and admit that I took one week off from my challenge. In some ways I guess that's failing the challenge, but the whole thing has been good for me and a learning experience. I think the challenge actually made me see all the ways I hinder my productivity when I'm in charge of all of my time! Ouch. But that's a good thing. During my week off, I wasn't taking a break completely, however, but working on fine details rather than making finished photographs. This included gathering new props, sewing new flower masks, brainstorming, and writing about my ideas. Totally necessary stuff! I'm getting back into shooting daily but I'm only going to shoot 5 days a week. I'll use the other 2 days a week to do all of those other important things that I just mentioned. I'm going to start at square one and do this for 6 weeks, so that equals 30 days of shooting. After that I would like to keep shooting at least 3 days a week.
I have also given my content serious thought and have narrowed it down more than before. I'll be talking about that next Monday. But, the biggest change is that I'm going to be bringing in more personal anecdotes, and pairing them with the work. I mentioned before that I took a creative writing for visual artists workshop this summer. In the workshop, the thing I was inspire to write most was short, autobiographical stories. I actually have a lot of stories that fit in with the topics I'm dealing with in my art! So I just needed to realize that and put it together. My plan is to work on 1-2 stories per week, so I'll spend a few days figuring out how to illustrate each story.
I have also been inspired by Elise of Argyle Whale to restructure the way I work from home or from my school studio, when it's ready, when I'm on my own time. It's easy to make blog posts and do other work while sitting on my bed in my pj's but this morning I started off my day by getting ready and am doing my work from my desk all day! It's definitely an obvious solution to increasing my productivity but hey, being your own boss is hard. So, no more tv in the background for me on my work days, no more cleaning my home for half the day as a means of procrastinating my creative work. I'm going to have a lot more independent working time this quarter (versus taking a lot of classes) and I am going to make the most of it.
How do you stay inspired to get work done without getting distracted?
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