review – week 1 of making every day

On Sundays I’m going to review the week past. I’ve done 9 days of making something every day. Woohoo! The formatting of this post is wonky and shoddy because it’s 8.30pm on Sunday and I haven’t made the dinner yet and I’m going to get yelled at. what i set out to do (having written … Continue reading review – week 1 of making every day →

On Sundays I’m going to review the week past. I’ve done 9 days of making something every day. Woohoo! The formatting of this post is wonky and shoddy because it’s 8.30pm on Sunday and I haven’t made the dinner yet and I’m going to get yelled at.

what i set out to do (having written it, I realise this is a post hoc set of justifications – see below…)

practice making something every daynot losing my whole day to duties and choresfeel less stressed about doing the workdo more work and less sitting aroundstill do my day job wellprocess some of the stuffrediscover collaborators and fanspractice writing in public every dayrevive my blogging practicerecord what I’ve actually been doingunderstand my adhd betterfind strategies for working with my adhd betterbe more productive and happierhave things to give away as giftshave things to selldo some new things and learn some new skillsprobably loads more vague aspirations.

“Shit, that’s a lot” – if I’d shared all this with someone beforehand, they might have said something like “you seem to have a lot riding on this, don’t you want to make it a bit more simple and manageable?” and my answer is still, “No, these are all the things I want to do and that’s why I’m doing this exercise. I don’t see it that my happiness is ‘riding’ on the work, simply that these are the benefits I can see accruing from doing the work and doing it every day. If I had to narrow down what I actually set out to do, it was to practice making something and writing about the process every day in order to learn more about my adhd in the context of creative work. This is why I never could stand project managers.

what happened this week?

I made something and posted a blog post about it every dayThe first day I was a bit late writing about it, I think.I refined my blogging processesI researched blogging software

I made:
* a timelapse video
* a hand-drawn animated gif
* a collection of 35mm scans from 1981
* a very short (2 or 3 bars) snippet of music
* some candle wax ready for re-use
* 320 words on “What were the eighties really like?”
* a twitter thread about this process
* a twitter thread describing a weird dream I had
* a collection of photos of my day
* a set of eight (rough) sheets of origami paper
* a collection of reminiscence materials to send to my uncle
* a new plan for a piece about the 1980s
* a fire
* six small twigs of charcoal

I realised how much I blame myself for not having been disciplined enough to do this is in the past.

I realised how many different things I want to do. The desire to give up any day job is about having time to do these things.

I’m learning about my capacity to actually do them. I don’t have to give them all up, but I also can live better with them not happening soon or ever.

I also saw more creativity coming into everyday life. eg. I made some vegetable stock to make a dinner a bit more exciting.

what is worth persevering with?

It’s great to write and publish every day, no matter what.Having a prompt and some idea that I will stick to it, is working for me – I don’t always make something exactly as I expected, but I’m also not getting distracted by the other things, I can just go “no, that’s not wastecraft” or whatever “that will have to wait for another day”I will continue at least until I’ve done one of everything on the list. I’m still not revealing the list until I’ve done one of everything.I’m drafting in workflowy and draftsapp and now pulling everything together in draftsapp which can auto post to my wordpress blog. I then copy and paste to hiveblog – it works so that’s something.I’m not sharing to Facebook. This is a conscious choice and part of a general desire to keep most of my creative work away from there. It helps me that there are far fewer people reading and commenting here, it feels manageable.

what might I change?

I’ve amended the weekend routine to be “freestyle” on Saturday and a review (like this… only better?) on Sunday. I think it works (unless I find tomorrow that I’m still trying to bend the rules).I’d like to have a smoother process for hive, something that mirrors the wordpress action in drafts.I’d also like to be able to blog straight from the outliner – at the moment I’m doing microblog or note posting via twitter. It might be that I have to PESOS this for now, but I’d like my blog to be more than just these making posts.I’d like to be doing more writing as I go, rather than reporting at the end of the day on work done. Feels like homework. The blogging should be more integral to the work.

OK I’m totally bored with reviewing now. There are bound to be more things under every heading, but I think having expressed anything.

Here’s where we went for a day out today, it was lovely.