20 for 2020: week 7

Week of 10 February

After two intense days of editing my uni assignment last weekend, I was grateful for a public holiday on Monday to recover.

Kramstable and I were home and we took advantage of the space I’d made to set up the studio equipment (thing 11) and find out how we might be able to make it work. It didn’t all go according to plan and there are a few issues we need to sort out, but it’s happening.

I went to the coffee shop on Monday morning and did some of the journalling for the creative abundance course (thing 6). This was about projects I want to work on and how I might go about making them happen. I can now tick off the work for lessons 12 and 13. One of the projects is my photo project (thing 1), which I’m working on in my 15 minute creative time in the mornings. I missed one day because I slept through my alarm and woke up so late I didn’t even have time to go for a walk. I had gone home sick the day before and I had slept half that day, so I’ll cut myself some slack there. Being unwell is a reason not to walk and I obviously needed sleep. Needing the sleep isn’t the same thing as lying in bed for an hour because I can’t force myself to get up.

I finished the journalling for days 14 and 15 of the creative abundance course. There’s a lot of work involved in this and part of me thinks I’d be better off going out and doing something than writing about why I want to do it. But having a why is important because it keeps you motivated when you feel like giving up, so I’m going to keep working on it. (Yes, I feel like giving up on the thing that is supposed to motivate me to keep going when I feel like giving up. What?!)

I stuck in two photo collages into my 2019 journal just to say I had made some progress on thing 4.

I have to complete the second module of my uni unit (thing 8) in preparation for the face to face workshop that starts on Monday so I worked on that. I came up with a startling realisation connected to one of the readings that I need to explore further, on top of all the things that came out of the work I did on my assignment. This has been an intense unit.

I’m still trying to get my reading habit (thing 14) established. Some nights when I go to bed early enough I read in bed, and some days I read on the bus on the way to work. But I don’t always go to bed on time and I don’t always catch the bus, so I wouldn’t call either of them habits just yet. I finished reading Clare Bowditch’s memoir, Your Own Kind of Girl, which is a wonderful book. Subtitled The stories we tell ourselves and what happens when we believe them, the things that Clare related touched me deeply and what I reflected in as I was reading it connected with the work I’ve been doing in my uni self-analysis and in the creative abundance course. Funny how there are things you need to hear and they all come and hit you at the same time in a pretty intense sort of way.

20200214 Your Own Kind of Girl
Go and read this book!

As I said a couple of weeks ago, I’m still struggling with doing the scheduling exercise from the book Indistractible (thing 13) so that’s delayed me I’ve used that as an excuse to delay doing the other work from the book. I recently watched this video from Brooke Shaden about how she structures her days, which I found interesting and I thought it might be fun to imagine that I didn’t have to attend my place of employment and make up a weekly schedule of how my life might be if my life were solely dedicated to my creative work. So I made a Google calendar called “my artistic life”, hid all my other calendars and set to work.

A few things jumped out from that. First, I had no travel time, which would free up about an hour and a half every day for me to do my creative work. I was also able to schedule in the things I have to do to keep my creative work organised, like sorting photos, that I struggle to find time for now and that take time away from actually doing things with my photos.

The ideal week was probably unrealistic because didn’t take into account the fact that there are people, like my family, who might sometimes want to spend time with me. But it did see me going out walking three times a day and having a 30-minute nap at my lowest energy time of day. At that time of day I’m useless to anyone so might as well be napping rather than being completely unproductive struggling to keep my eyes open. It was a fun exercise and maybe there are some adjustments I can make to my current schedule (that I never stick to) to bring it closer to my ideal creative week.

Summary for the week
• Things completed this week: 0
• Things completed to date: 3 (10, 16, 18)
• Things I progressed: 6 (1, 4, 6, 8, 11, 14)
• Things in progress I didn’t progress: 3 (3, 13, 22)
• Things not started: 10 (2, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21)

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