Clearing the Way to Do Artist’s Work: some time-tested solutions

Creative Workout: Do a prep task, lasting no more than 4 hours using David Seah’s productivity sheets. Note whether stopping regularly helped with deferring procrastination or interfered.

Artists can feel mad, as in crazy-mad because they often feel like they are tossed about a million times over in an effort to get their left and right brains in gear. And because  they have to do what often feels like endless setup just to begin.  The plight of us all!

The trick is to use what you can to get settled quicker.  It’s an area I think I could help you with, since I’ve been on the lookout these days for some how to’s.  Sustained focus isn’t exactly easy when constant distractions fall into your lap, and when the chatter of our mind insists on taking care of every little thing.  But hey, there’s a limit to this, and you might as well heed it.

In this workout, identify your task and break it down into its key components.  It can be a task that is four hours or less. Then, locate the productivity sheet of David Seah online.  If you find you like less structure to your task tracking, check out this, more open-ended Task Tracker for Creative Types. Then, get yourself some beautifully colored markers and color in your progress with each fifteen minute increment as you go.  It’s a simple device to bring your attention back to where you are in pursuit of completion of the whole.  It also serves as a great reminder about how you actually end up spending  your time.

By the way, if your task is longer than four hours, it is probably not a single task and not one that will make this productivity sheet suitable.  Instead, make sure your overall goal is pretty much what you want to accomplish in a four hour slot, and then, reward yourself for moving forward on your path.  The strategy may not work for everyone but there’s nothing like seeing the results of your sustained attention, especially when it is towards doing what you really want to complete.

So, what about you?  What visual devices do  you find useful?

For a Fundraiser, Set Your Criteria for Success, Then Go!

Fund-raising is sometimes a hit or miss effort, but an effort it is.  And yet, more and more, creative professionals need to fold fundraising into their sustainability plans.  To address the challenge, it occurred to me that surfacing resistance at the very start of our project, even if indirectly, might not be a bad idea.

At the start of projects, what you want most is to get people on board.  The more you can do this, the more likely people will see their own values reflected in the chosen projects, and therefore, experience their own desires to remain connected to those projects.

An unwitting mistake is often to plunge into some activity straight off.  For example, you could involve your team quickly in a fund-raising challenge by asking them to locate and engage with some online communities (it is actually one of the preliminary tasks) or do some online research highlighting admirable stories about how like-minded organizations pulled off their fundraisers, but lately, I’m thinking no.  Better to harvest the most potential by generating passionate commitment within the fundraising team.  It’s a little like deciding to play closer to home.

To do this, identify a set of professional criteria for evaluating what your successful fund-raising campaign MUST deliver before you even begin reaching out to folks.  Setting criteria helps you narrow down the best groups to appeal to.  Choosing personal criteria as well as professional criteria will also add cohesion.  For example, you could ask those in your fund-raising circle what matters to them in terms of spurring their own engagement/ commitments and then, expand the professional list to make room for those personal items.

For criteria building around my own community, I knew that it would be best to to include criteria that reflected both the personal and professional. To see what I ended up with, check out my Social Media Guidelines here. Such a criteria list is bound to help people more precisely target their efforts, help eliminate good but still not compelling enough ideas, and get individuals on a team thinking more about the MOST FRUITFUL ways to make connections and build support into their fundraiser events.

When you think about how challenging fundraising really can be, why not take the time to aim a little better?

Have You Exercised At All Today? No, I mean, exercised your brain!

There’s a book that’s been around since ‘99, but one which is the forerunner to many since. It’s called Keep Your Brain Alive by Lawrence Katz and Manning Rubin, and they’ve named their fitness practice, Neurobics.

The premise is that to keep our productivity up, we need to be exercising our brain — daily. For example, learning something new every day, like waking up and smelling something unexpected (vanilla instead of coffee), putting a chess game in a collaborative space so with each person throughout the day is responsible for making just one move, doing common tasks but with the hand you don’t typically use, and placing different gelatin filters over your lamps, (which create new associations).  These simple activities all lead the way toward increasing your mental fitness.

I particularly like the one that makes the shopping list into a treasure hunt. Instead of listing the ingredients, describe them so the shopper has to work a bit to figure out the ingredients for dinner.  Oh, and have a backup plan, just in case.

Both playful and very serious, Keep Your Brain Alive sells at Amazon.

Social Media Success Simplified — seriously!

I don’t know about you but to me, it seems much of the way social media is presented is far too fragmented so many, many people end up losing sight of what they’re doing.

While there are an enormous number of possibilities rife with life, it doesn’t have to feel like being dropped out in the middle of a sea.  Or gagging as relentless waves take you under.  Quite simply, do not accept any feelings of being washed up, wet and weary, consigned to  some unfriendly, foreign shore.  Don’t.

You have only to be clear what it is you are setting out to reach, and then, with feedback, hear what modifications need to be made to maintain momentum.

So, using my experience with a local community parks project, think of the social media effort like the four simple but distinct stages you see below, and then, see if you can take your own project and work the branches/elements within each of those stages.

The Stages:

1.  Visibility
2.  Engagement
3.  Call(s) To Action(s)
4.  Evaluation and Re-Engagement

The tools you pull in to help you do each of these branch elements may feel a bit confusing and cumbersome at first but you’ll gain direct experience and zero in on each tool’s real value each time you go forward/get the practice.  The idea is to understand the essential terrain as mapped above, letting an overview like this help in many directions —  things like making sure you don’t get ahead of yourself, keeping you and your team focused on the bigger picture, and not what others are doing, using the branches as delegation opportunities for those areas you don’t know,  laying out a schedule for execution by task, etc. I found this overview enormously helpful in practice.

So, what do you think?  Do you have something like this to guide your social media implementation strategy?