This Tuesday, I was staring blankly at my PC, clicking between windows to find something to do between drawing sessions. Then I remembered a project I had started the day before: a web app dashboard to track my drawing hours, made to replace the physical calendar on my wall.
I opened the project, imported my data, and saw this:
This diagram shows my whole year. Each square represents one day, the more orange it is, the more work I did. The most I’ve ever done in one day was 4.8 hours. Seeing my actual habits visualized like this was sobering.
I’ll draw more when I have more time
That’s the lie I told myself from September to January. But the data completely blew that assumption away:
Let’s look at November vs February. In November my schedule was packed with classes and gym. The only time I had to draw was about 2 hours in the morning before school and on weekends. In total I drew for 58.3 hours that month.
February, on the other hand, was completely empty. I didn’t need to be anywhere except the gym. So I had all the time in the world. In total I drew for 59 hours.
That’s a 42 minute difference between one of my busiest school months and my freest month, basically the same amount.
So why did I draw almost 60 hours in those months and only 4 hours in April and 3 in May?
It changed when in August I took on a big commission, that took me to 48 hours. In September I mainly worked on designing a new refsheet for my character. The 1st of October was when my study went viral, so for the next 3 months my only goal was to post more of them. In total I drew for 158 hours in those 3 months.
I always go down the path of least resistance. If I have a meaningful project, the path lies through it. The only thing I need discipline for at that point is to structure my days.
Think of your creative energy like a river. If you don’t direct where it flows, it splits up into shallow, scattered streams that dry up and go nowhere. A specific project is the riverbank, it focuses all your scattered energy into a single current.
Build your riverbank
A project forces you to carve out time for it out of your existing routine. My data shows that committing to a specific project increased my output from 4 hours in April to 48 hours in August.
Here’s how you make up that project:
- Pick one specific outcome. If you’ve always wanted to make a refsheet for your character, or a cool illustration – there’s your project.
- Set a constraint. It can be an arbitrary deadline, for example right now I’m trying to post a new sketch or study every 1-2 days on Twitter.
- Find your best hours and use them. For me it’s the morning right after gym, every day I sit down and draw either a study or a cool idea I had.
You’ll know you’ve built your riverbank when each time you sit down to draw, you know exactly what you’re going to do this time.
