Productivity

I got a little more serious in the past few weeks about getting my groove back as far as my art is concerned.  For way too long, I've been stumbling my way through doing things, often sitting down in front of the computer with no plan and no inspiration, but needing to churn something out for a website regardless.  Often, the result has been an uninspired hackjob that I've been less than proud of.

 I recently started listening to some audiobooks on setting goals and being more productive while traveling in the car by myself.  It got me to do some writing, and I was able to outline some specific goals for myself, and really envisioned what I wanted to be doing with my artwork.  I kept going and wrote out quite a few storylines for the comic sites I'm doing, and then I sketched out a bunch of pages, and drew up some layouts for them in CorelDraw.  Now when I make my renders in Poser, I know exactly what to do.

More importantly, I took a stack of index cards and came up with a production schedule for each of the sites, with explicitly spelled out deadlines and quotas.  So I also know when I need to get things done.

The spike in my productivity has been amazing, and I'm much happier with my work now than I've been in the past few years.  Once all of the baggage in my head that consisted of worrying about deadlines and content was pulled out and placed on cards, it really freed up my mental processes to focus on more creative aspects of my work.

The really exciting thing is that this is only the start of what's possible.  I'd like to apply these principles to other aspects of my life and see what I can accomplish.

My listening material, all available from iTunes:
* Getting Things Done by David Allen
* Goals! How to Get Everything You Want by Brian Tracy
* The Power of Intention by Dr. Wayne Dyer