Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

Edited by Jocelyn K. Glei

My husband gave me a book for Christmas that he heard about on the Chiot's Run organic blog, Manage YourDay-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your CreativeMind. It's a collection of essays on the topic, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei. I’ve been reading a bit of it every day.

Just as the title suggests, the articles in this book focus on building a good routine, and focusing while using creativity to your advantage in the workplace, or building your creativity in any area of your life. They are short and easy to digest. There are some great reminders and good information.

Just the simple admonishment to do the thing that is most important first in your day instead of trying to get all the other little things out of the way first, is so obvious and yet counter to my typical thinking. I tend to think that if I get things tidied up or cleaned in the house first, then I’ll be better able to concentrate, but then something always seems to come up and the creative work keeps getting pushed aside. It really has profound implications for all areas of my life – my work, my child and my writing.

The article on Harnessing the Power of Frequency by Gretchen Rubin really spoke to the heart of my writing dilemma. It helped me to realize that the key to my writing productivity is going to be writing smaller amounts more frequently.  There is just no other way in my current schedule to make room for writing.

Building Renewal into Your Workday by Tony Schwartz was a good reminder too. My boss is always saying that we are given vacations and breaks for a reason. If you don’t take them then you are doing yourself a disservice and you will become less productive over time.

The article on multitasking, Banishing Multitasking from Our Repertoire by Christian Jarrett, really echoed my thinking. I’ve been hearing that multitasking is counterproductive for a long time but he put it in a different light that I appreciated by explaining that there’s really no such thing as multitasking, just switching between tasks really fast.  However, there’s always some lag as your brain switches gears and you do the tasks you are switching between more slowly than if you had just focused on one to begin with.

The articles are organized into sections on ROUTINE, FINDING FOCUS IN A DISTRACTE WORLD, TAMING YOUR TOOLS, and SHARPENING YOUR CREATIVE MIND from a multitude of authors. Honestly, there is so much in the short articles in this little book that it took me a while to digest it and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it again. I highly recommend it.

Artist’s Journal Workshop by Cathy Johnson

Artist’s Journal Workshop

creating your life in words and pictures
with insights from 27 artists
By Cathy Johnson

Now this would make a great Christmas present.  Hey, and she’s even offering autographed copies, a favorite gift of mine.  Of course, I highly encourage you to take a look at it through your local library, before you buy it.

Don’t think of this as a journal that only someone who is a trained artist would make, but as a journal to express the artistic part of yourself.

“People sometimes tell me their lives are too boring or uneventful to journal.  I’m not buying it.  They say there’s nothing to draw that’s not mundane.  But seeing and capturing such things in the pages of a journal rescues them from the mundane.”

I’ve always said everyone has a story to tell.  I encourage people to journal.  I’ve often heard people say they can’t write or they can’t draw, even though I know they made it through school so they must be able to put words on paper, and most people have at least doodled in the margins of paper while they talked on the phone. 

If you don’t enjoy these things, that is certainly valid, but what people usually mean is that they can’t create with the level of sophistication that they see coming from professionals.  Maybe it will be more representational than a direct picture, but you can draw.  You did when you were in kindergarten, right?  You can learn techniques and improve but just drawing will help you improve too.  If you are interested in this, don't let your current level of skill and knowledge deter you.  You will find your own mode of expression.

“This book will show you how to keep your own artist’s journal.  As you celebrate the moments of your life, you’ll discover your own way of capturing them on paper, whether you choose to do simple gesture sketches in less than thirty seconds or to design a complex page with borders, textures, layers or text.”

The author explores such basic questions as “What do you want from your journal?” and “What will go into your journal?”  It might seem art was intended to be shared but she suggests that even whether or not you share the journal is totally up to you.  She explores materials and supplies, like the many different types of pens and pencils, watercolor pencils, simple ballpoint pens.

She does stress that you should put name and contact info inside.  She says many friends have lost a journal and they usually get it back because they did that.

Looking at her images might be intimidating for those of us who are not artistically trained.  Let them serve as an inspiration instead.  What she’s showing you is much later in your journey, perhaps, but it’s also her journey, not yours. 

She encourages you to simply try things - try color, try ink, try collage. 

“For the first ten years or so that I kept an artist’s journal, I worked almost exclusively in black or brown with a pencil or technical pen.  For nature observations, studies and research, the pens worked beautifully – nice crisp details!”    Then she added colored pencils and built up to exploring all sorts of mediums in her journal.

This book provides just the right amount of art instruction as well as the inspiration to create an artist’s journal.  She provides instructions on how to do quick gesture sketches and even how to elaborate on things later, as well as different topics to journal about – nature, travel, dreams and your flights of fancy, challenges that you face in life, and/or your spiritual journal.

Making time may be the hardest part of any journaling endeavor but it can be done, trust me.  Whether you have some creative energy that is burning to get out or a spark that needs to be carefully tended to bring it back to life, you can do this.  Make time for yourself.

The Artist's Way ~ Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to a Higher Creativity
By Julia Cameron

When I first got this book as a teenager I started to read it, got bored with it (probably because I didn’t have a good frame of reference to connect to it) and put it away.  Over a decade later, I picked it up again and used it as a twelve week course.  I wrote the three longhand, brain dump, morning pages every morning (almost) and I read one chapter every Sunday then picked out a couple exercises I could readily do.  It was a game changer for me.  Along with The Joy Diet by Martha Beck, it turned how I approached life on its head.

The text at the top of the cover says “A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self.”  That creativity can be applied to any area of your life.  You do not need to be a writer or a painter.  The writing that she asks you to do is not about creating something for someone else to read, it is merely a pouring out of your thoughts onto paper.  In fact, you are admonished NOT to show them to other people.  This is for your mind alone.

 “As you work with the tools in this book, as you undertake the weekly tasks, many changes will be set in motion.  Chief among those changes will be the triggering of synchronicity: we change and the universe furthers and expands that change.  I have an irreverent shorthand for this that I keep taped to my writing desk: ‘leap, and the net will appear.’ ”

The basic tools are the morning pages and the artist date.  Sometimes referred to as “brain drain,” the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness” to help you get the junk out of your brain.  No one will be reading them, not even you.  “All that angry, whiny, petty stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity.”  Let it out and let it go.  Morning pages are, in essence, a type of meditation.  Meditation is learning to let our thoughts pass by without judgment.  Here they are passing out onto our pages. 

If the morning pages are the outpouring of angst, then the artist date is the inflow, the filling of the creative well.  You need both.  Many things can constitute an artist date, from listening to music to gardening to cooking. 

“Remember, art is an artist-brain pursuit.  This brain is reached through rhythm – through rhyme, not reason.  Scraping a carrot, peeling an apple – these actions are quite literally food for thought.”

The weeks proceed through recovering a sense of Safety, of Identity, of Power, of Integrity, of Possibility, of Abundance, of Connection, of Strength, of Compassion, of Self-Protection, of Autonomy and, finally, of Faith. 

As a child you may have been instilled with the ideas that you can’t make a living at what you love doing, that you aren’t an artist or that you’re no good at it.  This book is about inspiration and permission to do what you love, what you may be thinking you can’t do.  You can, and this book can help you figure out how.

Reading through this again has inspired me.  I think it’s time to do this course again from a new perspective.  Mid June seems like the perfect time.  Meet you at the end of summer and we can compare notes.