Going through my hard drive can often give me a touch of heart break. Half-used, discarded project ideas rot in digital cardboard boxes strewn about the storage space. It's hard to see them sitting there, knowing full well that at their inception, these projects had all of my attention and all of passion. I had believed these projects. Now, they do little else but take up space.
Why? I know for certain some of the projects didn't live up to the assessing process that I run all of my projects through nowadays, but others were simply labeled 'Cause of Death: Unknown'.
Though the left-brain-right-brain myth has been debunked, most of us know two types of people - organized, detail-oriented people, and creative, big-picture people. There are many people I know that are a mix of both, but the archetypes exist for a reason, and it certainly speaks to something true about people. "What do you know about categories of people?" you may ask. "You're just an anti-social artist that - ope, guess that proves your point. Sorry."
It's okay, hypothetical skeptic. I forgive you.
Part of why my opinion is so strong about the left brain vs. right brain, planner vs. pantser, detail vs. big picture stereotypes is that I am 100% an ideas based, improvisational spaghetti-brained artist without an organizational bone in my body. I can say with utmost certainty that if I let my brain do what it wanted, I would have a million project ideas without a single finished work by the time I died.
Granted, having that realization wasn't a bad thing. It simply taught me that I need to swim upstream a little to make sure these beautiful ideas come to life. At a writer's conference last year, I heard Chloe Burgett speak on exactly how she makes this happen, and I took away quite a lot from that and made it my own. If you're anything like me, I'll pass this bit of advice along: just for a few hours a month, pretend to be organized, goal-oriented, metrics-focused, and responsible. Within the structures we establish, your creative self will thrive in a way it never has when working on personal projects.
Step 1: Assess Your Time
This one is straight from Burgett's seminar: the time wheel! For a visual person like me it presents time management in a whole new light. Draw a circle no smaller than the palm of your hand and chop it up into 24 slices. These are your hours. Now, in order of most important to least important, write out the different ways in which you spend your time on an average day. I started with sleep, then client work (bread on the table), personal work (what this blog is all about - passion projects!), and "me time" (chores, relaxing, spending time with family and friends). Assign each category a color and fill out the wheel as a best-case scenario for your day.
Here's an example of one of my wheels - this being on a day where I'm not teaching at the university. Another thing Burgett mentioned was defining your Power Hour - the time at which you are most alert. This is where I put my personal work, because nobody is cracking the whip on those projects except me. This is just a small way that I can better set myself up for success and get these projects done.
Everyone's wheel is going to look different - even from day to day! I have a totally different wheel for days I'm teaching and Fridays when I'm ahead on client work. Some of you may not have the same amount of time in the day to work for 3 hours on something you love - but I know somewhere in there, you have at least one hour, even if it doesn't align with your power hour. If it wasn't clear already, I'm not a mathematician, but I can safely say one hour a week is better than zero.
Step 2: Break it Down
The next thing she showed us blew my little right brain. I'd heard of - and woefully attempted - time blocking before, but this time, with the addition of the time wheel, it clicked. Whatever physical planner or calendar app you use comes into play now. Spend a bit of time on Sunday or Monday breaking down your week, blocking the time out in the same colors that you assigned on the time wheel. Be specific in labeling each colored block. Don't just write "Personal Work" from 8 pm to 10 pm, write "Chapter 6 Edits" or "Coloring Page 10" or "Practice Measures 85-204". Make sure you leave your future brain no time to hem and haw over what needs to be done in that moment - liberate yourself of the planning and deciding in the middle of a week full of stress and unpredictability. Here's an example of my week last July. As you can see, not everything fell exactly where I ideally wanted it to because of client work, but I still used the time wheel as my north star in planning it out.
Step 3: Plan Out Your 'Personal Work'
Once Burgett started talking about project planning, journaling, timelines, and retro-scheduling, things got a bit too complicated for me, so I took what I learned and made a little something on my own. For me, those yellow chunks on the time wheel and Google calendar are the times that are most susceptible to getting erased or written over, because in my mind, my personal projects offer no immediate monetary or practical value for anyone but me. For some of you that may be different, but right now I am content with how I view my personal projects;
they are things that bless me and I one day want to bless others with, but if I threw all of the weight of my financial survival on them, I know I would come to hate them.
With all of that out of the way, here's how I plan out my projects. I start with my yearly goal, break it down into quarters, weeks and days. Using my current time wheel, I have 15 hours a week to work on personal work, so how can I break down my weekly goals that add up to 15 hours? It may take fine-tuning as you go, but for me, this model has saved projects from the brink of death. Here's one of my 6 project plans for 2025. I plan out every quarter right at its start after assessing the previous quarter, asking myself, "How did last quarter go? Was it too much or too little?" I'll share how you can grab this make-shift project planner for yourself at the bottom of the page.
Step 4: Extend Grace
This last one is a must. Things come up, plans get altered, schedules shift, motivation runs dry. If there's one thing to take away here it's that your artistic projects deserve to get done, and for me, I have to work against my nature and wear a waffle-brained hat once in a while so my spaghetti brain can run free in the day-to-day. For some of you, this will only be a burden, and as C.S. Lewis would say, if it stops being helpful in pointing you towards that goal, drop it. Good luck out there!
If you're interested in a copy of my simple yearly project planner from Step 3:
Fill out the box at the bottom of the page and join my mailing list so you never miss a new post about creative living and storytelling!
Leave a comment about how you organize your time and get your projects done on your own time.
I'll send you an email with a link to the Google Sheets. Follow the link and click File in the top left corner.
In the dropdown menu, click 'Make a Copy' and find a place on your Google Drive to store it for your own use!
Thanks for stopping by today. In line with my poor planning, the month of December was insanely busy, so blog about creating ideas out of thin air will be coming out next week instead, as I resume my usual blogging schedule. Hope to see you then!
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