Monday, January 02, 2012

Creative 15

New year's resolution: spend the first 15 minutes of every day doing something creative.

While teaching I noticed that I was needing to go to bed earlier and earlier each day; an odd occurrence as I'm usually craving for more night time and can usually get by with 4-5 hours sleep. By the end I was taking a power nap straight after work before tea to keep some sort of regular pattern in my day.

There have been other times when I've used power naps to solve problems. If I'm stuck on a difficult Programming problem, I'd take a 15 minute nap and almost always wake up with the correct solution.

While writing assignments for Uni it felt like what I need to start writing is a good sleep. I had put this down to my finely honed procrastination skills, but maybe there's more to it?

Teaching has been far more creative than I'd expected. Even fully prepared lessons seem to go awry and require to to think on your feet to get the topic covered another way, and most of my lessons weren't as prepared as I'd have liked. It seems that I can easily function in a logical and analytical manner on hardly any sleep, but to be creative I need a good sleep.

To test this theory, I'm planning on spending the first 15 minutes of each day on something creative. Drawing, building, writing, blogging, coding, designing, singing, playing. Something. Hopefully 15 minutes at the start of the day won't take out too much from the craving to catch up with what's going on in the world, and maybe even make enough time to get some ideas down.

First creative15 was to get the blogger app for the iPad so that I could quickly write if that's what I wanted to do. Turns out 15 minutes is out to about 45 by now, but I'm Ok with that too.

Here's a picture done on the iPad in procreate when testing the concept. It's not finished, but I'm happy with the result and it felt good to draw again.

Hmmm, colours on the iPad screen seem different. Oh well ..