The kids have been needing me a lot more in the evenings and throughout the night lately, which has left me with no time or energy to work on my creative pursuits. In looking at my thorough documenting of my writing every day, I decided to come up with a system to keep track of all of my creative projects too.

What I felt deep down though was that I didn’t really want to be tracking every minute of work on each of my projects. I can more or less remember the next step I need to take for each without needing to write it down (if it’s a painting or sewing project or something). Usually. And so it felt like an awful lot of overhead to actually get around to the thing I wanted to do, which was to keep going on my creative projects, even if only a little bit at a time, every day.

The thing I decided to do instead was to actually commit to doing my art reflections. When I started painting with acrylic I started learning a lot of lessons that I wanted to actually remember, so the idea to write those learnings down once I finished a creative project seemed like a perfect way to do that. After a while that became overhead too and I more or less abandoned the idea. Today, I paged through my creative project ideas notebook where I track all my ideas and whether they are in progress or completed, and I started actually writing down some reflections for each of my completed pieces.

The process was fantastic! I didn’t always write about specific lessons or tips of tricks I learned, but in reflecting on each piece I was able to remember my work pretty well and I came to realize that I actually have made a lot of art over the past couple of years (since I’ve started keeping track of my ideas and such). It’s been a great motivator to keep going.

So going forward that’s the system I’m going to stick with, at least while it works. Once a project is finished, I will write up a reflection on it. This way it’ll be very motivating while I’m in the trenches and also nice to look through at the end of the year and see how much I actually managed to accomplish, despite all the occasional chaos of my daily life.