This is mostly a rant that I felt like would be a good Everyweek. I want to write about this week because I feel like I learned something valuable. It’s probably going to be really long and really frustrating to read and all over the damn place so I wouldn’t recommend it haha. Timeline, this is also going to cover the last 8 everydays. Also if you do want to read this, it’s going to cover my full thoughts on everydays and how I feel about them in general.

So let us visit the start of why I suddenly decided I needed a write up.

I decided last week that I was going to start up a new season of Everydays. This decision does not come lightly and requires a lot of preplanning and set up if you want to be successful. First you need to know what the fuck you are going to do everyday but mine is pretty easy. A minimum of a 1000x1000 exported image out of Blender every day for 90 days. What I actually do for the image doesn't matter. It can be literally anything even if it’s shit. When they’re shit it sucks because I don’t like to put out stuff I don’t like BUT YOU HAVE TO! It’s part of that growing process and you learn from that. It’s the fact you did it that actually matters but you need that drive of “Ohh, I don’t like that one” to make tomorrow better. Second you need to set guidelines for how long you are to spend on this side project. I have a full time job so the most I can provide is 2-4 hours per day. Next I need personal time so I make sure to have at least 2 hours where I can relax and just chill, play a game, watch a video, whatever. You’re going to be doing these EVERY FUCKING DAY for however long you said you would so plan for it! Lastly you need to post it. Post it somewhere people can see it online and that will give you accountability which is a major part of this. Without accountability of some kind, you will lose drive. Everydays has the potential for massive learning in what seems like literally the most accelerated method possible. Unfortunately everydays also has the potential to solidify bad habits and push you to think short term throughout the entire creative process as well as pushing you to your limits in the first place. Because “massive learning” and “solidifying bad habits” are two of the features/byproducts of everydays, it would make sense that you could “massively learn bad habits”. I find it hard to jump in and out of the everyday mindset because of how extreme your time management has to be and that’s where I feel like you can get into trouble. To help, you need to narrow it down. Most of the good you get out of a project is in the first 50% (or whatever, I’m sure there’s science somewhere) so what you need to do is make that 50% your new 100%. Sacrifices need to be made before the project starts to make this work but it’s all part of the deal. Lower your expectations so you can make better decisions on what and how you’re going to do your project for the day. The more you can narrow your subject and project scope the better. Otherwise you go in to make Avatar and end up with a sphere in some fog (been there).

Now all that is totally fine and I’m good with that and I know I’m capable of it from my first success of everydays for 90 days but what I didn’t consider was the extra stress from streaming. I stream now! I’ve been streaming for at least 8 weeks now and I totally love it. I don’t have many viewers but it’s still fun and eventually when I feel more comfortable I will advertise on Reddit and stuff but for now I’m just trying to get used to it. I might continue for a long time or stop in a few weeks, I don’t know that yet. But streaming put me over my workload/preferred stress level this week so I want to do a quick breakdown on what happened there.

At the beginning of last week I started putting everything together to prepare for my Everydays and streams. My original plan for streaming on my regular schedule was to stream once a week and a bonus stream if I could find the time while doing another everyday. But then I really wanted to kick off the new Season 2 Everydays with a stream every week day! But just for one week. This was also a test to see if it was at all possible. I knew there was a high potential for failure but no biggie. If I’m going to be doing these daily anyway, why not on stream!? Wellll that's where things fell apart. My workload went from 0 to nonstop bullshit for seemingly no reason. I had some really brutal 12 hour days this week and I eventually had to halt everything. Streams, Everydays, everything. I had friends texting me asking where I was “You kinda fell off the radar” and I looked back at my week and realized I hadn't stopped moving. I was tired from lack of sleep all week, I had to focus at work and none of this was working out well so I stopped everything. There was a particular day that pushed me over and ohh man was that a fuck of a day. I reached my maximum and it felt like hitting a brick wall. I wasn’t mad, frustrated, angry or anything like that. I just ran out of fucking time and energy and literally couldn’t do anything else. I rarely push that hard and it felt good to reach that peak of productivity but at the cost of a big crash. I thought I could do it for a week. Just one week but I can’t and I know that now. I didn’t burn myself out, I just forced an early break.

I really really really want to get better at art, blender, process management but don’t kill yourself doing it. I’m a little discouraged and a little sad that I failed my plan but I’m fine and it literally all doesn’t matter so that’s nice. I’ll keep the everydays up starting Monday again or something and at least one stream a week and it’s still a lot of pressure and it’s fucking hard but it’s totally worth it in the end. This felt like starting fresh, all over again.

Last Edited on Fri May 05 2017 23:53:53 GMT-0400 (EDT)