Mysterious Flame

Goal-setting is nothing new in the world of productivity. However, very little has been said regarding goals in the world of art. While goal-setting is largely the same as it is with everything else, it can be a little different for artists. Artists aren’t usually very goal-oriented. They tend to live in the moment, thinking of neither the future or the past. This is great for making art and capturing moments. On the other hand, unfortunately this can lead to rash and regrettable decisions. Ever heard of 20/20 hindsight? Think of the times have you looked back and said to yourself: “Man, I should’ve followed up with that gallery,” or “I should’ve asked that potential patron to make an offer.”

Just the simple act of setting a goal can make a huge difference in your life. Write it down! It gives you something to refer back to later. Thomas Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt has written about how important goal-setting in his post Goal-Setting: The 90-Day Challenge citing how just writing down his goals has made a profound impact on his life.

Put your goal in concrete terms, with some sort of tangible result that’s just crazy enough that you’ll really go after it. That way you’ll know for sure when you’ve reached your goal. In Michael Hyatt’s case, it was to write a New York Times bestseller. Later that year, he got his book published, and the next year it made it to the Times bestseller list.

Example goals an artist can set:

• Explore a certain theme
  Pick a theme and explore different ways to talk about it in your art.
• Start a new series this year
  Similar to the prefious, try something new that you haven’t explored before.
• Set aside x hours each week to work on art
  Just setting aside a set number of hours to work on your art each week is life-changing. It makes you much more serious and dedicated toward your art, signifiying that your art is less of a hobby and more of a career.
• Draw a sketch daily to post to your sketchblog
  My friend Mitchell Breitweiser has been doing this for a while on his blog, Inky Fingers.
• Participate in Nanowrimo this November
  Writing 1667 words each day to meet the goal of 50,000 words at the end of the month is sure to produce something good.

Break your goals down into doable steps. If have an upcoming art event, the Art Biz Blog has some excellent ideas in a three-part series for promoting your exhibit, breaking it down into a number of doable tasks, all in three posts. And here on Mysterious Flame, I’ve talked about breaking big projects down into smaller pieces.

Bottom line: write down your goals, and make them manageable, so that you don’t bite off more than you can chew. But don’t make it too manageable that you won’t be proud of your efforts. You appreciate more what you work hard to achieve.

Today as I was reviewing my RSS feeds, I came across a post on Freelance Folder that talks about different idea seeds that can later bloom into full-fledged blog posts. These same idea seeds can germinate into things other than blog posts, of course, such as painting or photography ideas, or other written forms. As always, be sure to capture and document these idea seeds in some form, whether it’s on ordinary 3 x 5 cards like Anne Lamott does, or if it’s in a special Moleskine notebook you have.

See also: Ten Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity and A Few Inspiration Sources, Culled from photopreneur.com

You probably have personalized your Macintosh setup to your taste. You have desktop wallpaper featuring your favorite band, your kids, or a picture from your last vacation. Maybe you’ve customized application and folder icons to your liking. Not only can you personalize your Mac to your own individual taste, you can personalize it to help you be more productive. Here are some ways to tweak your Finder, some add-on applications for manipulating files and actions, and ways to organize (and name) your files.

Before I get into this, I have to say that much of this is borrowed from an article I read in Macworld a while back. The online version of the story is here. Also, this covers Mac OS X v. 10.4, as I haven’t really used 10.5 with the exception of the times I’ve played with the new Macs at the Apple Store. The Finder Sidebar is a little different, but the same principles apply.

Set Up Your Finder Sidebar to Work for You

You can change the icons visible in your Finder sidebar for quick access for a variety of items. Drag and drop icons to create aliases (shortcuts) to things you use often, placing them in the sidebar visible in each Finder window. Here’s what I suggest placing there:

• Commonly Used Applications I keep Entourage, my e-mail program, in the Finder sidebar. This makes it easy to quickly e-mail PDF proofs from the Finder: all I have to do is drag the PDF icon onto the purple Entourage “e” and it instantly creates a new e-mail with that file attached.
• Frequently Used Servers I keep shortcuts to our Projects server here, too, so I can get to it quickly.
• Hot Folders Call me self-centered, but I have a folder containing aliases to my own projects on the shared server, since I don’t really care too much to navigate everybody else’s projects when I’m looking for a particular job. You can also use this to have easy access to other folders or even individual documents. It just saves you the trouble of drilling down through a bunch of folders to get to something.

Color-coding Your Files

When you right-click (or Ctrl-click if you’re still using the one-button mouse) on a file or folder in the Finder, you can choose from a number of colors to tag your files with. Create a system where each color means something special to you. I use green on images that I have downloaded to add to my “inspiration” folder. You can also use color-coding to remind yourself when finished project folders are ready to be burned to disc for permanent offline storage. Folders that are over 3.5 GB are labeled with red, so I’ll know to burn them to DVD.

Add Keywords to Your Files For Use with Spotlight

While you’re in the Get Info window, you can tag your files by adding keywords to the Spotlight Comments box. This way, when you run a Spotlight search, you can search for a specific word that you’ve tagged your files with. This will work in conjunction with a “keep everything in one big folder” method.

Take Advantage of Folder Views

Using the buttons at the top of the Finder window will allow you to view a folder’s contents a number of ways: icon view, list view, column view, and with Leopard, the new Quick Look view that lets you preview documents without opening them. Personally, I find list view and column view most useful. The former since it lets me see color-coding at a glance, and the latter since it makes it easier to go up or down in the folder hierarchy. You can read a lot more about it here on Apple’s site.

Use a Launcher

Third-party application launchers do exactly what the name implies: launch programs via keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps the most popular one for the Mac is Quicksilver, which does a lot more than just open files and run programs. (I use it in conjunction with a MoodBlast AppleScript to update Twitter and Facebook.) Lifehacker recently ran a feature that polled readers for their fave app launcher. The jury seems to be out on using Spotlight as a launcher, though.

Some Things to Remember

One thing to keep in mind is to remember to name your files well so that you know what they are, even without special tags or color codes. This really should be a no-brainer, yet it happens all the time. You don’t want to end up with five different files named “Business Card.” Give it a name like “JohnSmith_bc” or something else descriptive that you’ll be able to identify immediately when you’ve got the flu and you’re loopy from cough syrup. You may be the only person who will ever look at your files, but you need to make it clear enough to other people what they are, in case you are unable to work with them at a future point. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of writing your tasks as if you are delegating them to someone you actually know.

Earlier this week, Chanpory Rith at LifeClever, in his post 10 Reasons Why Your Portfolio Sucks, linked to a post by Kyle Meyer of Aestheria that complained about bad web portfolios. Kyle had seven points, so Chanpory added three more, bringing it to ten:

1. Bad navigation
2. Zoomed and cropped thumbnails
3. “Mystery meat” squares
4. No phone number
5. No email
6. No contact info of any kind
7. Background music
8. Flash animation
9. No labels
10. No resume

The first three items are really variations on the same idea: poor navigation. While I don’t necessarily think Flash is bad in itself, it can be abused and misused. Don’t go for “flash” to make up for a lack of substance. Background music may or may not be annoying, unless it’s done right. (More on that in a minute.) If you’re showing your design work, make sure it has context or at the very least some sort of explanation as to what it’s for. (Am I looking at a small ad or a billboard? or It’s a pretty design, but what is it for?) Last but definitely not least, make sure you can be contacted in some way and that people can see at least some kind of credentials whether it’s your resume/CV or testimonials.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. For example, the website of (high-end) wedding photographer Jesh de Rox is all Flash, has some great background music, and it actually fits with his work. But his site makes it easy to contact him, and also has a client area for his clients to log in and view the photos they’ve commissioned.

Finally, make sure your portfolio isn’t neglected. It’s all too easy to get busy and forget about your portfolio. Next thing you know, two years have gone by and your portfolio doesn’t reflect you at all. On top of that, make it easy to update later. You’re more likely to put off updating it if it’s going to be a pain to do so.

Obviously, there are all kinds of methods people employ to stay on top of their e-mail. I’ve tried using context-based folders and a sort of three-folder system, but that didn’t work for me. Here’s what I’ve wound up doing.

Inbox Zero

As a practictioner of GTD I stick pretty closely to the “inbox zero" concept, keeping my inbox as close to empty as possible. Somehow, it's easier to do at work, since the messages I get there are more immediately actionable than the ones I get in my personal e-mail. And once you see your inbox get to zero and stay there, you wonder how you ever managed otherwise. After getting used to a clean inbox, I honestly cringe when I see other people's e-mail inboxes full of months (if not years) of messages. It fills me with a combination of anxiety and pity when I see an inbox with more than a dozen messages.

On rare occasions, I'll mark messages as unread so I can go back to them later if I can't deal with them now, but I usually don't go longer than a day or two before acting on them. I know, this practice of putting things back in the inbox is not strict GTD, but it works for me.

One Huge Honkin’ Folder

I tend to take the “searcher” approach, dumping everything into one huge folder named “Processed.” This folder contains everything I’ve dealt with. Once I read an actionable e-mail in Entourage at work, I act on it, categorize it according to the client the e-mail is associated with (even our own company), and put it in the “Processed” folder in case I need to find it again later. This way, my inbox contains only new messages. And when I need to refer to something from last week or last month or even last year, I’ll enter the client’s name into the search box, and poof! all messages related to that client appear. It sure beats drilling down through various folders, especially when a message can apply to multiple categories. (For example, I might have an e-mail containing FTP information, which would go in the “Info” category since it’s general info, but it may also apply to a specific client, which would go under a category that has that client’s name.)

The Google Made Me Do It

This one-folder system didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it wasn’t until I began using Google’s Gmail a few years ago that I discovered how liberating the one-folder concept could be. Since Gmail doesn’t use folders, it encourages you to label everything and then archive it when you’re done. I transferred this technique to my Entourage e-mail setup at work, assigning Categories to incoming messages before putting them into the “*Processed” folder in the way I stated above. Once I read and tag messages on Gmail, they get Archived. This helps me keep my inbox fairly empty, nice and tidy.

Automation

One of the things I love about computers is being able to automate stuff, making them do little routine tasks so I don’t have to. In whatever e-mail program/service I’m using, I apply rules and filters to a number of subjects and addresses:

• Mail from the contact form on my website gets tagged according to the category selected by the user. If, for example the user selects “Purchasing Artwork” for the category of the message they want to send me, the incoming message is assigned a specific tag in Gmail, which expedites my response. This filter is based on strings in the subject lines.
• Mail from my wife gets tagged with its own tag, filtered by her e-mail address.
• Industry newsletters get sorted and tagged based on their domain.

That’s pretty much it! The only really tedious part about it is creating the categories at the beginning, and it took a while to form the habit of assigning categories when I send and receive new messages. But I think it has paid off in the end by letting my messages be easily searched and found. Plus, my inbox always tells me what’s important, because the messages in it aren’t competing with 15,000 other messages. It’s not for everybody, but it’s my system, and I like it.

I know I’m not the first person to say this, but e-mail has gotten out of hand for a lot of us. E-mail is here to stay, and it’s not going away anytime soon. It can be great, but it can be annoying. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by it, since a lot of people get too much of it too quickly. There are many people who get hundreds of real e-mail messages a day, not counting spam or junk mail.

So what to do about this onslaught of mail? Well, the number one key is to empty the Inbox as often as possible, dealing with everything appropriately. Avoid leaving loose ends. Don’t leave anything in your inbox that you’ve already touched — you only want to touch it once. That will make you efficient, productive, and confident. It can be a little scary at first, but it’s well worth it.

Several Strategies to Choose From

There are a number of strategies available, depending on your style of working. You might be an organizer with an elaborate system of folders within folders, or you might be a searcher with everything all in one big searchable folder. Here are some of the strategies I’ve come across.

File everything immediately into designated folders, categorized by project or sender

Some people like to use a folder for everything. You can automate this with Rules or Filters, depending on what your mail service/software calls it. (Same thing, different name.)

• Set filters to check subject lines for certain words or phrases, and put those messages in a specific folder
• Filter by sender, whether by specific address or domain (everything after the @ symbol) and file accordingly

Flag items for follow-up at a future date using the Flag feature

This is a feature I haven’t really used before since I usually act on e-mail right away (or otherwise file it for reference) but I can see how it would be useful to remind yourself to follow up on something.

Keep everything in one huge, honkin’ folder

Some people like to dump everything into one enormous folder, applying tags or categories to everything. These categories can be color coded. If you’re disciplined and specific with your tags/categories, messages can be easy to find, since you don’t have to go through five different folders to find that one e-mail. The no-folders approach is the one that Gmail has had from the start, and it takes some getting used to at first.

The GTD “Three-Mailbox System”

Use three folders (“Mailboxes” if you’re using Apple’s Mail.app) to sort things into one of three broad but concise categories:

• Act On Contains e-mails that require action, but you can’t act on them immediately. (The ones that required immediate action were acted upon as soon as you got the e-mails, right?)
• Waiting For This folder contains e-mails that you can’t act on without some sort of additional information
• Read & Review For lower-priority messages that aren’t necessarily actionable or that you can read when time permits — perfect for newsletters and the like

Gina Trapani has discussed a similar system at great length on Lifehacker in her post Empty Your Inbox with the Trusted Trio.

What’s Your Strategy?

So how do you cope with e-mail overload? Feel free to share your own strategy for dealing with e-mail in the comments.

A good while back, I read a post on Lifehacker about caffeine naps. The idea is pretty simple:

• down a cup of coffee (espresso in my case)
• lie down and take a quick 15 – 20 minute nap
• get up immediately, feeling energized and focused

According to the Achieve-IT blog, sleep researchers at the Loughborough University in Britain found that the caffeine nap was very effective for sleepy drivers:

Researchers found coffee helps clear your system of adenosine, a chemical which makes you sleepy. So in testing, the combination of a cup of coffee with an immediate nap chaser provided the most alertness for the longest period of time. The recommendation was to nap only 15 minutes, no more or less and you must sleep immediately after the coffee.

Four Hour Work Week author Tim Ferris talks about the caffeine nap too, taking a bit of a scholarly approach and going a bit further to hack his sleep in his article Relax Like A Pro: 5 Steps to Hacking Your Sleep:

Test “caffeine naps” between 1-3 pm. Down an espresso and set your alarm for no more than 20 minutes, which prevents awakening in the middle of a restorative sleep cycle. Interrupting cycles often leaves you feeling worse than no sleep (though some researchers assert your performance will still improve in comparison with deprivation).

I’m not a chemist, so I don’t understand all that stuff about adenosine (I even looked it up on Wikipedia). What I do know is that the caffeine nap works pretty well. I’ve tried it a couple of times, and it delivered as promised. I woke up extremely energetic and focused. I also began talking really fast, which annoyed my wife, since she’s not used to my being that energetic.

I think this technique could be really useful if you’re trying to focus on a piece of art or a piece of writing. Or maybe you’re a student trying to hunker down for finals (it’s that time of year, isn’t it?) you might try the caffeine nap. I don’t think it’s something you’d want to do every day, though. And remember, kids, caffeine is definitely no replacement for sleep.

Michael Shane Neal is an amazing and prolific artist and a fantastic guy. If you ever meet him, you’ll find him to be extremely personable and gregarious. He’s received many honors and accolades. In the midst of teaching numerous workshops and painting many commissioned works and going on plein aire painting trips, he finds time to write on his new blog, The Spectator.

In two recent posts (Tips on Survival! and Tips on Survival 2, Neal shared some tips for survival he mentioned in an article he wrote for a newsletter for the Portrait Society of America a few years ago. While all ten tips are pretty important, I’ll highlight/paraphrase/condense most of them (since I don’t wanna copy him outright):

• Set goals and write them down! List things you would like to accomplish both in the short term and in the long term. … Setting goals is the first step to accomplishing them. Hang them near your easel as a constant reminder of what you will achieve.
• Work hard. Whether you have the opportunity to devote your entire day, or just a portion of the day to your art, work hard! I have worked 12-18 hours a day for more than 15 years. It is important to devote as much time as possible to your growth as an artist, but you must work smart as well. An hour of painting free from distraction is worth 3 when the phone is ringing and the kids are home from school.
• Study. Spend quality time developing your skills by reading and studying each day.
• Tenacity! Don’t take “NO” for an answer! … Commit yourself to growth from every experience. Remind yourself constantly that you will succeed, that you will grow as an artist, and your decision to follow your dreams to become an artist will become or remain a reality.
• Thrift. For nearly the first 10 years of my life as a full time artist I painted every painting on a $2 easel bought second hand, mostly held together by duct tape and a prayer! … Survival is your main goal. Living frugally whether by choice or not, is important. Getting to the next painting is your ultimate goal.
• Identify your market. Recognize “who” can purchase your work.
• Diversification. Not only does diversification help you grow as an artist, but it provides other opportunities for you to show your work and advertise your name as well as provide alternative income!
• Dependability. Unfortunately artists are not known for keeping schedules, arriving on time for appointments, or generally running their affairs in an orderly and responsive manner. Go the extra mile and remain dependable at all costs. Be responsive and provide the best customer service possible.
• Develop a support system. Develop relationships with other artists and friends you can trust.

Ideas have a way of escaping us when we need them the most. So the obvious thing to do is to capture them as they arrive. We should all form the habit of carrying some sort of capture tool.

My Granddaddy always carried a camera in his car. It stayed under the seat, along with a flashlight and a can of flat tire fixer. It was one of those slim, black cameras with an embroidered strap and took film cartridges. He liked to paint watercolors of barns, farms, chickens, and other rural scenes. He built up his own library of images to composite together in his paintings with these photos, with everything meticulously categorized in his file cabinet.

Why did he do this? It wasn’t until a few years ago that I came to appreciate this: opportunity exists at every turn, and inspiration is everywhere. You never know what interesting thing you will see around the corner. Every creative person should carry some sort of capture tool at all times, whether it’s a fancy camera or a small sketchpad. Writers should always carry at least a slip of paper so they can jot down the words and sentences they overhear.

Today I follow Granddaddy’s footsteps by carrying a camera in my own car — a digital SLR that lives in the front seat console. If I don’t have that with me, I have a sketchbook of some sort (currently a Moleskine reporter notebook). At the very least, I’ll carry some 3 x 5 index cards for doodling ideas or jotting down words or making lists. And I’m never without some sort of pen or pencil.

What do you use to capture your ideas? Share in the comments section below.

Let’s face it: there are a lot of boring moments in life, where things are a little dull and you’d rather be doing something else, and you can’t really get out of whatever it is that’s boring you at the moment. Places like sitting in church, class, on the bus, an airplane, or a staff meeting.

I’ve always thought, though, that boredom is for people with no imagination. So it really shouldn’t be a problem for creative types. There are a lot of things you can do when you are in a boring situation, things that keep you entertained and let you keep using your mind:

• doodle/draw on a piece of paper or in a sketchbook
• write stream-of-conscious style
• jot down character sketches

Oh, and those “boring” places I mentioned above? I’ve done some pretty interesting sketches and doodles in all of them.