More often than not I get this question – how do you do it all? Having a family with two young children, being a self-employed yoga teacher and then all those paintings and the crafty stuff like sewing and knitting (and blogging about it).
There is no secret. We are all busy. We all have 24 hours in a day. And we all have creative dreams, that often get lost in the net of everyday. But what I often say – you can get a lot done in 15 minutes. 15 minutes a day add up to nearly two hours of creative time a week.
And because long stretches of creative time are usually unrealistic, I was very happy about the first lesson of Alena Hennessy’s painting e-course A Year of Painting II (I took the first year-long-course last year and this is the follow-up where we dig deeper). Painting your word of the year in 15, 10 and 5 minutes. No room for perfectionism in this short period of time. Just play, intuition and fun (even though some frustration might occur). These small imperfect paintings became some kind of meditation for me this week.
And I also found out this week that I am not the only one with this little-15-minutes-of-creativity-theory. I listened to an interview with creativity couch Samantha Beckett and she even wrote a whole book about it. Her advice: discover which of your projects matters most to you, spend 15 minutes a day on that project, every single day (before checking your e-mail). Magic will happen. Or in my words:
15 minutes of painting a day keeps the muse from going on a holiday.