I was never the best student or the biggest fan of schools. As a young adult, I studied multimedia design.
To prepare for my degree program, I spent a year doing what’s called an “année préparatoire”. It’s like a course that helps you prepare for art school. It lets you test a lot of things to find out what you like and what you’re good at. I often say this was my best school year.
We would spend days at the park drawing trees and ducks. Experimenting with paint. Playing with clay. Coming up with crazy performances. Visiting museums and discussing art history.
What a blast.
Being able to do this now, without the financial pressure that comes with being a grown-up with a family, would be terrific.
Photo: Me, during art-school years, when it was cool to make blurry, low-res images with a Logitech Pocket Digital Camera.
Creative days became minutes, then vanished.
During the two years I lived in Amsterdam, I tried to recapture the feeling I had during that year. I managed to scale down my work contract at G-Star. I was then able to dedicate one day a week to exploring my creative side. It was very nice.
Then we moved to Switzerland, and I started working as a freelancer. My life changed quite dramatically with the arrival of my first child. The creative days vanished. It was too hard to keep them in my current schedule. Family and clients consumed all of my focus.
Still longing for some unfettered experimental time, I tried to block in my Fridays as creative days, but it didn’t work.
I scheduled a weekly recurring one-hour event in my calendar; this didn’t work either.
Still, I missed exploring my creative side. I’ve been trying to find a way to integrate this into my “work life”. But these days my work life includes a lot of data, code, email, and excel sheets.
A visual routine
One day, I stumbled on an unexpected solution: The visual to-do list.
Writing down my to-do list has been part of my daily routine for a long time now. I just needed to piggyback a second routine on top of it (a tip from the Atomic Habits book).
After writing my to-do list for the day, I decided I would spend 5-10 minutes drawing or sketching something with the aim of making my to-dos look nicer.
And it worked!
Before:
An ugly notepad.
After:
An inspired notepad.
What did I learn?
My new routine makes writing down my to-do list more satisfying, and the final notebook looks much more appealing. This increases its value to me even though no one else gets to see them.
I get to draw a tiny bit—not enough, but hey. It’s a start!
What are your tips for integrating tiny bits of drawing, crafting, or creativity into your daily life?
I’m curious to hear from you.
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