Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tips. Show all posts

Friday, August 26, 2011

Tips for a More Balanced Life


I wonder if any of you experience the same problem as me?

My life consists of me constantly struggling to keep the balance in my life. If I am keeping up with my art, then my house is a mess or I'm not exercising. If my house is spotless then my artwork hasn't been touched. However, I have FINALLY figured out a way to keep myself on top of everything. It mainly came down to my housework. If my house is a mess, it affects everything else for me. Even if my artwork is going well, I will be depressed and feel out of control with my house being in chaos. So I recently broke up all of my housework into specific chores and assigned them to specific days. I had tried to do this before, but I would spend too much time doing each task and end up getting overwhelmed again.


Before it would have been Monday- wash laundry. Now it's Monday-wash whites. You'll notice that I have specifically broken it down to JUST the whites. This is because 'wash laundry' would often involve me washing and folding 3 loads of laundry! By the time I finished doing all of that I wouldn't have done any artwork again. Now I only give myself tasks that will take no more than 1 hour. Once I have completed this chore I am free to work on art, exercise, or whatever. While there are definitely days when I want to be lazy, I find it easier to force myself to do the tasks at hand because I know that they will only take 1 hour at the very most. It's not such a daunting task anymore. If I know that Fridays are my day to watch the Frasier marathon on We TV, then I schedule tasks that allow me to be in the living room. (ex. iron clothes)

So far it has worked out really well. It's amazing how free I feel just by having less clutter and chaos!

What tricks do you have to help keep the balance in your life?

Monday, March 1, 2010

I woke up to a disaster on a post apocalyptic scale.

The following photos are horrifying and disturbing so please brace yourself. Please don't ask me how I allowed this to happen or when it happened or how I could live with things this way for so long. I have NO IDEA.
I literally woke up from an artistic reverie and discovered that some sort of bomb had gone off while I was in my own personal candy land. It was quite a shock I assure you. I realized that my studio had long since
become nothing but a storage space and the rest of my house had been assimilated into makeshift work spaces. Beading in the office, polymer work on the dining room table, mosaics in the living room, etc. The list goes on
and on. Rather than all of my art being kept nicely in one space (as originally intended) my entire house had been overcome with it! So I am beginning the enormous task of doing over my studio so that all of my art projects can be comfortably worked on in it. It basically comes down to organization and my studio's extreme lack of anything remotely resembling it. Well, that's not ENTIRELY true. Over the years I have spent large quantities of time labeling random boxes and attempting to keep everything tidy. It just seems as if my ever expanding interests have outgrown my current space.








Any craft/art organizational tips and advice would be
greatly appreciated as I tackle this behemoth of a project. I will be keeping photos of my progress as I work on it.