How have you have been organizing your time? Do you feel that it has been successful? And do you feel that it has given you the freedom to live an artistic life?
Living an Artistic Life at Work
In part one I shared my ideal week schedule like the one recommended in the book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I still think that the activity of doing the schedule was a good one. It really made me see where most of my time was spent (of course, I knew that it was at work) and that I needed to be certain I was living artistically at work. I am. But I was able to bump it up more.
For example, in looking at my “job”, I viewed it from a new perspective. How am I living an artistic life there? Well, I’m promoting creating. In fact, I’m pushing my students to use their imaginations in constructive ways. As I began to look at this aspect, I was able to see that this is a fundamental in teaching as all new breakthroughs, solutions, progress, has started with someone wondering “What if?”.
So just doing the activity of creating the visual resulted in a new viewpoint. I would recommend doing it.
Organizing Your Time? Is It Really Linear?
I don’t think we really need to think in a linear way when organizing our time. One factor that I found I needed to consider in organizing my own time, was that I had to keep my highest goals in mind and that I needed to keep it very simple. By that, I mean that it needed to be simple enough that I could actually combine several of my interests at once.
Here’s an example. On Saturday morning, I have “cleaning” listed. Hmmm. I really wanted to clean that pool surround as part of a creative activity of making my pool area an aesthetic place for me to play and work. Then, “creative activity is listed in the afternoon, so I purchased more mulch and a few plants and used that time to create on that project also.
Fantastic! I accomplished movement toward a high goal: Aesthetic Living Environment, and I accomplished cleaning and creative activity all at the same time.
Activity: If you’ve written up your big goals and purposes before, take another look at them and see if you are achieving some of them in your regular activities. If you haven’t written them up, I encourage you to do so. Let me hear from you! You can use the contact form or email me at livinganartisticlife@yahoo.com.