Now that I am in the ranks of those with personal creative websites, I can partake in the collective feeling of guilt we share over failing to regularly update our websites.

This post is the fruit of me going in as a wasp to the fig of a draft that I let sit for a month.  Even though uploading what amounts to a blog entry onto my website can expect to have the same traction as leaving one of my morning pages notebooks on the bus, there is still a hesitancy to put the permanence of words out there in the world.  Paintings? Easy.  Music?  Getting easier.  But to chronicle what I am thinking about in any given moment and just leave it out in public?  A bit terrifying and embarrassing, tbqh.  But here we go.

In the spirit of cut and paste, here are whole lasagna noodle sheets of paragraphs from the original draft for this entry, which gets to the topic at hand:

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Starting in the new year I have been keeping with what I call my “quota system.”  The initial categories were exercise, music, reading.  I had already had some success with committing to 210 minutes of music practice a week, the number based on the 30 minutes a day of guitar and cello playing I did as a child with an egg timer.  The idea to apply it to my adult creative practice came from my pianist friend Todd’s own practice method.

Like many, my attention span was shot between screen time and the pandemic, so I set a goal of 10 pages a day of reading BOOKS.  By January I was well and cleared to run again after breaking my ankle but pretty out of shape between the injury and the pandemic, so I aimed for 10 minutes of exercise a day, which included walking to the train and stretching.  I allowed myself to start small.

I kept track of my progress each day in my morning pages, increasing amounts by a minute a day every month.  The rules have expanded to an ever-developing administrative code that I will not bore anyone outside of my inner world with further explanation.  The method has proven to be something I can stick to and I have chosen to apply it to other areas that I care to build on in my life. 

My current weekly quota is thus: 140 minutes of exercise, 120 pages of reading, 210 minutes of music, 210 minutes of art practice, 49 minutes of meditation, 100 minutes of “werq” (where I primarily focus on reading developments in my area of legal practice), 100 minutes of “apartment” (where I basically take from this Apartment Therapy guide and keep my apartment in some degree of order), and 100 minutes of writing, which I find to be the most painful practice for some reason.

The hardest part of accomplishing anything is starting it.  Often, I set the timer on my phone for 15, 20 minutes and find I have enough momentum to keep going once it goes off.  *timer goes off, sets it for another 30*

Of course, if I really don’t feel like carrying on after the allotted time has passed, I walk away with the satisfaction of that one little accomplishment.  A typical day has so many pockets of time, where it’s tempting to them fill in by rotating through the apps or, with my favorite guilty pleasure, online backgammon.  But now I feel more motivated to pass the time with a quick sketch or a few pages of poetry.  I won’t say it is like night and day because I still play a lot of backgammon, but my muscles have gotten stronger, both from what I see in the mirror and otherwise. 

I haven’t told many people about my quota system.  My friend Tasha pointed out after I explained it to her that “there has to be a point where you max out, there are only so many minutes in a day!”  Indeed, I never want to become a neurotic serf to my quota system, where it rules my life as opposed to enriching it.  

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Fast forward to early October 2024.  An election looms over the American populace along with ever more obvious signs of climate catastrophe and the fallout of late stage capitalism.  Not that these issues weren’t feeding into my existential dread while writing the first draft of this entry, but my quota system did offer as good of a coping mechanism as any for living through this chaos.  Until Tasha’s prediction came to a head and my hobby-cultivation-self-improvement-plan started to stress me out.

It was only after complaining about this completely self-imposed stress with some frequency that I considered taking a break from this nine-month experiment.  Duh.

So here I am, four days into this week-long holiday of sorts, doing what I want, when I want.  This evening, it has included a sporadic jog/walk to the swing set and back, baking a lasagna, watching Florida influencers livestream their experience of staying put for Milton (I ask the universe that someone better equipped than myself write a Substack piece about this phenomenon), and this.  This type of feral indulgence can’t last forever but was sorely needed.  Let me turn now to the final paragraph of the original draft to explain what led me to this quota system:

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Perhaps not coincidently, I have been drinking and smoking less weed this year.  I escape more into these habits I have set out to develop and have less time for the ones that leave me with less clarity of mind and body.  I am reminded writing this that my quota system was also inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, recommended by my friend Julie.  It’s hard arguing against the basic premise behind Burkeman’s time management philosophy: our time here is limited.  Therefore, we must identify what we care about the most and invest our limited resource in them.  This quota system, for now, guides me in facing this truth.

***

For those still here, I will wrap this fig up in some bacon and serve it on the damn platter already: discipline is cool but fucking off is soooo necessary sometimes.  In that spirit, I am not going to let this blog entry bake in my own little oven anymore and will just post the damn thing, just like I do a painting on IG while the paint is still wet.

xo

Dana May