WEEK 45 - Procrastinating on your dreams? Open up!
What!? It's week 45 of HOMwork 2019!
For those of you just joining us, you can see 80+ past assignments in our Challenge Archive. No pressure to complete them all, but many of you have asked, so here you go!
A few years ago I made a sassy piece of hand lettering to remind myself to put my phone down and get some work done.
To my surprise - when I shared it on Instagram - it blew up with likes and comments! It’s still one of my most popular posts of all time.
It turns out that plenty of us waste our time scrolling through Instagram (or Pinterest, or TikTok, choose your app!) when we should be emailing that client or calling that vendor back or working on our latest passion project. No matter what stage of our career, we all have bad habits or time wasters.
Calling ourselves out in a playful way can accomplish a few things. Most obviously, it can help us identify how to improve the quality of our time. (That’s what I was going for with the initial quote.)
But this kind of assignment can also help identify things that might need a closer look.
Sure, sometimes we are just being lazy and ignoring work in favor of a good Instagram creep (guilty! haha); but for some things there are deeper reasons for dragging our feet.
When things have been sitting on my to-do list for a long time I use that realization to revisit the “thing” and whether it’s actually that important in the first place. Does it even really need to get done? And if it does, do I need to find someone else to do it? Ask for help?
Just because you have time for a thing doesn’t mean you should be doing it. Pay attention to why you’re wasting time!
FREE PHOTOSHOP TEXTURES!
We're mixing things up to give you a variety of creative freebies. This week, we've got two FREE Photoshop textures for you to experiment with, courtesy of DesignCuts.
<< Click here to download them!
Your Assignment: Call yourself out! Create a playful piece that identifies how you’re procrastinating and what you should be doing instead.
Getting started: Make a two-column list. On the left, put all the things that you want to do or that have been on your to-do list for a while. On the right, put all the things you do to waste time or avoid the stuff in the left column!
Use those lists to fill in the blanks: “If you have time to _______ [right column] you have time to ________ [left column].
Some helpful examples:
If you have time to wander around Target for 45 minutes, you have time to practice your drawing skills.
If you have time to follow a cat on Instagram, you have time to follow your dreams.
If you have time to scroll through Pinterest for “inspiration”, you have time to update your portfolio.
Caption idea: Think critically about why you’re dragging your feet on the thing and talk about what you're going to do about it!
In my case, I made this piece at a time where I was falling into the bad habit of consuming a lot of content but not creating much of it. It was way easier to procrastinate by scrolling through other people’s lives than to get to work and explore making new things.
While looking at other people’s art can certainly inspire us to create art of our own, I’m a big believer that looking inwards at our own feelings, thoughts, and emotions is more inspiring and motivating than scrolling through the ‘gram.
Some of my BEST ideas for projects have come from tapping into *my* voice and perspective. If you’re currently struggling with tapping into your own ideas and voice, you should consider signing up for my popular creative marketing class Passion to Paid. In it, I share all of my brainstorming techniques on how to extract juicy ideas out of everyday life, plus how to turn them into passion projects that can get your work in front of the right people.
his is the LAST TIME this course will be taught at its original price because it’s getting a major overhaul in 2020! Click here to check it out + grab your spot.
Once you complete your assignment, post it on Instagram using the hashtag #HOMwork. Don't forget to tag me @homsweethom because I'll be sharing my faves in my Story all week.
Can't wait to see your playful call-outs popping up in my feed this week! And I hope to see some of you in Passion to Paid by the end of the weekend ;)
Love,
Lauren
P.S. If you’ve got time to read these HOMwork emails, you’ve got time to start brainstorming a passion project! Passion projects are without a doubt the #1 reason I was able to grow my business as a freelance illustrator.
You can think of Passion to Paid as a super version of HOMwork, actually. If you like my creative prompts, this class teaches you how to come up with a series of your own that you can use to hone your skills and market your work.
Click here to join 1,500+ creative students and enroll in Passion to Paid for the original class price.
