Good Read: Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

I recently finished reading the book entitled, Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind by Jocelyn K. Glei and Scott Belsky.

This book explores a few facets of the creative life — increasing your idea generation; dealing with perfectionism; managing procrastination; and working through creative blocks, which are all common themes that artists face regularly.  Most of all, there are many insights from Seth Godin; Dan Ariely; Gretchen Rubin; and Steven Pressfield, among others who share their expertise.

Some of my favorite quotes from this book are shown below.

“It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility.  While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal.  Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen….Only by taking charge of your day-to-day can you truly make an impact in what matters most to you.  I urge you to build a better routine by stepping outside of it, find your focus by rising above the constant cacophony, and sharpen your creative prowess by analyzing what really matters most when it comes to making your ideas happen.” -Scott Belsky

“Everybody who does creative work has figured out how to deal with their own demons to get their work done.  There is no evidence that setting up your easel like Van Gogh makes you paint better.  Tactics are idiosyncratic.  But strategies are universal, and there are a lot of talented folks who are not succeeding the way they want to because their strategies are broken.

The strategy is simple, I think.  The strategy is to have a practice, and what it means to have a practice is to regularly and reliably do the work in a habitual way.

There are many ways you can signify to yourself that you are doing your practice.  For example, some people wear a white lab coat or a particular pair of glasses, or always work in a specific place — in doing these things, they are professionalizing their art.”  -Seth Godin

“Step by step, you make your way forward.  That’s why practices such as daily writing exercises or keeping a daily blog can be so helpful.  You see yourself do the work, which shows you that you can do the work.  Progress is reassuring and inspiring; panic and then despair set in when you find yourself getting nothing done day after day.  One of the painful ironies of work life is that the anxiety of procrastination often makes people even less likely to buckle down in the future.” -Gretchen Rubin

“Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas, and one of the easiest ways to encourage that fertile froth is to keep your mind engaged with your project.  When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.” -Gretchen Rubin

If you are a creative, I highly recommend reading this book — there are many great insights and words of wisdom!  The biggest take away for me, from this book, is to maintain a regular daily art practice in order to keep moving forward and staying inspired.