I’d love to admit I am one of those driven, fully focused, people that wakes up each day and smashes their goals with eyes always on the prize. However, my eyes are drawn to pretty much anything that is NOT what should be my focus.
Then when I manage to actually focus I tend to feel overwhelmed by the task and end up being unable to start! This has led me to many last minute assignment submissions for uni, delays in my illustrations and a very clean house because procrastination for me tends to lead me to doing housework or napping.
This is where my psychology study comes in handy, because I have started to implement some strategies which are actually working! Hence my blog being updated on a regular basis as well as my instagram, AND artwork being finished!
So, you might be curious about what I have changed?
The first thing I did was make myself aware of what was sucking up all my time when I was procrastinating. Then I created as many barriers between me and it as possible.
- I moved all my social media apps to a new place on my phone which made me think about what I was doing when I went to scroll through them. Making myself aware stops me from opening them entirely which has been my biggest time saver.
- Smaller goals. Instead of opening google docs and spending hours on a plan only to feel burnt out afterwards and unable to execute it, I open up procreate and I draw one character. I don’t think about it, I just do it. This ends up with me sitting and drawing more and more characters.
- Social media promotes perfection, which is dangerous on so many levels that I am not going to go into because that would be off topic. For someone like me that has perfectionist tendencies this can mean nothing is ever good enough to post which means unnecessary redos and overthinking. However I want to be real with you and be okay with letting stuff be just “good enough”. This means posting up work that’s not finished, rough sketches, and concepts I ended up shelving because I wasn’t happy with how they turned out.
So far this has been the most success I have had in staying focused and on task most of the time. I’m only human, and the next step is to stop wandering out to the kitchen for snacks every time I start to feel mentally drained.
Below is an old layout of The Epic Battle which I scrapped due to it feeling overcrowded.
Thanks for reading!
Rachael
