Finding the time to pursue your art

A Getting Art Done reader told me he has trouble finding the time to pursue his art.

Adam says,

A lot of what I'm working on now involves coding in python and javascript, and I love doing it, but you really need 1hr + to 'ramp up' into a coding frame of mind and really get productive.

Believe me, I've been there before. I remember sitting in a gray cubicle, doing coding projects, and someone would come up and tap me on the shoulder to ask me if I could change the paper on the printer. It will "just take a minute," they'd say.

They didn't consider that they had actually set me back an hour. And, since you only have so many hours of really focused work in a day, they set me back nearly a day.

I was 23, and clueless (I know many 23-year-olds are not clueless, but I unfortunately was), so I just suffered through it.

I've learned since then that making progress in your work isn't about sitting down and trying to power through a really long session.

In fact, if you start with a really tiny habit, you can start to build momentum on your projects. Once you build momentum, your project starts to drown out other things that might interfere with your work. It takes on a life of its own. It becomes real.

We tend to suffer from "The Fortress Fallacy," imagining a project so big that we intimidate ourselves. We "Inflate the Investment," thinking we need a solid block of 4 hours or 3 days or 7 years to make our work real.

My advice to Adam was to scale down to a 15-minute-per-day habit. He could keep himself from second-guessing, and the habit might shorten his ramp-up time.

Adam seems optimistic:

If I use some weekend time I could plan out a list of to do items and estimate the time to implement them. So, a function for one script might reasonably take 20 minutes to type and test if the planning is done already.

If you keep yourself from "Inflating the Investment," you can overcome "The Fortress Fallacy," and get your work underway.

I'll be talking about these phenomena more in Getting Art Done. (You can read it free if you sign up before 7pm CST Friday).