It’s that time of year again, as we begin to think of our New Year’s Resolutions for 2021. Are you tired of making the same old resolutions every year and having quit the gym and indulged in chocolate before the end of January?
If the answer is Yes! Then our Top 5 New Years Resolutions for Creatives will help to ensure that you start 2021 with a positive mindset, lots of inspiration and the confidence to gain that creative edge.
Have a wonderful New Year!
1. Nourish your mind daily
Nourish your mind daily with art, music and culture and knowledge.
Make time daily to indulge yourself in what makes you happy. It might be picking an artist or someone you admire and using them as inspiration to come up with a brand new artistic style that you have always wanted to try. Or committing to stop reading fiction or news and buy that autobiography of someone who has inspired you in the past that you’ve been meaning to read and committing to reading it for just 30 mins each day with your favourite coffee. Perhaps it’s finally setting aside that time to listen to a podcast every day to gain new ideas and inspiration, we love Tim Ferris, Noah Elias and Tony Robins, Chris Evans and Rich Rolls. Or is it spending some time researching to visit a new city this year when restrictions are lifted to nourish your soul!
2. Create a morning routine
We’ve all heard the saying ‘the early bird gets the worm’. There are many benefits of being an early riser and having an established morning routine, many of the world highest achievers adopt this practice not least because our minds are most productive during the early mornings especially when things are quiet and the normal chatter of the working day hasn’t started yet.
Plan ahead and ensure you go to bed at a time that allows your body enough sleep, then get up 1 or 2 hours before the rest of your household and try the routine below. Using this routine you can start the day with a full tank and make time for focussed work which will produce your best ideas and be the best quality.
- 5 minutes of meditation/quiet time/prayer
- 5 mins stretching (let’s face it most of use sit on our backsides all day for hours on end)
- 20 mins exercising ( keep it simple, go onto Youtube do a free HIIT workout or a short run outdoors)
- Cold shower for 2.5 mins ( it’s not nice but reboots your immune system and you are vibrating afterwards)
- Focused work time – no distractions or threats of interruption, just peaceful creativity, freedom to think and no anxiety. This is the perfect time to do work such as creating content, writing or painting
Just remember….NO DEVICES until your morning routine is completed!
3. Win the Day
The key to having a successful day is in the planning. Set yourself up for a good day by planning what you need to do before you go to bed the night before. By having a plan already written, you free your mind to get a good restful night’s sleep and allow yourself to hit the ground running in the morning rather than wasting time trying to work out what you need to do.
Try to plan 1 key task (The Needle Mover) that you MUST complete each day that will move you towards a goal and that even if that is the only thing you get done that day you still feel a sense of achievement and accomplishment. By giving ourselves that reward and recognition we can motivate ourselves to keep going.
4. Learn something new
As B.B. King once said, “The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you”.
Make a commitment to continue your learning or take the first steps on a new idea this year. It may be committing to reading more and increasing your knowledge, learning a new skill, like a small level of animation if you are an illustrator for example after all ‘knowledge is king’.
You might want to learn a completely new skill that you expect to be popular in 2021, check out the latest trends and make a plan to enrol on a course to enhance your skills. Or alternatively, make a commitment to yourself that you will take a first action on any new idea within the first 24 hours. We often procrastinate and put off on new ideas but as Richard Watkins at Illustration Agent says “If you don’t plant the seed of an idea nothing will grow” so take massive, uncomfortable, messy action and ‘Get it Done!’
So make your commitment to learning for 2021 today and who knows where it will lead.
5. Hack your time
Finally, we look at how we can manage our time better. In these current times, particularly with many of us still working from home, it’s easy for the lines between work and play to become blurred. There is always more to do and projects to finish and we can quickly find ourselves neglecting family and personal time.
It all comes down to Pareto’s Law, think about which 20% of your efforts, products, or work produce 80% of your revenue? If you were to consider how much of your working day was wasted on alerts, interruptions and distractions and if you trimmed all of this dead weight what would your day look like? If you were to spend more time focussing on that 20%, what would your life and creativity look like?
Time mastery is about forcing yourself to work the same amount in a shorter time frame therefore protecting your personal time and time with family. If you give yourself three hours to do the same work you would do in an 8 hour day, you will guard your time and remain focussed on the 20%, you will soon realise how much of your time has been stolen or wasted by time wasters! Work Smart Don’t Work Hard !
Create boundaries that work for you and your lifestyle and use time mastery to stick to them!
