If you love the feeling of crossing things off your to do list, I’m right there with you. And if sometimes you look at that list and put it right back down, walking as fast as you can in the opposite direction, once again, I’m with you. 

Which is why I want to share two easy strategies for making to do lists a little more manageable that came to me within days of each other: 

ConverSketch is officially 10 years old today! 

Thank you. You’re the reason I get to write this!

Anniversaries are a great excuse to celebrate and taking time to recognize milestones feels especially important right now as time is simultaneously flying, blurring, interpretive dancing - whatever it’s doing - during covid. 

Every year I like to share things that have resonated or I’ve learned as a self-employed creative. My hope is that you find something useful to try, or that validates what feels true to you, or might push your comfort zone a little bit, in the best way possible. 

Pretty much anyone reading this is used to juggling all sorts of things. I mean, just a couple, right?

When it gets complex or you start to feel overwhelmed, you don’t have to get caught in the weeds or keep re-hashing the same half-formed ideas! 

Here are some visual strategies you can use to refocus on what matters most, whether it’s your team’s vision or making time for your loved ones. You can use each one individually, or combine them to build on one another and move toward clarity and action!

Can you remember a time that something went “wrong”? Trying a new recipe turned out…meh. A difficult conversation with a loved one. A creative project didn’t turn out perfectly on the first try.

How did you react? 

The sheer volume of curated feeds can make it easy to fall into a thought pattern that if something didn’t go perfectly right the first time, it failed. 

This is crazy talk. How can we expect ourselves to instantly be experts without practicing, experimenting, failing, pushing, learning, expanding, playing, falling…and getting back up? 

We’re human. We’re going to do things “wrong”. It’s beautiful! And, with practice, we can shift how we feel when things go sideways.