My New Creative System with Notion
For a long time, my creative life has consisted mainly of idea doodles on scrap paper. I’ve been drawing almost every day, but without a clear goal. My output has been unfocused, and I haven’t been making a lot of finished artwork. To change this, I’ve decided to build a system in Notion to track two things: my creative projects and my creative habits.
My creative project manager is pretty straightforward, and I’ve already been using a similar setup in a Google Sheet; however, by moving to Notion, I gain additional database view features. It works like this: When I decide to move forward from idea to project, I add it to a list with the project name, status, priority, and deadline. Currently, I have the prints I’m working on for the upcoming Ghoullery show, a new artist alley banner, and the Blood Coven Moon Magic horror comic anthology I’m putting together with my comic group. It’s a single place to organize my “official” projects, and will likely continue to evolve as I figure out what works for me.
My weekly habit tracker is a bigger change. It’s a daily checkbox scorecard that helps me gamify and clearly track my progress. I’ll be tracking tasks like morning or evening drawing sessions, finishing a daily drawing page, and bigger goals like working on a larger project five times a week (or posting to this blog once per week). Seeing the progress on the types of habits that I believe a professional illustrator would have is helping me defeat perfectionism and become the type of artist I want to be.
It’s too soon to tell if this will fix my creative struggles, but I’m hopeful. I believe part of the impetus for this change came from the theme of James Clear’s book Atomic Habits:
James Clear
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Now let’s establish those systems and get to work!