This week has been fantastic as far as studio time goes. I am back on a creative roll!

I just kept finding that flow. I contribute a lot of that to the Dance of Shiva. It just gets my brain all wired up for creativity.

But the most important thing I did to go from 2 hours a week in the studio, to over 16 hours over 4 days?

Prioritized.

Sounds so obvious, so blase right? But it wasn’t like that. I didn’t do it the way those time management gurus tell you to, with their military sense of time and their punishing ways- oh the guilt and shame! So not my thing.

There was no list making, no “This is the most important, and this is second most important and blah blah blah.”

I made a decision. I said to myself, “What is important? What matters the most to me, out of everything that I need to do in a day?”

And of course, the answer came back, Art.

That was that. My day now revolves around my art. The very first thing I do in the morning is my art. It has priority. And when I’m finished with that, everything else can happen. But not before that. No emails will be checked, no dishes will be done, no websites will be designed.

First, I will paint. Everything else can sort itself out.

Not to mention, one of the brilliant side effects of this method is that I’m embarrassingly happy for the rest of the day. I skip, I sing at the top of my lungs, I dance around the house, I smile like an idiot.

I’m doing what I love. What more could I ask for?

And I’m making sure that I’m doing what I need to do to support my creativity – I do 15 minutes of Dance of Shiva (just started level 2!) and then 10-15 minutes of savasana meditation. Bam! I’m in flow. I’m on. My brain yells, Create! and I happily follow its command.

I’m still kind of playing with things. I mean, I didn’t blog all week and I don’t want to completely abandon the ways that I share my art, so I’m going to have to find a balance between my art and my marketing time as well as my jobs. It’s a work in progress. I’ll have to experiment and see what works best for me.

In the meantime, you can enjoy this interview with me over at Magpie Girl, with the wonderful Rachelle Mee-Chapman in her Chronically Creative series.

Also, some of the pieces that I’ve been working on: