Creating exercises with no time (includes worksheet) ~ (6 min read)
With a free worksheet so it's easier.
Hey everyone,
I know, life gets busy, and finding time to dedicate to personal projects can be challenging (or seem nearly impossible) 🫠.
That’s why I’ve tried to put together a guide to help you work efficiently and creatively within the limited time you have. This take of the newsletter is about maximizing productivity through focused, time-constrained sessions, that serve as our daily exercise that our creative craft needs (as the gym for our body or therapy for our mental health).
Let’s get into it.
By the way, if you want to get also the premium series of posts. You can refer this to 3 friends and will get a month for free :)
The importance of time management
We all juggle multiple responsibilities, making it difficult to find time for personal projects.
By managing our time effectively and working within specific constraints, we can make significant progress even with limited hours.
At least that is how I think that improved since I started to work professionaly as a motion designer.
When you set aside dedicated time for your creative work, even if it's just a small window each day, you cultivate a habit of consistency. This practice can bring us to a significant cumulative impact over time, you will see.
One thing!
There is a worksheet for this topic that you can download here, so you use it to follow along. And every time you want to exercise a bit with no time.
Setting clear objectives and goals
The first step is to define short, clear objectives for each session.
For instance, your goal could be to create the intro for your demo reel. Having a specific target helps you stay focused and measure your progress.
Clear objectives serve as a roadmap, guiding your efforts and preventing you from getting sidetracked by less important tasks. Or also feel that is too much of a challenge and just drop it there, without doing anything.
By breaking down your larger goals into manageable pieces, you create a series of small “wins”, or pretty much, exercises, that can keep you motivated and on track.
Working within limitations
To maximize our productivity, it’s really key to put these limitations on our resources and tools for example.
This helps us stay focused and make quick decisions.
For example, choose one primary tool, such as After Effects for animation, and Illustrator for design elements.
Limiting our resources forces us to think creatively within those constraints.
Also! Aim for short animations, between 3 to 5 seconds, to keep your projects manageable.
And also to try to take the best out of them. It’s like adding a little bit more weight to our dumbbells. Restrict your color palette to 2 or 3 colors and use basic shapes, such as only circles or squares.
Of course these are all examples, ideally you will set different constrains each time, or work many times with the same. It’s up to you, but don’t make it so open that then you wander a lot about it.
Structuring our time effectively
Suppose you have 12 hours over one week to complete a project. You might dedicate the first 5 hours to planning and designing your project, which includes sketching out ideas, creating mood boards, and setting up your design elements.
The remaining 7 hours can be spent animating and refining your work, focusing on bringing your designs to life.
This structure not only provides clarity on what needs to be done but also creates a disciplined approach to working within your available time.
Btw. Knowing how much different tasks take, helps you a long way when working within a team. So, also try to track the hours you spend on each thing while you are working on it. You will thank me later.
Embracing the Sprint methodology
Inspired by the Design Sprint methodology, this approach brings the validation and creation process into a short period, helping us quickly move from concept to completion.
The key is to define clear, short-term goals, such as creating an intro reel, and set a fixed timeframe, like 12 hours distributed over one week.
Outline the techniques and limitations you will use, such as a 3 to 5-second animation, a limited color palette, and using After Effects with complementary tools like Photoshop or Illustrator.
This method forces us to think critically and work efficiently. So, in our case, these exercises in a delimited amount of time are what we are going to call sprints.
So then after that week of work I review it, and see if it’s up for another sprint or we have to publish it.
This is slightly different than just checking your project here and there and keep working on it until you feel it’s finished. Is more about creating ‘blocks’ of work with a clear objective. And after review, creating a new ‘block’.
So it’s more manageable, also concrete and doesn’t feel as ‘abstract’ as the idea to just keep working on it until we feel like it.
So…
Remember, each project is an opportunity to improve and learn. It’s exercise, we are just a little bit better after each one.
Limiting our resources and setting clear goals allow us to create impactful work without that stress of an open-ended timeline.
Test the worksheet and try to get an exercise going this week. Then I would love if you send me that out and see how it went.
Thank you for following this newsletter. As always, feel free to share your feedback and let me know if you need any specific tips or advice. Happy designing!
Cheers, and have a great week! 🌟