Reply To: Your CG routine – how do you keep up the pace ?

[Shawn Blanch]

I love my family and time with them so I too find myself burning the midnight oil, after everyone’s asleep, in order to do my projects. Somewhere between 2-3 potential hours each night. I’ve averaged about 5-6 hours of sleep the past 4 years. Every few days it adds up and I go to bed early.

If you ask me, a good pace is all about balance. I need it all to be satisfied: Time with my wife, time with my kids, time to do projects, time to do other lame adult stuff life budgeting, taxes, and honey-do lists. I’m generally a happy person when I balance time between them all. When any of those things tips the balance, I need to course correct or I’ll get negative.

I guess the point of all this is to say: Mind the balance.

@theluthier I am finding myself coming to this level of ambition and motivation really relies on the balance. I spend time with my wife and 3 kids during the afternoon after a full day’s work as an engineer. (But I secretly want to be doing my passion project). However I am in control and decide some days that family must win because when I am doing my passion project sometimes I secretly want to be with my family (vicious cycle).

So for me the balance is 3 things: 

1. When kids are in bed, I get 2-4 hours a night to be able to work on CG as a newbie.  Some nights I need a break and also go to bed early but I have tried to just eat the elephant one bite at a time each day. 

2. I started a polybook on my training last week mainly just to motivate myself to make a daily log of “today I successfully/unsuccessfully did this…….) It is turning into a Star Trek captains log kind of feel and I feel like it is become very routine.

I agree with the commentary that the hardest part is the motivation to start each day……. and then stop haha. Once I get into the ‘flow state’ I don’t want to stop and sleep becomes a burden. 

3. So I put an annoying lockout in place on the computer and our internet to ‘motivate’ me to work at a good pace because I know the end is coming. That helps me prioritize my modeling activities and to ‘jump start’ better without the fear of mindless browsing of content to learn which I was sooooo susceptible to in the past; and to help me stop so I can get needed sleep!

This is helping me go from “what should I do today because I am getting a little bored with what I am doing……………..only to waste hours and do nothing or end up with 50 unfinished projects; 

to “today I get to work on this part of the  project I am on. Let’s see if I can make it within my time limit”

I’m not perfect with this new work flow but I have to say it is much more regimented and helps me complete things quicker. 

Weird thought: Boundaries/Rules/Timers actually make me more productive!?!