Get Inspired... Then Get Creative
Yesterday in the studio, we were almost finished recording video footage when Jack woke up from his nap (of course!), and Jamie grabbed him from his crib. Moments later, Jamie brought him in and sat him down as I finished up. He was quiet and observant, as it usually takes him a few minutes to fully wake up. Then he felt right in his element and even wanted to play along. The kid loves markers just like his mama.
Jamie and I worked on our Creative Handbooks (get yours free by entering your name and email in that orange box on the right side bar). After clicking Yes Please you will even have a chance to download a free scripted printable as a thank you. The handbook email should show up a couple minutes later, but be sure to check your spam folder as it has been known to show up there - urg!
Practice 3 is about taking all that inspiration we’ve gathered on places like Pinterest and putting them into a list of projects we’re committing to do. Is there such a thing as inspiration overload? Sometimes we need to step back and evaluate how much time we're spending looking around instead of getting stuff done.
Social media, blogs and sites like pinterest and instagram are great sources to find new and exciting projects. But they present two challenges:
1. They are never ending streams that can suck a lot of our time and attention
2. It’s so easy to see, tag, like and add to our boards that we can become overwhelmed. There are too many projects we want to do and sometimes this leads to paralysis by analysis.
So how can we get the most out of this inspiration overload, stay productive and actually get things done? By curating, which is what practice 3 is all about!
The top page of the page is designed to make inspiration we’ve gathered more tactile. Jamie noticed that printing photographs immediately made them more meaningful to her- and more memorable. She thought, what if we started printing elements from our pinterest boards and other projects we’ve been meaning to get to? Would that make us more likely to do them? Well it worked! Printing these out does two things:
1. It forces us to choose- we can’t exactly print out the hundreds of projects on our inspiration boards. We immediately pick ones that speak to us most at the moment.
2. It gets the projects out in front of us where they can be gentle reminders to be worked on.
For a little motivation, we added the quotes page to the bottom page. We both went through and looked at the quotes we’d liked, shared or added to our pinterest boards to see if we could find patterns. We realized there are themes that emerge when we look at all the inspiration. For me, it was very much based around priorities.
We hope this practice inspires you to take some of that inspiration you find online and print it out- get it on your walls and in front of you- we think you’ll find this is a much more effective way to turn inspiration into output!
In case you missed it, here are the links for Practice 1 & Practice 2. And a special shout out to Jodie of Polka Dot Creative who posted this lovely write up on her blog.
There are now over 100 photos using #amytangerinehandbook on Instagram!
What projects are you most excited about right now? Comment below and share using hashtag #amytangerinehandbook, we’d love to see what you’re working on!
