In today’s world you often work in cascading explosions of micro-urgencies.

You look up, you see the time, the afternoon has passed in quick bursts as you move from project to project, email to email, text to text — and you realize, Hot damn, I haven’t spoken to a soul all afternoon.

I work in a relationship-driven world — the art world. We cease to exist as an enterprise if we’re not minding three relationships very carefully:

— With our clients

— With our artists

— And with our creative ecosystem

The clients and the artists are self-explanatory. High-quality relationships with clients beget sales.

We only represent living artists — this means we support these hungry rent-paying necessities-needing art-supply-devouring special organisms only if we sell their work!

With artists, we get the best work for our clientele from deep relationship building. A bad relationship and we get no work at all. A mediocre one and the artist might send inferior work, or old work that hasn’t sold elsewhere — those wretched orphans who’ve traveled tiredly from gallery to gallery to gallery pleading for someone to take them home.

It’s the creative ecosystem that’s easy to ignore.

This ecosystem is comprised of your team, your vendors, your landlord, your neighboring tenants, the crew who cleans the grounds — who wants to step across a yucky half-eaten burger tossed on the sidewalk the night before just for the honor of viewing your high-priced artwork?

Not many, I can assure you. Not the ones who buy.

Recently I read a study stating that for most better-paying jobs it’s still the soft skills that edge you into the higher pay brackets. Writing, communication, negotiation — and most especially — relationship building.

Master those and you better control your destiny.

Toward the end of a voiceless, talk-free afternoon of silent conversational interneting that went on too long and caused an eye twitch, that study rose up in my mind and confronted me.

I was thinking of our team — of exhorting them to call more frequently and not just rely on texts and email — when my mind pointed out my hypocrisy.

I needed to call more often. I needed to speak to others in person more often, even on our own team!

With our artists too.

You’ve had this frustration, right?

Where you text back and forth, back and forth, you discuss the when, the where, you go back for the details that are missing — Was that Wed or Thurs? — Did you mean the Starbucks on Blankety Blank Boulevard or the one on Streetly Street — the cryptic messaging that leads to misunderstanding, opening new lines of inquiry and clarifications–

And then you think, A phone call of a minute and a half would have solved that.

Twelve minutes of texts flying back and forth furrily provides good thumb exercise, little else. It detracts from your day and your momentum.

A week ago we had a client text, Can’t wait.

Hmmmm, was that, I’m excited, I can’t wait to see you even though you’re running late??

Or was that, Can’t wait, I have tickets to view airy proto-fairies on ice and must scoot off or I’ll miss the first number.

Digital communications can be notoriously imprecise.

So my mini-challenge for Week 9 was to talk to someone at least once a day that I would normally email or text.

Guess what? There are far more real out-loud laughs when conversing over the phone than LOLs ever loosed from mildly clever texting.

Making these phone calls — to artists primarily, but also to individuals in our ecosystem — reminded me how much extra can be gleaned from conversation versus digital communication.

Artists would clue me in on goings on in other parts of the art world. Personal tidbits would spill out — same with laughter and camaraderie. Successes elsewhere would finagle their way into the conversation, which would prompt a, Hey! We should try that at Studio E Gallery too!

For vendors and freelancers it was the same thing — suggestions welled up easily.

But more than the business plusses, oh the humanity! To communicate with people voice to voice is to establish a real connection.

I write about these weekly micro experiments long after they’ve taken place. Which allows me some elevation to gauge if there was an effect beyond that particular week.

This micro challenge has lingered with me. To the point where a little niggling crops up in the back of my mind whenever I go too long without a person-to-person conversation.

So — a good challenge it was. One to continue.

You might wish to give it a whirl too.

Have you been stymied by too muchness? 

Recent pressing issues knocked me off my stride. Our business suffered a slowdown in sales for a couple of months during our selling season — enough to provoke fear and remembrance, of the desperate crash years a decade ago.

Simultaneously my creative side career — writing bookitos — reared its own ugly challenge. The Work flowed — the writing itself — it was my inability to squeeze in marketing outreach that plagued me.

There’s a weird kind of paralysis that stems from hyperactivity. Too many threads tendriling off in different directions, not twisting together into a unified whole, makes for a breathless but unsatisfactory pace.

 It’s like you’re running through stretch wrap.

Worse, it’s anxiety inducing. You swing for the fences, you throw effort in multiple directions, but ultimately you feel like a chimpanzee flinging feces at imaginary enemies.

Each day felt maddeningly ineffective.

I remember reading about a man who went to his rabbi when work projects overwhelmed him, seeking advice. The workload jacked up and the man was falling behind.

 The rabbi listened carefully, and said:

 “Work harder.”

That is decidedly not my answer.

It used to be. Working harder used to be my primary directive and my fallback option.

Then I noticed the ones I admired, the most effective ones, seemed to work less than other people!

Many call this working smarter. And it is, I guess. In my own application I’ve found a more apt phrase would be working in harmony.

Working in harmony with my keenest aims.

Working in harmony with my most heartfelt desires.

Working in harmony with the actual environment I’m in. Taking note of the rhythms, the intrusions, the personalities, the capabilities — and then figuring out the glide path between them all.

So I took a bath — an hour-long bath — the type where you’re shivering at the end because the water’s gone cold. I’d like to say I cleaved straight to the heart of the matter, pithily dissecting the issues and cutting through all the gristle to arrive at the solution.

Instead I sunk into a stupor. My befogged brain ruminated on the mess. It was dispiriting.

Until it wasn’t.

Maybe you’ve felt this too. An impending answer. You don’t yet know the answer but you feel its imminent arrival.

That’s what I felt by the end of the bath. As I examined the issues — lower sales at the gallery + lack of marketing and outreach for my creative projects — I felt something pop.

Again, not an answer, but a clarity. I could feel exactly what the problems entailed.

Later in meditation an answer came — surprisingly, it was something I was already doing! —  but in other areas.

If you’ve read the numbered posts from the last few months you’ve seen that I’ve embarked on a Year of Micro Experiments.

This was my solution!

Big dreams, the smallest of steps.

Of course! An old mantra, dusted off and reinvigorated through the prism of these weekly micro challenges I was setting for myself.

The Japanese word kaizen immediately came to mind, simultaneous with its meaning: small continuous change.

The meaning was immediately clear — I needed to cast forth a grandiose vision (profitable gallery, successful creative marketing) and then immediately forget them and go small. Into the smallest possible shifts that could be made each day in service to these goals.

Daily kaizen. Nano efforts applied daily, consistently.

For the gallery I broke this down into three areas:

1. Personal client contact (who could we follow up with today)

2. Display (edit the art on display ruthlessly, what was working, what was not)

3. Marketing (quickening the pace of our newsletters during our high sales season, plus a signage issue)

For my creative outreach — I’m still working on that! Looking for the smallest pockets of time to squeeze in effort before the late afternoon when it all goes slack — my system, my mind, my abilities.

A few weeks in, it’s working. Daily kaizen. Looking for the inflection points and applying the smallest possible pressure changes your trajectory.

. . . . . . .

Sanaya Roman:

In everyone’s mind there is a whisper of the next step. It may be simple, such as making a phone call or reading a book. It may be a very concrete, mundane step to take that may not even seem connected with your higher vision. Know that you are always being shown the next step; it is always something that comes to your mind as obvious, simple, and a joyful thing to do.

From Creating Money: Attracting Abundance by Sanaya Roman and Duane Packer

When my wonder woman wife Ann booked an art workshop for a week the hamster wheel in my brain started spinning. Squeaky and lopsided as it is, it still rotates. With a wobble.

Three years back a friend and I improvised a creative retreat across the state in a rental home in Anna Maria Island. My creative compadre for that retreat was improv comedian-speaker-writer-coach-transformational artist Travis Thomas — damn, what doesn’t this guy do?!

He’s beautiful too, so unfair.

It proved fun — and successful — so much so we vowed on our ancestors’ graves to do it annually.

We wiffled on that vow — ancestors are spinning in their underground cubicles — not managing to get another creative retreat off the ground . . . till now.

When Ann set the wheels in motion for her Big Sur art workshop week, I pounced on the idea for another DIY Creative Retreat, this time from our home.

Our son is in high school, so technically this wouldn’t be a round-the-clock creative mania like the one Travis and I did for several days on the barrier island.

It would mean about 6 hours a day including our lunch break. It was the best I could muster between delivering Zane to school and picking him up at the furthest point I could get him to disembark from the bus each day (to gain an extra half an hour).

(Devious, I know.)

Travis was on board immediately — love his spontaneity. He lives up to his improv roots. He yes anded immediately.

For those who might want to make their own intensely productive focus time happen, here are my loosey goosey Rules for How to Create a Successful Do-It-Yourself Creative Retreat:

 

1. Do it with a like-minded friend

This is my number one creative retreat suggestion if you can swing it . . . because is it really a retreat if you do it solo?

You can argue philosophically that it is — I’ve managed to ferret out time for creative bursts by myself. But there’s something about the presence of other people that spurs me to greater heights, greater commitment.

A great example is this very week:

Monday I was on my own yet still managed a fair amount of work despite a school holiday and the beginning of an exhaust fan installation into Ann’s studio that would take several days.

Cutting through exterior walls is not whisper work. There’s grinding and high-pitched whining, even if mostly from me.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday Travis joined me. He couldn’t make Thursday because of other commitments. Slacker.

Thursday, oh Thursday.

Thursday was the only day my creative retreat efforts collapsed. I spent too much time with Harley who was installing the exhaust fan in the morning.

After he left, seeing I had approximately an hour till lunch time I made the mistake of glancing at my phone. Responding to an email led to God only knows what else.

For the next hour and a half!

It’s like coming out of a digital bender when you look up sheepishly, myopic because you haven’t once glanced away from the phone, afraid to admit even to yourself you squandered 90 precious minutes on advice columnists.

Surely what I gleaned from humanity’s angstyness could have waited till later that evening while Zane was studying.

Which brings me to . . .

 

2. Set a schedule

. . . and stick to it.

In our case Travis arrived at 9, we kibbitzed for just a few minutes, then went to our spaces and revved our mighty engines.

We clocked out for lunch around 11:45 — scooted off to a Mediterranean meal spot in a neighboring town — and then came back for a couple more hours afterward.

 

3. Create space to work

Notice how I said we calved off from one another and went to work?

Workspaces matter. Not terribly much to two guys who are working primarily off their laptops, but they do.

I need space for my notes, my laptop, some water, my notepad for scribbling half-formed thoughts. Travis needed quiet, to create short videos, blast through his considerable email contacts and to handle the occasional phone call.

My makeshift workspace is pictured above. We lugged my son’s desk from his room to our living room. Voila, instant additional home office.

 

4. Vary your rhythm

Here’s an example:

I start out at the desk, tappata tappata typing away on the laptop keyboard. As soon as I feel myself flagging, I ooze on over to one of the bean bags — or to a recliner — and grab my notepad.

Settled in I let my drowsy brain drum up ideas, which I capture with the diligence of an 18th-century Lepidopterologist. (Butterfly enthusiast-collector-expert — I won’t make you look that up!)

I let my slow-moving neural network fire ideas languidly down my arm onto the page . . .

Then, when I’ve had enough of that, feeling revived, I slide into the upright position at the desk again.

Tappata tappata tappata.

Away I go.

 

5. Work from a different workspace than normal

. . . if you can.

Travis worked from my home office (a glorious term for my L-shaped desk in the master bedroom adjacent to the room I worked in).

I insisted on this to throw me out of my comfort zone. It may have seemed a generous gesture for Travis — who I hope is not reading this and discovering the naked ambition beneath my largesse — for me it was a surge of electricity.

To sit and work in a not quite familiar space put my imagination on high alert.

 

6. Take freaking breaks!

Our daily lunch was the best reboot tool of the day. We drove off, sauntered into a fast casual joint for a healthy meal, talked with the pent-up emotion of solitary confinement inmates let loose in The Yard for one hour, then jumped back into the work for the afternoon.

 

7. Bonus rule: Start off the day with someone who sparks you

Each morning between lobbing Zane onto the school grounds and starting at 9 am with Travis, I squeezed in a breakfast. Not just any kind, the inspirational kind.

A different friend from my creative universe was scheduled for each day of the week. This amped me up. More than you can imagine.

Minx Boren — whose Balance Points emails you have to sign up for because they are wisdom and poetry and verve all in one. Minx was excited to talk about her own bookitos in progress, which revved me all the more.

Another friend could meet only briefly because he was finishing up a bookito for his bioneurofeedback center. (Biofeedback for the brain.)

Each morning a different personality would energize my creative hemisphere into a higher state. An excited state, as they call it in physics and lap dancing.

On the drive between the diner and home the creative retreat, ideas would be gushing — spilling onto note pads at stop lights.

 

That was Week 1 for my Year of Micro Experiments. Though this week was not micro at all, it set the tone and birthed the idea:

To engage in one small life experiment each week.

In case you want to follow along, I’m focusing on these areas:

— Creative work

— Enhancing relationships

— Body betterment

— Mental/spiritual hygiene

— Time optimization (in a relaxed way; I aspire to luxuriously unhurried chill focus)

— Outreach and marketing

Please email me suggestions at Evan (at) NotesForCreators (dot) com

 

#TweakOfTheWeek

The note she has on her easel reads:

Is this the best you can do?

If it isn’t, then it’s not done.

Artist Barrett Edwards lives this credo. Her studio is across the state of Florida from our gallery. A few days ago we drove to meet in the middle for an art exchange. Imagine how anticlimactic it was to discover we were only getting two paintings.

I’d driven for days! Well, an hour plus.

I’d be forced to dine at a tony restaurant nearby! On the gallery expense account.

The indignities were piling up. I might even be forced to take a nap to get over the ennui setting in.

Turns out Barrett had been working till late the night before on canvases she simply couldn’t release to me. When she asked herself if it was the best she could do, she knew it wasn’t.  So those will come another day.

My disappointment flipped into admiration in a nano moment. If only we all held back our lesser work!

(Those are her shoes by the way. Holding yourself to a higher standard doesn’t mean you can’t be impishly spirited too.)

 

Paul Tamanian, an artist we represent whose open-air studio spills onto his dirt driveway, has left messages like this on my voicemail:

Read more