Thursday, April 10, 2003

Four Quadrants Today I woke up thinking about the Seven Habits book - the four quadrants. Perhaps as an excuse to stay in the warm, dry Nest, I looked at how my bowlmaking "to do" items fall into the four quadrants: Important and Urgent Urgent, Not Important Important, Nor Urgent Not Important, Not Urgent This felt helpful, so I made pages for bowlmaking career and bowlmaking business, too. I learned from Robert Fritz' book, Creating, to separate out the actual artmaking from an art career, and to separate an art career from an art business. They're really three separate things to create - with obvious links, but separate. It helps to think of them separately. These lists even made me wonder again about getting whiteboards for the Nest, so I can see an overview of what I'm doing without looking at papers. Suddenly today I could see four different places, at least, where I could put whiteboards. I could even read them easily from my main workplace. This is interesting, because earlier I couldn't see a single place for one. Long ago, I kept a very lightweight aluminum easel in the big studio (the forge) with a blackboard on it. I could move it around to keep it out of my way, yet where I could read it all day. Sometimes I posted a quotation I liked a lot. At other times I tracked my time. What actually worked best in tracking time was to track breaks. If I started on time, and took a total of 1 1/2 hours for breaks, walk, etc., I could work an 8 1/2 hour day and enjoy it. It might take doing that again to earn money again as an artist. Or it might not. A better question, probably, is whether or not that's what I want to do. Making lists isn't really going to tell me that. 10:24:55 PM    comment []

Cold damp day (total time today working on actual bowls: 0 hours) But I certainly have well organized boxes of drill bits, nicely protected from rust. (I like the Bullfrog rust inhibitors.) It turns out that I moved all the firewood out of the studio a little early. I've been here twenty years so I really know to wait till May 1, but I wanted the space. This morning it was COLD. And damp - raining. I can work around the roof leaks, but I really didn't want to be cold. So I filled up my studio time with putting away new things, jotting down ideas for that third bowl, enjoying being warm and dry in the Nest. (That's the 8x10' "clean studio," a well insulated room built into one corner of my 20x32' studio building.) Then after lunch I worked on the computer, earning money. Made some strides with laying out web pages, which will be useful for my "real" bowl website. It wasn't a wasted day, and I've been happy. The time just wasn't as "thick" as I prefer it to be. Do you feel the difference, yourself, between "thick" time and "thin" time? Thick time has a kind of depth and richness to it. It doesn't run through your fingers. It isn't shallow or easily forgotten. In some Christian theology, "thick" time is a taste of eternity. (Don't ask me for a source on the theology, as I gave away the book, but it was a very small, thin book about having plenty of time.) Is a taste of eternity worth being a little cold and damp? 10:09:12 PM    comment []