Every evening before I go to sleep, I grab my little bullet journal and write down what I’m going to do the next day. And this is absolutely great. It’s a fantastic tool for increasing my productivity, it’s very useful, especially now exams are drawing closer and closer, and it really helps me get stuff done.
Or at least, most of the time.
I’ve been bullet journalling for almost a month now, and I hadn’t realized this until today, but during this time, I haven’t had any creative ideas.
As a part-time game developer, ideas are incredibly important to me. Those little moments of inspiration, when I suddenly see a new design for a monster or NPC in front of me, a little snippet of story or even some new personality traits for my characters, are very valuable to me. And I tend to get these rather often.
But in the past month, I’ve only had one. Which happened today, making me realize how long it’s been since I last had one of these.
Now I’m not going to go around correlating these two thing and say bullet journalling has destroyed my creativity. That’s not true. In fact exams probably haven’t helped either, and I would like to test this whole planning vs creativity theory out when I’m not being completely stressed out by so many other outside factors in my life.
But I do think there might be a slight correlation here, not necessarily between planning and creativity but between over-planning and creativity.
Because every night when I decide what I’m going to do the next day, I first write down all of my revision goals, and then I write down one or two precise bits of pixel art that need doing. Note how I highlighted the need there. This part is important.
So when I’m ready to pixel art the next day, there are two factor’s affecting me.
The first one is that I’m already completely exhausted from exam revision and not really at my best any more. The second, is that I don’t have to decide on what to pixel art. It’s just there on my notebook, I just need to draw that and then I can go to bed.
And yes, this actually saves me a lot of time. You’d be rather shocked, if you knew how much time I used to spent staring at my massive list of all the things that I’m going to have to draw in between now and the release of the game (which, if you are not aware of how lengthy of a process this is, is going to take at least one more year from now).
But this also means that I don’t spent any time thinking about what I’m going to do. And that time is usually when most of my ideas come in. When I decide what I want to draw just like that, in that moment, I go with whatever the hell I feel like. And sometimes it takes me a very long time to figure out what that is. But sometimes (in fact most of the time) that is because what I feel like drawing isn’t actually on the list. It’s a new idea, a new piece of content to add to the game. And this whole process of generating ideas just doesn’t happen if I start doing what I know needs to be done right away.
Saying that, I still think planning is incredibly useful and bullet journalling is amazing and has really helped me go through all of these exams much better. And I’m not planning to stop using it.
It’s very useful to plan out the things that I need to do. But I can’t plan out my ideas. However, what I can do is leave some extra space, some extra time in my day that I haven’t occupied with all the things that I have to do. And yes, sometimes ideas won’t happen during that time and I’ll spent half an hour staring at my screen to then decide to not draw anything at all today. But I’d rather risk a part of my productivity in return for the possibility of creativity.
Anyway, that ended up sounding a bit more serious than I intended it to. I guess what I’m trying to say here is planning is great, just make sure you don’t plan out every second of your day.
So after all that, you might be curious to see my little idea from today, which by the way, happened because I really really really really couldn’t be bothered working on what I had planned to work on today and spent half an hour deciding what to draw instead.
Here you go:
It was initially meant as a monster but it’s super cute so I might keep it as a friendly companion instead. We’ll see.
So, I’m off to bullet journal for tomorrow then. Have a nice day everyone!
-Marta
Dragon Egg Games 