How to have a Productive Break
Either it’s just me, or you too have a hobby that you think might be able to go somewhere.
For me, it’s art.
As a teenager, I of course feel the restrictions of “oh, I’m not an adult yet, so what could I possibly do?” far too often. Then I see people like @couture.to.the.max on instagram and I think “what am I doing??”. Max is an odd one out in the way that his mother is the acclaimed cardboard artist @realsherrimadison whom I already admire because of her outstanding art. This famously led to Max wanting to be a fashion designer at an outrageously young age, his mom making a mannequin for him out of cardboard, and him going on to become a (currently) 7 year old couture design prodigy, and making waves in the entire fashion industry.
How does this relate to productivity? Well… uhh… anyways, art has always been a pastime of mine, and yes I’ve sold art, but I’ve never truly considered it as a possible career. Now that I am a junior and looking at Art Degrees as a possibility for college, I realize my art could possibly lead to being more than a pastime.
Now how this relates to breaks… well… over breaks there is a lot of downtime. There is the constant urge to sit down and binge a TV show or scroll through YouTube until you pass out from exhaustion, only to wake up to a similar sense of non-urgency to complete anything the next massively unproductive day. Hence my encouragement of structure.
To have productive downtime is the same as to have productive uptime. What I mean by that is you need to establish goals. Whether that is to post a new art piece every day over break, spending as little as 30 minutes of your 10 hour day on it, that’s alright. With that post you could reach three new accounts, of those three accounts, one could follow your account and suggest an idea in a future suggestion box you post. That idea could springboard into a series of 6 posts, each reaching a dozen new accounts and of those dozens, 20ish new followers (or more, these are just numbers that would be substantial to me at the moment). The act of posting something was part of the grander scheme of growing a social media presence with your art, and therefore networking more, therefore growing more potential customers, therefore growing a business you may not have even begun yet.
Just think what three posts could do.
Now of course there is going to be plenty of brain-dead time over your breaks. (At least there always ends up plenty in mine however hard I try to maintain a productive state). Motivation is not endless, I get it. However the point is that with just a little structure in a massively unproductive amount of downtime, a hobby can transform into a little bit more than it was before.
