The habit of the doing
Roz Wound Up: Adventures in Bookbinding: Working in the Spaces of Life:
You might think that for a task like this the best thing to do is pick a weekend and work like hell on that weekend with no distractions.
You’re wrong. Just like it is folly to think you can skip your journaling all week long and “catch up” on the weekend (first of all you can’t catch up on something that is about being in the moment) it is unlikely a big weekend push will accomplish as much as you hope. And then you’ll have to deal with the let down.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t schedule a playdate with friends to make paste paper one weekend, or make your own bookbinding cloth by paper-backing your favorite fabrics. Those can be great and productive weekends.
What I’m saying is that when you start putting off your creative efforts until you have more time you’ll quickly find you have less time for those efforts, because other things keep stealing from those plans.
Better to steal back those times that aren’t used during the week and apply them to your creative tasks (in this example, to bookbinding).
And to do that you’ll have to develop patience. But that’s a good thing anyway. You’ll feel better about a lot of things in general, but if you develop a little patience your creative projects will really benefit because you will find yourself working in a more mindful and determined way.”
This whole post is really relevant to just about any creative endeavor you want to undertake. Full of really sharp insight. You should read it. The thing I try to remember is to remove the “magic” from creative work: it has to be done over and over again with little regard to quality or making something Great. The idea is to instill practice as a habit. Then it just becomes something you do because it’s something you do, and the attention and development grow out of that.