In the studio-style classroom, I stared jealously at my peer as he talked about a project he had been doing for more than a year. Our professor had found out about it and asked him to explain what he was doing—little did I know this wasn’t as unique as I thought it was, and it would be something I would end up doing many times.
This student was older than most of us; he had already had work experience in the design field and even helped produce an eclectic magazine. Photography was his specialty in the arts and he had set up a blog to document his project: one photo a day for a year.
It’s the kind of project that has weight to it. It shows skill and dedication. Most importantly, it creates creativity.
It turns out that the “daily X for Y (time)” project is very common among artists and is even an effective strategy for gaining followers on social media and other methods of internet fame.
I believe that these daily projects are important for the rest of us, artist or not, especially in the age of AI, based on the findings of two experiments I’ve run this year.
Creative Blocks
Daily projects can be extremely difficult because of the creativity required. It’s easy to get burned out or frustrated. That’s not the best situation for something as fragile as creativity to flourish within. At least, that’s how it seems.
Creativity often feels out of reach: good ideas are hard to come by, motivation ebbs more than it flows, and it seems like performance art most of the time (meaning you don’t know what you’re going to get until it’s done).
Inktober is a challenge I took on this year. For each day of October I produced a drawing done in pen/ink. This was the first year I actually followed the official prompts—I usually have taken the challenge and pompously ignored the community behind it, opting instead to draw whatever I pleased each day.
This year was vastly different in how I felt about the daily challenge at the end. I actually set parameters for the project: I would only draw dinosaur skeletons (attempting to boost my collection for freakyfossils.com) and I would follow the daily word prompt from the Inktober website.
The parameters I set for this year’s Inktober made it significantly easier to pump out drawings every day. I still went through the typical roller coaster: I can’t wait for Inktober; this is fun; I hate Inktober; when will this end?!; that was really fun. The ideas flowed more often despite the emotional ride, thanks to the system set up around it.
Creating creativity is a practice of system creation: enough rigidity to support the flexibility.
Understanding how creativity works is what the daily project continuously teaches me first. It reminds me that it doesn’t matter if I’m in the mood or even if I have an idea, I still need to produce something. The pressure of a daily project is what creates creativity. The restrictions or parameters of the project help us lean on creativity because it essentially constructs a problem to be solved.
Given infinite time and space, we would never create anything substantial. Daily projects force us to do something because of its tight frame.
Now that we’re backed into a corner, facing our daily commitment, we have to figure out a way to get it done. Necessity encourages ideas to flow—as long as the pressure is not too great that we instead switch to an anxiety or fear response.
Daily Tune-ups
YouTuber, The Bioneer, said something in one of his videos that served as inspiration for my other daily project experiment:
"[Fitness] becomes a genuine form of self-expression and freedom as you learn to craft the body that you want and to use it to achieve the things that you want to achieve."
While we sometimes relate creativity with self-expression, I had never before thought that it could find a venue for that expression in physical movement. This was something I wanted to explore, so I created a daily video project with two goals:
- Attempt to revitalize one of my YouTube channels
- Test my creativity in the physical space
The challenge was to demonstrate what I consider to be “micro skills” as a daily tune-up for my coordination. Mostly it means, what’s the simplest trick I can do with a tennis ball or a bean bag? How many of these can I figure out? 54 videos later and I still have ideas that I haven’t gotten to.
How is that even possible? It’s the most ridiculous, simple idea, how is it that there is still more to do?
The physical creativity surprised me. It’s way more common to expect creativity to come in forms of knowledge work: writing, drawing, brainstorming, coding…but creative object manipulation isn’t what first comes to my mind.
There was one unique emphasis about this challenge: play. There’s no getting around it: put a bean bag or a tennis ball in my hand and I’m going to be popping, dribbling, juggling, bouncing, throwing, and rolling it. This daily challenge is just fun for me—it’s an 80% play with 20% work (video editing) kind of project.
With so much play and fun, the creativity is so much easier to access. In fact, I even looked forward to filming a trick for the next day, so I’d often come up with ideas in anticipation. Other times when I pulled out the tripod, having no ideas at all, I would mess around until I realized there was a movement or a trick I hadn’t done before.
Play is such a crucial aspect of creativity because it frees you from judging yourself or your ideas too early. It allows you to break barriers or act in ways that aren’t typical.
Sum of Parts
The compound effect is often talked about in the financial world—small and consistent investments over time that eventually yield larger returns than just the sum of what was invested. Daily projects seem to work in a similar way.
Skills are developed using this method. It’s essentially a practice routine that bundles pressure, challenge, and interest into a consistent flow. The secret to getting good or gaining experience is putting in the time to do that thing, so the daily project is a secret to making sure it gets done.
I had no idea how impactful daily challenges and projects would be in my life when I first encountered them from my peer in college. Before we get to the final benefits, there are some setbacks that need to be addressed first:
- Dailies are going to be hit and miss. There are Inktober drawings that I am extremely embarrassed to have drawn and then posted publicly, because I was too tired that day or the rendering was just terrible.
- The projects eventually end for me. The longest daily project I ever did was doing push-ups everyday for four or five years. It ended in a shoulder injury and I never picked it back up.
To address these two setbacks, I think it’s important to approach dailies with the right mindset: It’s ok to be human and try to be consistent. Don’t attach your identity to the outcome of these projects (a mistake I have made almost every time until recently).
Just because you won’t always be pleased with the result or product of the day, doesn’t mean it was a wasted effort. Going back to the compound effect, not only do these hit-and-misses help you develop skills, I also think that the collective body of work is more interesting than the single piece separated.
Even in terms of physical daily challenges like my daily tune-ups, I think the entire playlist of these 30 second videos is more valuable than any one video on its own. (Even commenters have struggled to understand what I’m doing, lol.)
The daily tune-ups are no longer daily—I had a solid streak for many weeks, but since it overlapped with Inktober and it got cold in the mornings when I have time for filming, the videos have much more time between them. This taught me a final principle: the harder or more work the daily project, the shorter the time frame should be. The easier it is to produce, the longer you can go.
It’s so much easier to do something hard every day for 30 days than to think that it will go on for years. In my experience, it’s actually good to experiment with dailies and their window of time to be done within.
In an age where AI is more and more a part of our work, entertainment, and other aspects of digital life, I think that daily projects could be a vital practice in re-engaging in our own lives and skills.
It’s hard work, no doubt. Looking back after a tough challenge, however, is usually spectacular.
I still work to obtain, practice, and refine skills even though there are always people who are better than me in every possible way. AI is just another addition to the pool of talent that exceeds my own.
I do dailies just for me.