It feels great to finish tasks, however small. But what if you’re not good at finishing tasks, however small?

When you complete something you are reminded how capable you are: how you can do the work, and sometimes, even, that it was easy (okay, not always. I, too, have crunched for a deadline one too many times). It’s easier to remember the euphoria after the task is completed, but not necessarily, before.

Annoying, because it would be really helpful if you could use that knowledge as a motivational bait for yourself. Some people have little trouble doing this. I’m not one of those people, and if you’re still reading, I’m going to assume you’re not either.

Imagining the results is exciting, but it does not help me to actually get shit done. Some of us, need help to begin tasks, no matter how much we are reminded, acknowledge the value in doing so, or the consequence of not.

So what’s the problem with starting tasks? In my experience, it’s that I do not know where to begin, do not feel confident to begin, or that I simply don’t know how to begin.

I came up with a little technique, or method, to help combat this. Technically, it’s a hybrid of already existing techniques, so do not expect a Space X level of innovation. But, what is a revolution, in my opinion, is the way the method frames a focus on giving yourself the confidence to continue, and holding your hand along the way. This isn’t something other methods cover; they gloss over the details of how to actually focus, or what to focus. If you have ADHD, these kinds of executive functioning skills are literally a brain impairment, so extra help is required.

The truth is that you are a smart, capable person, who can complete these tasks that are dwelling on you. You just don’t really believe that right now, or you’re executive functioning is breaking down somewhere along the line. Below, I outline the method you can follow, to help combat this. Follow the steps, and see if it helps.

Additionally, or alternatively, watch me talk through the steps for ten minutes, here. Warning: the production quality is non-existent!

Step 1 — What’s the one thing that would make the most significant difference, if it was done?

Consider all the tasks you feel are on you right now. Which of these feel as though they would make the biggest contribution? Even if it wouldn’t complete the project, but progress it. What’s the most important?

Try to pick one thing. (See: The ONE Thing)

If you feel overwhelmed, even at this step, it might help to do what I call a “brain dump”. Note down everything that feels as if it is occupying space in your brain. Often, for me, that means writing down every single little to-do I interpret as being a current responsibility. Now that information is “parked”, giving you more room to pay attention to the following steps. You can refer back to your brain dump, and update it, whenever you want to. It also doesn’t matter if you never go back to it. That’s just dandy.

Step 2 — Let’s break it down.

How big is the task? If it’s anything bigger than what you estimate to be one hour, it needs to be broken down. Don’t write a plan, just focus on breaking the task down into something you can do today that would progress the important thing you already established.

Step 3 — Break it down, again.

Is it less than one hour? Good. Now let’s break it down again. Write how you would begin this task; what is the very first thing you would do? Describe it in detail (especially if the task is full of stuff that feel good to clarify).

When you start to feel you’re writing the task detail so vibrantly, to the point that it feels as if there is no point in writing this amount of detail, because, damn it, I could just start doing this already, why am I even writing what I am about to do? — that’s when you know you’re ready to begin!

It can be easy at this stage for you to begin writing action after action, another kind of to-do list. Try to stick to the first things you would do, imagine what would take no more than 10 minutes!

I like to call this task, my “frog”, thanks to the wonderful little productivity book, Eat That Frog.

Step 4 — Prepare to work.

Now you’re soon ready to begin your frog, the task you defined in the previous steps, but we need to do some preflight checks first. Are you sure you know exactly what to do ? Does it take less than 10 minutes to complete? Is your workspace ready, do you have the materials you need? Have I eliminated all distractions? Put your phone far, far away, close Slack, and any email applications, and I advise you to log-out of socials.

Step 5 — Start the timer!

Find a timer, preferably not your phone because they are full of distractions. A visual timer is awesome, but not totally necessary. There are lots of timers available on the web. When you start the timer the idea is to be completely focused on the work you just defined for the entire duration. 25 minutes is widely recommended as a starting place (see: The Pomodoro Technique®).

After you begin the timer, try to avoid distracting yourself as much as you can. Challenge yourself — “In this 25 minutes of time, I’m going to do pure, focused work. It’s only 25 minutes, I got this!”. You’re probably going to get distracted, that’s fine. Just like meditation, what’s important is catching yourself, and pulling yourself back into focus.

The Pomodoro Technique® suggests restarting the timer every moment a distraction strikes, but I find this counter productive to the point of my goals in this very early stages of learning a technique. I’d never finish a timer if I did that. Instead, you could try making a little mark in your notes every time you successfully realized you were distracted. Noticed you wandered off into social media land? Go to your notes, make a mark of the distraction, and get back to work.

If you realize you’re getting distracted a lot, or can’t seem to focus, you might consider some other factors. Is my frog really clear enough? Are you sure you don’t have a deep anxious thought about the work - is there something bothering you you have not listened to hard enough? Often times, I am distracted because I feel unclear about what I am doing, which creates stress. But avoid writing more to-do’s here! You only need what you’re doing right now now to be clear. If you’re brain is busy and you feel like you need a way to let go of all the other thoughts that aren’t relevant, you might find a brain dump to be incredibly helpful — See Step 1. Other things to consider are if you’re experiencing more serious emotional strain. It’s okay to have a bad day, remember that. Forgive yourself. You’re probably beating yourself up, and that never helps.

Whilst doing your timer, your aim and focus is to complete the frog. Once the frog is complete, you should feel a sense of relief and awesomeness, and hopefully, if the frog connects well to continuous work , you’ll instantly realize another thing you should do, and you can go ahead and just let that work flow take over. You’re now in-the-flow and you should embrace it. Sometimes, I like to get my nice juicy reward early, and I think that’s fine if you feel you need some extra self-love. That reward is going to my notes, and giving myself a nice fat green check mark next to the frog I just completed. Yay, I did it, I did the most important thing! But, get back to your work flow after! You still have the rest of the timer to complete work focus. If you don’t know what else to do, no problem, use the time create a new frog and get started.

Step 6 — Reward yourself!

At the end of the work focus timer, it’s time to reward yourself. Go to your notes and mark down that you complete the frog, and a single work focus timer, in a visual way.

I like to use a big juicy red tomato emoji 🍅. If you’re into paper crafts, stickers might be a great option. Find cute stickers (preferably small so you can fit many of them on your “what i achieved today” list), and pop them next to your frog, or task subject, to remind yourself visually what you achieved. Glow and bask in the feeling of being a capable, task-completing goddess. I usually recommend a 5 minute break here, stand up, look at things far away to prevent eye strain, do a quick stretch, etc. It’s also what The Pomodoro Technique® recommends. But often, I find myself wanting to do another timer, straight away, because the glory of completing a task has given me the thirst. So, I sometimes go right ahead and do just that. The Pomodoro Technique® be damned.

Step 7 —Rinse and repeat.

Now you had your first taste, you can continue to work in this fashion. The Pomodoro Technique® says take a longer break every four timers. I say, do what feels best for you. There’s no right or wrong. But there comes a point where you will begin to flag. Twenty five minutes will begin to drag when you keep doing them one after another, without no breaks, and you might forget to take care of yourself. So, after each timer, try to work on getting into the habit of listening to your body. Do you need the toilet? Hungry? Are you feeling your focus slipping? Assess and give yourself a break appropriately.

If you can be bothered and think it worthwhile, you can also keep a small record of when you take breaks. Put your 🍅’s in rows, — a new row means you took a break. Over time maybe you’ll see a pattern. Or if you’re anything like me, it’s unrealistic to expect a pattern of ones self.

Instead focus on the important thing: the frog. It’s no use starting a timer when you haven’t got your frog sorted out. When this method fails me (or rather, I it) it can be for many reasons, but it all comes back to the core:

• Clear, actionable frog.
• Reminding myself of the above.

When I get distracted, what do I do? Check what my frog is.

When I get distracted again, what do I do? Check what my frog is.

When I get distracted for the tenth time? I might actually realize here that I’ve been lazy, and haven’t given myself the respect to write a properly clear and actionable frog. Time to do something about that.

Troubleshooting

What do you do when you do not know how to write your frog so it’s actionable?

My biggest suggestion is to ask for help. There’s a good possibility you haven’t ironed out the work clearly enough. Ask your colleague, manager or a friend for help to understand what the task is, or should be: what do you need to deliver? You don’t necessarily have to show them the whole technique if it feels embarrassing: try to get them to talk about the task in an actionable way themselves. Ask them, where would they start?

Avoid the temptation to treat this method as a regular to-do list.

It’s easy to begin treating frogs like regular to-do’s. Almost every day, I notice my frog is not specific enough, so please don’t beat yourself up. This method is a technique, and arguably, a skill. It will take some practice as it’s easy to get side-tracked, even with a clear method to follow. Old habits die hard.

The point of this method

What I have changed in this way or working, compared to other methods, is to focus on rewarding myself. I cannot emphasize how important it is to use (what some people might describe as childish) visual rewards, like bright emojis, stickers, or whatever. Your confidence and belief in yourself is detrimental to your desire to want to tackle tasks. At the end of the work day, having four tomato emojis staring at you can feel pretty great, even if it’s not as much work as you hoped.

If you have ADHD, the reward part of the method is to help your brain stimulate dopamine (that’s my theory, at least). Also important to note for the ADHD readers, is that you should consider one single frog to be the only thing you have to do. Lessen the pressure, because then the work carries itself out due to you simply beginning. Beginning gets you in swing of things, and your skills and knowledge naturally take over after that, most of the time. You didn’t actually need a to-do list, you just needed a leaping off point.

To conclude, I adapted this hybrid method of “frogging” and “pomodoro’ing” because those methods, on their own, did not help me remain focus, and I still had tons of anxiety about my ability to complete tasks. I realized I need to remember that I can complete tasks, I do know what to do, and it’s easier than I believe (hell, even fun… sometimes).

To conclude, getting things done, gets things done. And to achieve that, all I really need to do, is begin.

P.S. I would absolutely love to hear if this helped you, and any adaptations you may have made yourself, either from this article, or your own creations.

I had a breakthrough!

I purchased an oil painting tutorial by one of my favorite painters, David Cheifetz. He has a couple of tutorials available on gumroad, here’s a link:
https://gumroad.com/davidcheifetz

Watching his demo’s, I was able to see how exactly this guy paints so darn thick without everything getting all mixed up. It turns out, I was putting way too many strokes on the canvas, and trying to be too blendy-blendy with dry brushes, etc.

Here’s some pro tips I picked up:

1. Use a medium (duh I knew this but I think I was mixing it wrong on the pallete, you’ve really got to mix it and get the consistency right. I’ve got water soluble oil paints so I just used water, but I think a gel like medium like David uses would be perfect)
2. Use the tip of the paintbrush!
3. After 2/3 strokes, get more paint on the brush! DON’T KEEP STROKING THE CANVAS. NO!
4. Start with the focus of the painting, so that when you paint everywhere else, you can tone it down and keep the focus standing out.
5. Edit your photo reference more!

Okay, great pro tips David, thank you. With these in mind, I decided to try a slightly different reference photo, tired of landscapes with difficult trees and water!

I am really happy that I managed to really try the actual method of painting that I’ve wanted to (thick, alla prima, impasto stuff). It’s obviously not perfect, you can really see some of the big mistakes when it comes to the proportions when comparing it directly to the reference.

But, I am pretty impressed that the car doesn’t look like a total wonky blob! For me, that’s a true result. I am not even sure I can draw a car and when I started this painting I was thinking to myself, “are you sure, Katey, that you can paint a damn car?!”. Okay, so I didn’t 100% get the car right, but it could definitely be a lot worse.

All in all, this is a milestone and I am excited to try again with this exact method. With more patience I think I can get even better results.

I did two paintings last week which I never got around to blogging about, perhaps partly because I was feeling so frustrated with them.

Well, painting number 3 was probably my most frustrating attempt yet. I didn’t have a canvas and I read online you could oil paint on paper for practice, so I thought I’d try it. Mistakes were made. The paint ended up so thick, it just dragged along the paper with so much friction; it felt so sticky!

Not only that, but maybe the reference I picked was really just so difficult. As always, the photo is my own, but boy are the value and hue shifts so incredibly subtle. No wonder I had so much trouble.

In the end I ended up with some blobby trees and really no depth to the image. Okay, fine, next painting!

The reference here is a photo I took of the best sunset I have ever seen in Croatia (from our hotel room, ugh!).

As you can see, I painted this far too orange basically all over the canvas. When I started painting I did this kind of orange wash that spread out from the middle, thinking that having that as the ‘base tone’ would do me favors. It really didn’t, it’s just ended up making the entire painting too orange, therever not allowing the focus of the painting (the sunset band in the central left) stand out.

However, I can definitely see an improvement. I tried to be more thick with the highlight (the sun and sun reflection) in order to give that focus. I guess it worked okay.

Next problem, how the heck to paint moving water, especially when it’s so zoomed out. The colors of the water were SO difficult to determine, I think that ultimately brings the whole piece down since it’s like 50% of the canvas…

I am not very happy with either of these paintings, but I did learn a couple things:

1. Painting on paper is hard, needs a better priming and more medium so the paints don’t stick. Also, soft, subtle trees are not the greatest reference when you are a beginner at oils who doesn’t aim to be a ‘realist’ painter.
2. Remember to paint the saturation where the focus of the painting is. I do believe I am painting way too thin because things keep mixing together and I just don’t know how to control the paint the way I want to still.

I really want to go for the thick, impasto painting. Something that’s more simplifying the forms, painting in a sketchy and study way. That’s actually want I want to achieve but every time I have tried, I’ve not figured out how to stop the paint from mixing together.

To be continued!

And I’m back! Yay, I didn’t just do one post and give up. Let’s keep that up!

Today I decided to take pictures of my progress (when I remembered) so we could see how the painting develops and maybe even spot where I go wrong.

I’m happy because I know I improved a lot from yesterday. I slowed down a lot more and decided to go thin with the paint, gradually getting thicker.

I was feeling really positive about the sky in the beginning, then half way through I realised the yellow part was too yellow. I then tried to do a whole bunch of correcting and I feel like I actually ended up kind of losing the form of cloud.

By the end of the painting, I was back to feeling a little disappointed in my results. The painting lacks depth, there’s little form and I must have messed up the values in the bottom half. Perhaps I went too thick with the paint and too quickly on the darker bottom half.

I’m also having a problem where, once I’ve put color on the canvas, I struggle to change the color on top of it, because the colors kind of just mix together. Does this mean that I’m not supposed to layer colors when painting wet on wet? That I need to only put colors exactly where they need to go on the canvas? Questions, questions…

Let’s see what happens in day 3!

Thanks for reading!

Peace x

I guess that happens to all of us and at many points in our lives. It was the first time for me that it happened when I felt I had no good reason to question my current lifestyle. I’ve got a great job, a supportive boyfriend and enough friends to keep me busy.

As I have always been an ambitious person, it dawned on me that I relied too heavily on my job to give me the every day life satisfaction that I’ve been craving for in the past couple of months. Sometimes, your job just can’t provide that. So, after a couple of weeks of figuring that out, I suddenly had an epiphany.

I’ve had sudden ideas and inspirational thoughts come to me, but I don’t quite remember having such an “oh my god, that’s it!” moment like I quite had this time two weeks ago. A vision flashed before my eyes of me covered in paint, tongue sticking out the corner of my mouth and my hand fluttering over a canvas with concentrated strokes.

It really felt like it was meant to be. I’ve always had a fascination with art, and I really love creating, especially if it means getting messy.

So, it’s decided. I am learning to oil paint.

It’s going to be landscapes, at least to start with. This is because I often find myself framing up a beautiful scene when walking around. I’ll often stop and gaze in awe at the colours and light I see before me. I feel a total sensation of ‘zen’ when this happens. Something about the atmosphere, it just really pleases me. I’ll often take a snap on my phone, much to my boyfriends annoyance if it’s a particularly beautiful evening and he’s dying to get home!

I’ve got a book called Landscape Painting; Inside & Out by Kevin Macpherson. He includes lots of activities and ways to practice which I am very excited to try out. It helped me pick out some basic supplies, which I’ll share below.

I got a bunch of brushes as recommended by Macpherson;
- Bristle filberts 12, 8 & 4
- Bristle brights 10 & 6
- Bristle round 6
- Sable filbert 10
- Sable bright 6
- Sable round 4

I have no idea if this is a good selection, but I just got a selection of some that he mentioned. It seems like more than enough for now.

For oils, I decided to go with a brand I can buy in the store and I opted for the water mixable oils, this is so that it’s much quicker to clean. When starting out, I am going to make a giant mess. Plus, I am probabaly going to waste a lot of paint on some pretty bad paintings!

That’s also why I’ve just got one of those terrible table easels and a couple of cheap cotton canvasses. The easel is really as bad as people say. The tightening thing at the top does not work, like at all, so that’s pretty disappointing. I figured I’d get a cheap easel until I knew what kind of easel I wanted and for me, it was important to start painting as fast as possible. No good letting excuses like “but I don’t have an easel!” to stop me from getting started!

Okay, enough of the boring stuff, let’s take a look at my first crappy painting!

And oh boy, will there be more…

So, I guess some of you might be thinking it’s not too bad for a first go. But I must admit, I like to think of myself as someone that has studied art and painting throughout her life, and would have a bit better sense of things. The biggest thing that threw me off was controlling the paint. I read that beginners tend to go too thin with the paint, so I loaded up my brushes and went for it. However, being bold is one thing… controlling the bold is another!

I feel I have a good understanding of where things went downhill, and to be totally honest I am glad to have got that first one out the way! It was scary in the beginning, I even distracted myself with tidying up my art space for 2 hours before actually braving to paint. Once I did start, it felt fun but as the painting went on, I got more and more frustrated. I decided to stop as soon as I recognized this was going to do nothing positive for either myself, or the painting.

I am determined to learn patience and enjoy the confusion of figuring it all out. It’s gonna be a rough ride from here, but let’s just keep going shall we?

Thanks for reading if you got this far. I am mostly blogging to hold myself accountable, and to have an archive I can always refer to. So, I do plan to continue to blog although I hope to improve the image to text ratio in future posts! Eheh!

If you have any feedback, recommended resources or questions, I’d be happy to hear them!

Peace!