Most likely I mangled my attempt at wordplay in that title. I’m writing again about my belief/obsession with small acts of daily creativity.
I have no real research, no data to back my hypothesis, but I will make up something that applying Curly’s Law to doing something small, new, micro challenging on a regular basis is better for you than brushing teeth or retweeting pundits (cite that fifth dentist).
At least a few times I pitched the idea to an audience (well at least back in 2015 when we did that public gathering in a room thing).
This is built on two of my practices, they are interconnected, in a way. The first, is doing daily photography, posting one of my choice to flickr as “the one”. I am now into my 14th year of doing this (and we have a group in flickr of over 1800 that continue to gather people doing their own version of the challenge).
There’s no rules on what you pick, and no requirement for perfect scores- in fact in only two years did I record the 100% rate. As told many times, I owe this idea to D’Arcy Norman, who did his own version in 2007.
At the end of the year, he said somewhere (was it early twitter) that it was an interesting challenge, but he probably would not do it again. I said, if you do it, I will do it again, and we started that flickr group for 2008. We had maybe ?20? 40 people.
D’Arcy later dropped flickr but continues regular photo posting on his own site.
With a personal photo challenge, it’s up to me to find something new daily. I enjoy this, as it makes you look in much greater detail at the world around you, notice more about light, texture. It’s a welcome break from daily routines to take 15? 30 minutes, and look around the house, the yard for something… interesting.
But then a new concept came in maybe 2010 called The Daily Shoot (web site gone but it’s in the Wayback Machine). Two photographers, Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark came up with an idea of each day posting to a web site and tweeting a specific photo challenge, like “Make an image with converging lines” “Take a photo using shallow depth of field” etc. The way you responded was by replying in twitter with a specific hashtag. The web site then aggregated responses to the original post.
I really liked this approach as it gave you little bit of direction, something specific to try, but not so specific that you could not get creative with an interpretation.
This was such a great activity for DS106 when it first started and we had regular assignments for students to do the daily shoot to practice photography, composition, and just thinking creatively how they looked at their every day world.
Students loved doing this, many times they commented on how it got them to focus more on their surroundings, or notice details better, or just appreciate things like upholstery patterns, tiled floors, reflections in windows.
But sometime in late 2011, the folks behind the Daily Shoot… gave up! They stopped doing the site. Those of us teaching or doing DS106 were not happy! So what do you do when a web service dries up? Cry?
Nah, in DS10 you build you own. And that was the birth of the first DS106 Daily Create site built by Tim Owens in early 2012. And we took it further, so it was not just photos, but design, words, video, and audio type challenges. It did hinge on the tagging and syndication from different services (flickr, YouTube), but it worked great.
It was maybe in mid 2014 that I got an idea to build a generic version of the concept as a WordPress theme I called the Daily ________ because it could be for anything- and like the orginal Daily Shoot, it’s tied to tweeting a new challenge every day and people responding in twitter. This is what powers the current DS106 Daily Create site.
Rather remarkably, the daily create as not missed a step since January 8, 2012. I was the maintainer for a number of years (meaning making sure there is a queue of scheduled challenges) but then moved on to other projects, Mariana Funes cared for it for a stretch, as did Paul Bond, and now Sarah Honeychurch keeps the machine going.
Think about it- this unfunded site that just runs on services donated by Reclaim Hosting and volunteers, has keep going daily for 9 plus years.
That Was Just the Introduction
I did not mean to do all that back history, it just happened!
With the daily photos, over a year’s time I end up with a bit of slop. Many times I have published a photo, but not tagged it or added to my album for the year. Or I got my sequence wrong. So there is always a few hours of cleanup at the end of the year.
Last year, I tried to make a habit of doing a monthly check to stay on track. I got January 31/31, February 25/27… and I lost track of the monthly check. Oh well.
But I set on in 2021 to be more careful, and I was actually posting almost every day (I was taking daily photos, I never use photos dated from another day), but with a big house move, February ended with me back posting 21 days worth! But I did get to 59/59 for January and February. Maybe I can keep the pace up again.
I had only done a handful of daily creates last year, but I was impressed as 3 of our regular crew ctually managed to get a perfect 366/366 in 2020. How do I know?
One of the fun aspects of that Daily ______ theme is you can have a Leaderboard! It even has shortcode parameters so you can have it be a yearly reset.
Not only that, each participant has a personal link that shows all of their responses over forever (or 2015 when this version of the site went live).
Check out the daily create prowess of the amazing @dogtrax
That’s right. This sixth grade teacher from Connecticut, who is not a “student” in a ds106 course but an eager open participant, has done 1858 daily creates since 2015. Tell me again about your so called Massive Online Open Whatevers…
So I got self inspired to try and keep up a strong pace for the Daily Creates in 2021. I aim to do them over breakfast. While I was in the tie for the leaders top score in January, again,February tossed a socket wrench in my productivity. I slipped maybe 12 off pace. But I’m coming back, doing maybe 3 a day. Look out leaders, there’s a cogdog on your heels.
But all of this is for maybe naught, as it’s not the perfect score, but just making a good effort each day, trying something new, and to be honest, having fun. It cannot help but be useful to the creative muscles, but also the soul.
I am not going to lop on any third daily habits (beyond coffee and loving my wife), but a twitter conversation with Kate Bowles (May 2020 was the last post? Say it ain’t so. I so miss Music For Deck Chairs…) introduced me to another fantastic example known as “3BT.”
That stands for Three Beautiful Things.
Every day I want to record three things that have given me pleasure. This 3BT site is the original Three Beautiful Things.
My name is Clare Law and I’m a mother and a writer and an editor. I kept this daily diary between 2004 and 2014, and I restarted during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. The practice of noting and describing these three things each day helps me take note of life’s many tiny joys.
For example, February 26, 2021 was “Strawberry smell, easy errand and crocuses.”
- There is an unnatural strawberry smell in the High Street that puts a smile on my face because it reminds me of something that I coveted as a child (not sure what, just that I didn’t have it and wanted it very much).
- An errand I expected to be complicated turns out to be pretty simple.
- There is a mist of purple at the bottom of The Grove where the crocuses have come.
The writing/posting part is trivial to do. But the thinking. Reflecting. What three things to choose, and how to provide them in a succinct form, enough to generate a memory nudge. And imagine having an archive of a decades of this practice of “noting and describing these three things each day helps me take note of life’s many tiny joys.”
It’s personal, self ruled, and gloriously simple. That is the power of these habits, is coming up with your own rules and approach. Sticking to it.
My daily practices are mine, meaningful to me, and rewarding on their own. But again, it all goes back to the wisdom of a cowboy named Curly.
