Book 118: Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build your routine, find your focus & sharpen your creative mind

This little book was a wonderful inspiration to me. It's a compilation of essays on harnessing your creative energy and beating burnout.

The many excellent lessons in this book include waking up early and writing three pages of free flowing thought in order to get your brain moving. Another lesson - working creative time into your work calendar each week, scheduling it as an uninterruptible time for you to explore ideas and create.

Finding the balance between having to be creative at work and wanting to maintain your art is a difficult thing. My obligations at home make it hard to find time to explore my personal hobbies. I'm either too tired when I get back to "play" or I have no desire to pull everything out to make a mess, which is usually necessary to my creative process. I felt like a lot of the suggestions in this book were immediately applicable to my own situation, and to that of others in a similar situation.

No matter how much you may love your job, it's easy to feel beleaguered when you're in a position that requires you to tap into your creativity on an hourly basis. Pick up this book, if for no other reason than to feel like others have the same difficulty.