Creative Office Hours

A few months ago I decided to be serious about my creative side projects. For too long I was letting work and my professional career take my focus away from creative endeavors I had wanted to pursuit for years.

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However, with it came fear about starting something new, personal, and very intimate and the pressure of sharing it immediately with the world. If you’ve ever read The War of Art, you understand the conflict of wanting to create work but scared about it not being perfect.

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At the same time, there is a need to get feedback on where you should focus your creative path. One of the things I miss most from college is not just studying fine art, but having a place to share and talk about my work with other people.

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We all find ourselves more than capable of creating great work. More often than not, we need a sounding board to share our ideas or find inspiration from things that often remind us of ourselves. The life goal of a creator is self-expression, and while it might seem at first to be a solitary journey, you need to feel like part of something. That something is a part of a team, a collaborative environment where everyone is working to come up with ideas and produce good work.

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the idea to try creating a community of people with creative side projects (and day jobs) that were willing to share their work with others, even if it was virtually.

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At first I was imagining a monthly meetup, salon style, for people to present their work to others and gain feedback. I wrote a post on Facebook to see who was initially interested and asked them directly if they had a creative project they were currently working on. I found two scenarios: either people were working on projects and had no community, or they had ideas for creative projects but didn’t know where to start.

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That’s how I came up with the idea of Creative Office Hours, a Facebook group (for now) where people can share and talk about their creative goals along with the struggles of working on a creative side hustle while balancing, well, life. The idea of “office hours” was based on something I do on a weekly basis: sitting at my desk at home and dedicated a few hours, on the same day of each week, to review my goals for the week and take care of other to do’s.

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It’s still very much in it’s infancy stage, but the group was created, it’s real, and you’re welcome to join if you currently have a creative side project to share, or need inspiration on how to start.