[Special] The 100-Day Project
Starts 2/22/23. Energize your creativity in just a few minutes a day
How often do you create?
Busy lives don’t leave much room for creativity, at least not for what you want to pursue in your personal life.
All is not lost. Can you find 5, 10, 15 minutes to play each day for 100 days?
Enter The 100-Day Project.
It’s Free, Easy, and Fun
A lot of us have complicated relationships with our creativity. For this event, you just need a desire to work on something and a willingness to commit to it for 100 days.
#The100DayProject is a *free* global project that takes place online Feb 22 - Jun 1, 2023.
Anyone, anywhere with Internet access can participate.
The main rule is there are no rules. Pick something creative you’d like to do, and work on it each day. What you work on and how much time you spend are entirely up to you. You can change what you work on. No guilt or public confession required if you miss a day.
Keep it completely private or share it with a few people or publicly post your progress. Or decide that each day.
There’s no official registration. Just start on Feb 22. (Or on any other day, for that matter.) As an option, announce your project on your own social feed(s) and sign up for the event’s newsletter to get updates. If any of my subscribers decide to do this, I’d love to know about it! See below.
To follow along online, use social media with the hashtag #The100DayProject2023. Optionally, add your own unique hashtag that highlights what you’re doing. Search Instagram with what you're thinking about using and see what shows up. You might want to try something else if it already has a lot of posts. Or feel free to ignore hashtags altogether.
Resources are available through the project website, Instagram, and a Facebook Group. A newsletter from the organizer is available (free and paid versions are offered; I’m using the free version for now).
Why participate in such a project?
I still struggle with the mandate I was given as a child that said I had to finish all my homework and chores before I could play. Now, there is seldom an end or a “finish” when it comes to the adult “must-dos” of my life. Which means creativity takes a back seat far more often than I like.
I’ve experimented and learned that accountability works for fun stuff as well as other obligations. For example, I love to write. To make sure I do, I started this very public newsletter.
Online communities like #The100DayProject work miracles for me when it comes to my art.
What makes a good project for this?
Anything at all! Paint, draw, dance, knit, doodle, sing, brush your teeth. Start that project you really want to do but have been putting off. Use a project you already have in progress. Or make up something completely different.
The original creator of this event is Michael Bierut. In his essay, he shows several examples of wildly different projects people chose in the first 5 years of this event. Some are quirky, like 100 ways to use an ordinary wooden folding chair. Some are straightforward, like drawing something from life every day.
Find more on what makes a good project and many other topics about this event in its FAQ section.
Join me!
Hobbies are so much fun when you do them as part of a group to give and get support and inspiration. Group members don’t even have to be doing the same hobby.
My #The100DayProject2023 is the hand-lettering class I’m taking from Willa Wanders.
I’ll post photos (not necessarily every day) on my Instagram account.
My unique (so far) social media hashtag for this is #100DaysLetteringFun. I will start using it on Instagram and Facebook on Feb 22.
Reply to this email to let me know if you’ve decided to create every day for 100 days and whether you’d like to share your progress within our little subscriber community. If at least one other person besides me agrees to do that, I’ll activate a Substack Chat thread where we can share our progress, optionally including photos, with each other. NOTE: At this time, the Chat function is available only through the iPhone Substack app. My apologies to Android-based smartphone owners. Substack is working on including it the Substack Android app.
Thanks for reading!
—Mary Anne Shew (@maryanneshew)