10 things to be resourceful

Be open for new

Remember yourself in childhood? The fresh look onto everything what happens. And this opens the doors for anything. Games with water, crazy bicycle rides, new findings on the forgotten building sites. Many things were normal, no matter how much time it was needed to spend. Now all requires your financial approval before you start doing anything new. Time lost = money lost. Maybe too radical, but close to reality for the majority. Rushing, Hustling, Searching, Grabbing, Earning, Growing. A Survival game, but without kid’s jokes already. We are pushed to use the most efficient solutions, but it limits the new stream of experiences which can support you and fill with something fresh. Looks like simple thing to try something new, certainly, but you have to do it while you juggle all other things with your hands! To avoid unwanted mistakes, it's needed to implement slowly little by little. Or just take a break for some time (a day-week), to try or learn something new, while everything else is waiting. So planning ahead can help here, but necessary to use the best time, when routine work slows down, for example Summer time or January-February.

Be ready for mistakes

and better if they will be not so hard to stop you easily. Experience is a mix of painful, normal and sometimes pleasant things, so when you wish something - be ready for some work, painful kicks and long routes. But it's not a rule, so as earlier, be always open for new, but be ready for a failure. If you're ready for a failure, you can mitigate the hit. If you dont't prepared for a tough kick - most probably it will destroy your will to continue. Sometimes your surrounding mitigates consequences of the failure, but at the end - it's your fault and responsibility. So be ready to drop out the garbage from your head and self-repair by yourself in order to continue.

Try various approaches

If you're ready to continue even after several mistakes - make sure you're doing something different, rather than simply hitting your head constantly in a wall. Maybe it's time to use a drill now.

Speak to people, connect

Working in a team is almost always beneficial for everyone, all depends on your ability to communicate. They share, you share. Just use it all the time, because if people are kind, they will be always sharing with you the best what they know. After spending much time with some software you can be also helpful and valuable for others, even if you're junior. There can be some obvious solutions, which seniors weren't acknowledged of, but you can surprise. Simply take active role, ask more, be kind and valuable. Connect and learn much faster with others.

Research and learn

The more you know(effectively), the more resourceful you can be. By learning how is built or works one thing you will have an understanding with another similar object. Same with a software, almost (sorry Premiere Pro). By learning how some tasks are managed can help you learn faster and work properly in many different situations. But true experience and professionalism wins certainly. Everything needs time to learn. And you want to live a normal life, not only to learn constantly. That's why you have to mix your activities, so it will be living by learning how to play musical instruments, dance, fight, build, plant flowers, communicate, paint, meditate, volunteer, travel. Everything can teach you something new and find patterns thatt can be applied somewhere later. The depth of this learning is the most valuable part. When you find true secrets of the craft - you gain a true power and cleverness that forms your character. And improves your will in searching for more and more interesting discoveries.

Breaking down complex problems into smaller, manageable parts

Sometimes it's devastating when you don't know how to start. You have to do something, design, animate, code, solve. And your vision is not enough to see the problem in details, in its entirety. You trying to do something, what you can do, because it's the only possible variant. And as the time is passing away fast, you have to do something without deep understanding and research. Which leads usually to mistakes and new experience. Which is not bad, and essential in any work. Even NASA does mistakes. But, at least you can split the problem and do what you can do GREAT. And later ask someone, google for example, chatGPT, your neighbor, community. Then go back to the subject, task and problem, and scan it again with your new vision. Like The Predator. Because human is a predator. Be savage to you problem or problem will eat you.

Additionally you can check my previous post of how to overcome doubts.

Be flexible to find an alternative

Had situations already how day have passed, and you still doing small unimportant thing which started in the morning? Time is subjective, and when you feel that you can spend 1,5 hours on fixing a composition, try to stop this regular thought and jump into the notepad. Just to switch your mind onto another task and maybe draw some schematic look of the composition and drop this task into subtasks. After that you can estimate time for each step and then, even if you will be doing some step significantly slower - you'll have an understanding of your real progress and efficiency. Which at least can be used for your planning next time. Or will reduce gaps on some particular tasks. Because you will be controlling the quality according to the project's requirements. You will be more flexible and ready to take another course, if you're not meeting each deadline that you've set initially in normal state of mind. Because it's hard to be flexible in a state of mind of a mad scientist, solving "almost final steps" of the problem.

Focus on most important

Start iterating with basic overview, and then improve details. It's normal to show the concept, an unfinished project to the client. Because showing a perfect inapropriate garbage (according to the client) will be vvvery unprofessional. It's just needed to conceptualize and prepare in a form, that's suitable for the client. At least it should look clean, neat, accurate. Focusing later on most important parts can improve the work in a shortest time. Just make sure you're focusing on necessary things (especially for the client).

Organize things

Easily access what you need when you need it. When you can find some templates, illustrations, 3d models it makes you feel more comfortable and confident in what you're doing. Why you have solve which disk to check, which folders contain what you need instead of solving the actual problem? When axiety appears during the work - nobody can tell for sure where it's came from. It's one of the reasons.

Plan ahead

Form the route before you start travel. It helps a lot. When you can start work and push it till the end, you're saving a lot of time. So spending a couple of minutes on small sketched plan can save you days. Take this into account before any serious task. Because flexibility is more important than somehow finished project (usually with mistakes). Control your time.

Happy keyframing! Till next time. Please register and comment below.