WHAT I LEARNED FROM BEING A PART OF THE WONDERRROOT CSA

So first, I'm still so grateful to have been a part of the Wonderroot CSA program. If you've never heard of this program, it's modeled after the agricultural CSA boxes that come straight from the farm with fresh seasonal vegetables. How it works for the Community Supported Art program is that the artists are selected and commissioned to make works for the collectors who buy the shares, work unseen. Each artist makes thirty pieces and each collector gets one from each artist for a total of six pieces.

The writing I did for the project was more in depth than I had gone before and that was one of the strengths. I kept a google document with all the arguments I was collecting, as well as the full script that became even more edited for the paintings themselves. Keeping it online kept it nimble, and working on the writing as a whole script kept it razor focused despite the variety of sources.

The project took longer than I expected and that's because it's hard to plan for failure. I had intended to cut the pieces down to 9" x 16" and accidentally made them 9" x 15" instead. This wasn't a terrible mistake, but it did make the video process more difficult because the pieces weren't in the correct format and it was an emotionally upsetting mistake. I've since decided that Sean McCabe's principle of striving for 90% perfection rather than 100%, is the more realistic approach.

Next time, I would plan the project a bit more rigorously.  When making this list, it would be important to keep each action item verb oriented, so that each step is it's own action instead of a collection of steps (because ambiguous steps hinders action). In the last few weeks I got a bit overwhelmed with the amount of work left and I ended up setting a series of deadlines for each action item. Doing this helped keep me on track to finishing my project, so I would work with a plan in place from the beginning.

Do you have any tips or tricks for getting medium to big sized projects done & done well? Tell me your stories in the comments.