Mint

Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a weekly column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track. Margot will be here on Mint each Monday, and Ellie will be over on Margot’s blog Pitch Design Union at the same time. If you have any questions for Margot or Ellie, you can ask them on formspring.

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It’s another guest post! This time it’s from a German student, who’s pretty much been The Post Family’s glue for the last 8 months. She mentioned one day that even though she’s not freelancing per se, she still loved reading the Howdy Do It posts. So I asked her to write one this week; I figured her perspective would be an interesting one about living abroad while making art, and what it’s like to run a studio with seven awesome dudes. Plus, Ina’s too shy to mention it, but she’s got a solo show opening at The Post Family’s gallery on April 9th. Details will be posted here soon.
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Hello! My name is Ina Weise and I’m studying Textile Design at a university in Germany. I’ve spent the last eight months in Chicago interning for The Post Family. I arrived in Chicago having neither an idea of what to expect nor what others expected of me. Fortunately, my family in Germany has been extremely supportive, and The Post Family and their friends share everything with me: resources, contacts, the space, and thoughts and ideas. I’m pretty much free to work on my own projects at all times. It is great to have an idea and then actually being able to realize it within a short time. It’s also nice to have people around: It’s impossible to lose inspiration when everyone around you works on crazy projects all the time, and it’s the best support when someone stops by and says “hey, that’s nice!” It keeps me going, and I’ll definitely try to share a studio with someone when I return to Germany.

As an intern, I’m not in quite the same position as Margot and Ellie. Nevertheless, my daily life needs a plan. And given that I work for seven designers at once, my daily life needs a good plan. My duties at The Post Family include anything from burning screens and answering emails, to helping install shows and being there when people want to see the gallery. Having seven “bosses” sounds like fun and it is, but it’s taken some work figuring out how to manage seven people’s opinions, requests and ideas. As you can imagine, there are disagreements. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen too often.

While working as an intern, I’ve noticed that I feel the need to finish small tasks before I begin working on another project. However, sometimes the small tasks never seem to stop. When this happens, I stay at home for an hour longer in the morning so I can avoid distractions and focus on a task that needs more thought. I guess distractions are one disadvantage of sharing a studio with a lot of people. So we created the “headphone rule”: Don’t talk to me — don’t even come near me — when I have headphones on!

I feel like the computer world sucks me in. Before I came to Chicago, I didn’t have a website and I never blogged. All I had was an email address. And now? Website, tumblr, Google reader & calendar, The Post Family’s blog, Grandma’s blog to keep family and friends updated about my life, and the tools The Post Family uses: Shopify, Backpack, Facebook, Twitter, Campaign Monitor… and not to forget Action Method. All of this means a lot of passwords and a lot of time spent in front of the computer. At the end of a day I always ask myself, “What did I do today?” That is, except when I letterpress or screen print: I can feel it in my arms and then I know what I did. I use every spare moment to print posters, create puppet shows with a group of friends or to work on window installations with INDO.

One tool that I use to plan my day is the Back to Action Method. It’s a simple, well-designed program to manage your projects by creating action steps. It also allows you to save references to your projects, ideas for the future, or to start discussions. You can delegate action steps to other people, which makes the Action Method heavenly for some of The Post Family members. By using the delegation tool, they don’t even have to call or email anymore – they can just delegate an action step and it’s on my list. At first I thought it was silly, but now I’m actually using it too. To be honest, before that I had a draft email that gathered half of the things on my to-do list. The other half was scribbled in either a little note book or another sketchbook. Finding where to read what you have or want to do was a project in itself.

Over time, I developed a better sense of how long various tasks take. Emailing people sounds like a quick task, but it takes much longer than I thought. I used to read an email and leave it to answer later. Usually I forgot about it, felt guilty, and in the end it took even longer to answer. So I decided to answer right away (apologies to my family and friends back home for being slow to respond. I like your long emails and handwritten letters. They are the best!). My Grandpa writes long letters, and I want to answer them as fast as possible because the sooner I answer, the sooner I will get another one back from him. It takes a while to convince myself to sit down and answer him. But it’s definitely worth the time. It makes me sit down and actually think about and write out what I have been doing, what I’m going to do and where I want to go with it. That applies to ideas, too. Writing a friend about your plans makes you think about them more thoroughly. Eventually, you don’t have to send what you wrote even though I’m sure the friend would like it. Figuring out my own point of view and considering a different point of view always helps me.

I say “yes” to everything right now. Everything, besides the thought of leaving Chicago. And yes, I get nervous and there are lots of thoughts on my mind when I go to sleep, but who knows when I will get this chance again. It will be hard to go back and leave all this behind. I guess I’ll take it as a new challenge. I want to have a Post Family in Germany and since I’m stealing all the knowledge on how an artist collaborative works, I think it’s possible.

Photo credits: Ina Weise, The Post Family & Ben Speckmann