Being overwhelmed is often my own doing. I get carried away, I dive in with both feet. I get excited. I'm impatient. I'm unstructured. I jump from thing to thing. But I don't want to do it anymore. It's too destructive to my mental and physical health.

It all goes back to starting with a structure that allows me to move through quickly and find a focus.

This first OCA exercise asks us to choose 1 historic illustrator from a list of 6. My approach was to set myself an over ambitious task to research in depth each of the 6 names on the list and from there choosing one.

That might not have been the case if the first person on the list, Edward Bawden, hadn't fascinated me so much. But I was digging a hole for myself from the very beginning. Deep diving into his work, creating a mind map, grabbing screen shots, ordering materials. The whole nine yards. Fine for a single research task but not feasible for 6.

So next time, I want to approach it differently and this is the approach I just employed to scan the other 5 artists.

• Choose an artist
• Google image search
• Quick scan of first page
• Do I like the work enough to dive deeper - simple yes or no
• No - move on
• Yes - dive to my hearts content.

This feels like a much more comfortable way to work.

And speaking of comfort, I set myself the discipline to work at my desk only so I didn't get into bad habits. Felt that working at my desk would be much better and again I took an all or nothing approach.

But think I want to modify this. Think for those basic tasks, I can do them with laptop on lap in front of the tv. Doesn't feel so much work like. I can enjoy a tv programme that doesn't demand too much attention and 'work' at the same time. For the deeper dives though, it will be a hybrid approach. For initial scan, maybe a lap approach will be ok. But for writing up, mind mapping, printing, notation, etc then a desk approach works best I feel.

Lets see, its all open to change.