Keep a seeds notebook always open
Rubin treats every observation as raw material. Make a Seeds page in Dotty and capture anything that catches your attention — a phrase, a colour, a contradiction — without judging whether it's useful. Over weeks, the page becomes a private library you can revisit when a project needs a spark.
Schedule space, not output
Creative practice is mostly about being available, not striking deals with results. Reserve recurring blocks for studio time with no required deliverable. Keep them in Dotty alongside your project work so you can see, plainly, that the practice itself is on the calendar — separate from any specific outcome.
Move work through the seasons
Rubin describes distinct stages: the seed, the experiment, the craft, the completion. Track each project by stage in your planner and resist the urge to push everything to completion at once. When you can see a project sitting in experiment for a while, it stays in conversation with you — and the right next move tends to surface naturally.