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It's Friday. Chances are you've brushed your teeth, walked the dog and exercised, just like you did yesterday and every day before that.
Daily tasks are too often boring and induce headaches. But a growing number of people are adding one more thing to their daily to-do list - on purpose.
One website, Thing-a-day.com, challenged people to create something new every day this month. More than 600 people have been knitting, baking, painting and inventing something new each day, then posting a photo of it online before midnight.
"It's like going to the gym every day, but it's gymnastics for your brain," said Mouna Andraos, the Montreal freelance designer who started the project after she was forced into a similar daily routine as part of a graduate course at New York University.
For the past 60 days, Sarah Lazarovic, 28, has spent 30 minutes a day painting portraits of people living in Toronto. (PETER POWER/THE GLOBE AND MAIL)
The site is spawned from a similar trend known as the painting-a-day movement, which took hold a few years ago. Once a technique used by professional artists as a way to practise and earn extra cash selling cheap art on eBay, now even soccer moms and grandmas are embracing technology that makes blogging and uploading easy, and producing everything from sketches to new cookie recipes, then posting them online.
The fun, participants say, comes from exercising their creative juices every day. Blogging keeps them from falling off the wagon because (theoretically, at least) there's an audience waiting to see what they come up with next.
"There's a palpable sense that a lot of people have that the biggest thing in their way is just the starting of it," says New York-based author and Web personality Ze Frank, who gained fame in 2006 when he made an online television show by posting a new segment every weekday for a year.
"These kinds of projects offer a community of people that are doing it. They are also guaranteed a sort of exposure. I think there's something about that that's incredibly satisfying."
Creating something new every day can be tough, participants say, but the rewards make it worthwhile.
"It's very calming and you get a kind of euphoria from it if you do it often enough," said Joyce Ripley, 68, a retired teacher from New Brunswick who has posted a painting a day on her blog, titled Art Musings, since the fall of 2005.
For others, the challenge makes them more aware of their surroundings, since they're always on the lookout for potential inspiration. It also helps do away with perfectionist tendencies.
"Some of them just, like, suck," says Sarah Lazarovic, 28, who's been painting portraits of Toronto residents - some well known, such as author Margaret Atwood, hip-hop artist K-OS and actor Albert Schultz, others from her neighbourhood - every day since New Year's, adding, "I don't want to agonize over it."
Like many thing-a-day bloggers, Ms. Lazarovic gives herself a time limit every day of no more than an hour. So far, the freelance newspaper illustrator has about 60 paintings, and hopes to reach several hundred.
Still, not many can keep up with the grind. The Internet is littered with abandoned websites of people who started with grand intentions, then quit.
Even Thing-a-day.com, which required dedication only for the month of February, has had its share of stragglers. Of 1,418 people who signed up, fewer than half (609) started the project. Cumulatively, they had posted 6,325 things as of yesterday, meaning a large number fell way short of the daily goal.
The site is full of apologies and excuses.
"Okay, I've been a bad girl and not blogging, but things have been kinda hectic for me at the moment," one participant wrote.
Another wrote: "Yesterday I forgot to post. Really I just needed to take a break. I feel drained from creating every day."
It's "just the little guilt you feel if you didn't respect the commitment to yourself," says Ms. Andraos, 28, who admits to cheating every once in a while.
Even Duane Keiser, the American painter credited with starting the painting-a-day movement in 2004, stopped his daily routine after keeping it up for a year and a half. He still paints every day in his Richmond, Va., studio, but has moved on to larger paintings that take more time. He also wanted to make room for other parts of his life.
"You've really got to build your life around it ... or you won't be able to pull it off," said Mr. Keiser, 48.
Three years after posting her first blog entry, Ms. Ripley is still going strong. Painting has become part of her routine - a time when she can relax in her basement studio, or enjoy solitude in a farmer's field while painting an old barn.
When the work starts to feel like a chore, she switches artistic styles. Over the years, she's morphed from oils to acrylic to watercolours.
She also fudges the truth once in a while.
"Some days I'll do two so I can take the [next] day off," Ms. Ripley said.
