Decisions and the future

This is a serious post about a big change I will be making, while I have highlighted the most relevant parts, please read all of it so you can fully understand the situation

After a lot of thinking for the past couple of months I have come to the conclusion that in order to keep going I must address the issue: I am not the best managing my time (and if you have followed me long enough you are probably already aware of that) it is the main reason I decided that it would be the best to make art my full time job, but even so for this whole year I always have this feeling of running late and I have been making changes to fix that, like moving the polls to a later date for example, but in the end I don't think it worked as good as I expected

Well, lets face, it didn't work at all. 

I am trully grateful for all of your support and patience, and I have been trying really hard for the last couple of months to not stress about it, but there is always that side of me that just won't let it go: There are drawings to be made, it's my job, I need to meet deadlines, but I barely manage to fulfill them, every time a new month comes with new work to do, there is always unfinished drawings still waiting and I hate that feeling.

In the past I have been trying to come up with ideas to fix this situation: I reduced the amount of characters per poll, I only do one sketch per month for suggestions and so on, but in reality it doesn't make much of a difference, so I decided to sit down and think seriously about what to do, because I don't want for this to keep going, so I have come up with two possible solutions:

• Stop doing Patron's Request or Suggestions: One of the things that I most like to do is reading your ideas, becuase most of the time you ask for characters I don't know about or are a challenge to adapt to my personal style, and I love it because it's a great way to improve my skills, but at the same time it's the one that takes most of my time because not only do I need to do research and look for references good enough (I can spend complete days only doing that part) and then try my best to mold them into what was asked for. Placing all this into a balance I have decided to reject this idea, I love it doing it more than I can complain about it, so Request and Suggestions will stay, but there will be a big change, explained in the next point
  
• Periodically take one month off from activities: If you remember I decided to do this back then in april before I took a whole month off from drawing (for my mental health, there was a lot of things going on in my life) and it surely helped a lot, right now I am fine, even with the current situation I'm adressing in this post, but the work just keeps stacking up and very often I see no end of it, so I have decided that starting next month I will be taking a month off from the monthly activities to catch up with work. I have decided to do this each four months, I will be properly announcing it in a pinned post each time, and I will understand if you feel the need to switch to a lower tier during these months, just keep in mind that I will not save reserve slots for the $10 tier, since they are limited

This was a hard decision to make and I really want to know your opinions

I trully appreciate your support and patience, as an artist it means all to me since I wouldn't be here without it, I hope I can continue to see it in the future and even if at a certain point you decide to go, please know that you will always be welcome

P.S. For the rest of this month activities:  Requests will be open tomorrow and will be published during november, and this month's sketch for Suggestions will be up tomorrow too, it will be halloween-themed so you will only have one week to send ideas