Discouraged so back to basics

Recently I have been discouraged with animation, and feeling burnt out. Basically because animation takes so long to achieve, and since I have only a short amount of time every night to work on something, whatever piece I'm working on feels like an old overchewed piece of meat before I can finish it.

The solution of course is to get back to the basics. Do quick simple tests that don't take long, to regain the sense of competence. The key of course being quick, so they can be done in a night.

The Arc's 60 frames a day challenge is perfect for this.

Jean Denis Haas has a good list of exercises (and how you should approach them)

And there's a thread on the 11sec club with a ton of exercise ideas.

And maybe I'll reverse engineer the AAU Pixar classes since they no longer exist. (by tracking through Shiva Adloori's blog while he was in them)
Character Walk
Juice box enter scene, react to something, and exit scene
Thought process while getting up from a chair
Character interact with an object
Have Character "fix" something
Gear change: 2 different thoughts with a good transition moment (this LightSwitch moment is the key point to this excercise)
Silhouette Dialogue (solid black)
1 person dialogue with subtext (subtext pulled out of a hat)
hiding something
secretly attracted
guilty
something else really important is happening
secretly hates
uber bored with char b.