An open letter from Dan
You have more time than you think, and the proof is already on your phone.
I was sitting on the edge of my bed on a Sunday morning when my phone told me my screen time was up eleven percent that week.
Up from what? And then I made the mistake of tapping through to find out.
Twenty-something hours. In one week. On a device the size of a sandwich.
I sat there a while.
The number was not the part that got me. I have known I am on my phone too much for a long time now, in the way you know a thing without ever having to look at it. What got me was that I could not account for a single one of those hours. I could tell you exactly where my studio hours went that week. My kid hours. My work hours. I could have itemized all of it on a napkin.
So where had the rest of it gone?
But twenty-something hours had just evaporated.
In three and four minute pieces. Standing in a kitchen waiting for water to boil. Sitting in a parked car outside a grocery store with the engine already off. Lying in bed at 11:40 at night telling myself one more.
I was not choosing that. I was defaulting to it.
I was not choosing those hours. I was defaulting to them.
I am telling you this because of a conversation I have almost every week, and because for a long time I handled it badly.
Somebody emails me, or corners me at a party once they find out what I do for a living. They love the idea of it. They mean it, too, you can hear that they mean it. And then comes the sentence.
I just do not have the time.
I used to argue. I would start doing math at them, out loud, like a lunatic, and I would watch their face quietly close for the rest of the evening. Nobody in the history of the world has ever been talked into a hobby by a man doing arithmetic in their direction.
So I stopped arguing. And I started believing them instead.
Because they are not lying to me. They have a job, and a commute, and a kid with a thing on Tuesdays, and a house that keeps quietly needing something. That is a real life and it is genuinely full.
But full is not the same as spoken for.
I will keep this short, because you are busy, and being busy is the entire subject.
People tell me every week that they do not have time for this. I believe them. They have a job, a commute, a kid with a thing on Tuesdays, and a house that keeps quietly needing something.
But full is not the same as spoken for.
So why does the week always come up short when you total it? Here is what I think, and I want to be careful about it, because this is not a character flaw and I am not about to tell you that you lack discipline.
Time you spend on purpose feels like time. Time that leaks does not feel like anything.
So when you add up your week in your head, you count the job and the commute and the Tuesday thing and the house. You do not count the leaks, because the leaks never registered as hours in the first place. They registered as waiting. As the small gray spaces between the real parts of the day.
Then you total it up, you come up short, and you decide there is no room in there.
There is room. It is just sitting in a form you cannot see without looking it up.
Which is the whole reason I am about to point you at a settings screen instead of asking you to want it more. Wanting it more is not a plan. Motivation turns up in January, leaves in February, and has never once helped anybody finish a thing.
A number on a screen is a fact. And facts are much easier to argue with.
So go and get yours. I will wait.
On an iPhone it is Settings, then Screen Time, then See All App and Website Activity, and the number you want is the daily average sitting at the top of the week. On an Android it is Settings, then Digital Wellbeing and parental controls, and it opens straight onto it.
So one class costs a small slice of what the phone already takes, and the rest of it is still yours. That is the whole argument, and you just did the math on it yourself.
A slider, not a study. It uses your number, and it assumes you would trade the time rather than find it somewhere new, which is the honest version of how this works.
Whatever it said, it is not a moral failing and I am not going to treat it like one. Mine was ugly. I told you mine first on purpose.
And if it came out genuinely lean, then it came out lean, and your no is a real no. I would honestly rather you close this letter than sign up for something in a season that cannot hold it.
Now here is the part I would not have believed before we opened in March of 2025.
The members who show up like clockwork are almost never the ones with open calendars.
They are the ER nurse. The guy with four kids. The woman who drives to Provo and back every single day and gets home at six. The people whose weeks are visibly, obviously, exhaustingly full.
And the ones who told me at sign-up that they had all the time in the world? Those are the ones I end up emailing about a pause.
I have a theory about it. I could be completely wrong. Here it is anyway.
A busy person does not have spare time, so somewhere along the way they stopped treating anything as spare. The night goes into the calendar like a shift, because a calendar entry is the only thing that survives a week like theirs. It gets the same protection their job gets, because it has to.
Meanwhile a person with an open Tuesday has nothing to protect it from. So the night stays soft.
And soft things get eaten. Not by anything dramatic. By a text at five o'clock and a couch that is right there.
They are not more disciplined than you. They learned earlier that nothing unscheduled survives.
So if you are looking at your week right now and feeling like there is no room in it, you may be closer to this than the person who thinks it will be easy.
Which is either encouraging or deeply annoying depending on your mood today. I mean it either way.
I should be honest about what you would actually be buying, because if you think it is pottery you are going to be disappointed somewhere around month two.
You would be buying three and a half hours where nobody can reach you and nothing you touch is urgent.
That is it. That is the product.
The clay is the excuse. It happens to be an unusually good excuse, because it takes both hands, it does not work at all if you rush it, and it is physically impossible to scroll while you are centering. So the phone goes in a bag. Or face down on a table with muddy fingerprints all over it. Either way it is not in your hand.
The pots are a byproduct. Some of them turn out genuinely good, and I am not going to pretend there is nothing like handing somebody a mug you made, because there is nothing like handing somebody a mug you made.
But that is not why anybody renews in month nine.
They renew because they found the only three and a half hours in the week that belong to them, and they are not giving them back.
And then there is a second thing, which I take no credit for at all, because I did not design it and I did not see it coming.
You end up knowing a few dozen people.
Not close friends, necessarily. Just faces who know your name, and who remember that you were fighting with a lid last week, and who ask you how it turned out.
Adults do not get handed many rooms like that anymore. I did not understand how much that mattered until I watched somebody walk in here alone in January and walk out in June with plans.
So say you do it. Say you look at your number, and you decide some of it is worth trading. What then?
Almost nobody who quits quits because they stopped wanting it. They quit because the night was never actually protected, and an unprotected night gets eaten in about three weeks.
Four classes a month is fourteen hours at the wheel. That is not much, and it is more than you think, because throwing is a physical skill and physical skills reward regularity far more than they reward intensity. Your hands forget in a month. They do not forget in a week.
One night every week will take you further than four nights crammed together and then nothing until March.
Here is what I have watched work. None of it is about wanting it more.
0 of 7 ticked
If you only do the first one, do the first one. Everything else on that list is just a way of protecting a day that already has a name.
Now the part I would rather skip, which is exactly why it goes in. What does this actually cost you?
Membership runs from $145 a month at Green Level to $275 at Black Level. It renews on the 25th, we do not prorate, and it is charged whether you made it in four times that month or once. Unused classes do not roll over, so sooner or later you will pay for a month you barely used. You can pause for a fee between $25 and $50 depending on your level, and a pause is not a refund. Canceling is free. And three and a half hours is the real number, not one hour, so plan for four door to door.
It is real money. Membership starts at $145 a month at Green Level and runs to $275 at Black Level, and it is a recurring charge on your card whether you made it in four times that month or once. Memberships renew on the 25th. We do not prorate.
You will pay for a month you barely used. Everybody does, usually the month with the holiday or the flu in it, and unused classes do not roll over. You can pause instead, which holds your shelf and your rewards progress for a fee somewhere between $25 and $50 depending on your level. I want to be clear that a pause is not a refund.
Three and a half hours is the real number, not one hour. A class runs 6:30 to 10 at night. Add the drive at both ends and the conversation you did not plan on having, and it is closer to four hours door to door. Plan for four and you will not resent it at three.
And the first night is awkward. You will not know where anything lives, your first pot will be bad, and you will be certain that everybody around you already knew what they were doing. They did not. Most of our members had never touched clay before they walked in, and there are four instructors working every class specifically so that nobody has to guess.
And if all you have on a given week is ninety minutes, take ninety minutes. Nobody signs you out at the door and there is no minimum. A short night you actually took beats a long night you keep postponing until the schedule is perfect.
If you try it and hate it, you cancel. It is free, it takes about a minute, you lose your unused classes and your shelf, and nobody asks you to explain yourself.
None of that is a sales pitch. It is just what it costs, and I would rather you knew it now, while walking away is still free.
Because sometimes the honest answer is not this month. If your number came out lean, or the money is not there right now, then it is a no for a while, and that is a real answer rather than a failure. I would rather you start in April and stay than start this week and resent it by June.
Three sentences I hear a lot. Two of them are correct.
The first one is “I am not creative.” You are not being asked to be. Centering is a physical skill, closer to a golf swing than to painting, and the first ten hours of it are pure mechanics with nobody's personality involved. Creative turns up later, uninvited, once your hands have stopped panicking. And if it never turns up, you still made bowls.
The second is “I would have to give something up.” Yes. That one is exactly right and I am not going to soften it for you. Something in your week is going to get three and a half hours smaller. The only question this whole letter has been asking is whether you know which thing it would be, and the phone in your hand has a ranked list of candidates on it.
The third is “I will start in January.” Maybe. But I have watched a lot of Januaries go past now, and the people with a shelf are the ones who started on a random Thursday in September for no particular reason. The date is not the thing that makes it work. The calendar entry is.
If it is us you are weighing up, and not just the idea of a weekly night somewhere, here is the shape of it.
Four classes a month is Green Level, $145, and that lines up exactly with one night a week. Classes run 6:30 to 10 in the evening Monday through Thursday, and Monday also has a daytime class from 10:30 to 2. Open studio is Friday evening and both weekend mornings. Pick the night that fits your actual week rather than the one you wish fit it.
Nobody makes you make the same mug. These are open studio classes, so you work on whatever is calling to you and four instructors are on the floor to teach you that thing. If the wheel is not for you there are more than 150 slab molds here, and a night of handbuilding is the same three and a half hours with considerably less swearing in it. Bisque firing is free every time at cone 05, glaze firing is charged by how much room your piece takes in the kiln, and everything goes to cone 5½ with a twelve minute hold at the top.
And there is a dog. Mud is a 35 pound miniature Australian Labradoodle who will find you within about ten minutes. He contributes nothing to anybody's pottery. He is also the single most mentioned thing in our reviews.
I am not going to tell you that pottery will fix your week. It will not. It is clay, it is messy, and some nights you will drive home with a bag of scraps and a bad mood and a shirt you have ruined.
But I have watched a lot of people walk in here saying they had no time. Then quietly rearrange a Tuesday around it. Then get protective of that Tuesday, in a way I recognize from my own week.
Not because pottery is magic.
Because it turned out they did have three and a half hours. And once they had seen where those hours were actually going, they wanted some of them back.
That is the whole letter.
Open the app. Look at the number. Then do whatever you want with it, including nothing at all, and I will not think any less of you.
But if it is this season, pick the night before you pick the level.
The night is the part that decides.
And if you do turn up on a Tuesday, I am easy to spot. I will be the one in the corner, losing an argument with a lid.
Written for anybody weighing a weekly hobby, wherever they live. Where something is specific to our studio, the letter says so.
Which version would you like to print?
Both print clean. The calculator comes out set to whatever number you left it on, with its slider removed.