A job, a significant other, children, appointments, and other responsibilities fill your day-to-day life.
And when school’s out, it’s somehow busier. You tell yourself you’ve got no time to pursue a creative activity. You’ll do it later. Perhaps you will. Perhaps you will never find the time because you’re looking for “extra” time. There is no extra time. Your day, my day, even the most successful creatives, have the same 24 hours in a day. So, what is the secret? How do others find the time to be creative?
There are three secrets, or keys, to finding the time for your creativity: Find Your Passion, Recognize Your Limits, and Assess Yourself. Follow these three key ways to look at your days, and you’ll find the time you need.
Find Your Passion
When you say, “I don’t have the time,” you are telling yourself a little white lie. Why do I say that? You make time for many other things—sipping your coffee, helping your neighbor/friend/family member, running your kids to their activities, scrolling your phone. Uncover the root of why you don’t have time for your creativity.
If you aren’t passionate about the creative activity you’ve pursued, you’ll never find the time. So, take a self-inventory. Are you pursuing a project that you don’t really care about? Are you following an art form or genre you aren’t that interested in?
If you are pursuing your passion, great. But you still don’t find the time for it, skip down to the next section. If you don’t really know the answer to those questions?
Guess what? Your passion may change more than once in your lifetime. So, it’s okay to not know the answers to the questions above. It’s okay to not know the answers right this minute. You can (re-)discover your true passion. How?
There are several ways to (re-)discover your passion. The first is to look back to your childhood. What did you gravitate toward the most? Art? Music? Storytelling? Television or movies? Clay? Fiber arts? Photography?
Whatever that was, start there. Dabble. Play. Experiment. Do trial runs. Give it two to four weeks and re-assess how you feel about it. Are you excited about doing it? Or does it give you a “meh” feeling? If you get a meh response or you “forget” about doing it, try the next thing on your list. Repeat this as many times as you need. There’s no hurry. You’ll find it when you listen to that inner creative, whom you have silenced for so long.
When you find your passion, you’ll make the time even if you have to take baby steps. It doesn’t matter if it’s five or fifteen minutes a day or a couple of hours one day a week. Once you find your passion, you’ll make time. Your passion will drive you forward but you may still have obstacles in your life.
Recognize Your Resources & Limititations
You have three resources:
Time,
Energy,
and Attention.
These are not endless resources. Each person’s limits for each resource vary, but every single person has limits. It doesn’t matter what causes the limits. What matters is where you choose to spend those resources, even when you don’t make a conscious choice (doomscrolling anyone?).
Limitations
Recognize your personal limits if you want to create time for your creativity. Don’t understand what limits you have?
Maybe it’s a chronic illness. If you have a chronic illness, that illness imposes limits on your energy and attention, which limits the time you have. Unfortunately, most chronic illnesses are lifelong and create lifelong limitations. It’s extremely difficult, but when you accept those limits, you can find ways around them so you can work on your creative projects at your pace.
If you have an acute (sudden, intense) situation that’s popped up in your life, your limitations may mean this is a season of your life when you can’t create as much as you’d like. Try not to let your passion lie dormant, even if you can only spend very little time on it. Try not to stress out if you hit a block. Stress causes physical and emotional situations where creating isn’t possible. Instead, you can watch videos or listen to podcasts, or read books, and learn more about the creative path or techniques you’re passionate about during this time.
No matter what physical or emotional limitations you have you still have the same three resources to draw upon. The first one is time.
Time
Some people use the “I don’t have time” phrase to avoid failure. Are you afraid to try because you might fail? Try reversing your thinking. Failure isn’t forever. Failure is often the path to learning and improving your craft.
Of course you will fail—a few or many times. But with each failure, you’ve learned something. Figure out what you learned and try again. Find a mentor. Take a class. You can do it when you decide to act.
Too Busy
If you’re “too busy,” look at your priorities. Do you prioritize others before your creativity?
Some of you will get upset at that question and answer, “I put my family first.” Of course, the health and welfare of your loved ones are a top priority, but if you don’t also make your creativity a priority, you will never have time for it.
Look at your life and decide what you value most. Maybe you don’t value creativity as much as you value other things. That’s okay as long as you are honest with yourself that you chose not to prioritize creativity.
If your creative pursuits are one of your top three most valued aspects of your life and you still have no time for them, look at how you are using your time.
Does what’s scheduled on your calendar reflect your top three values? They don’t have to be equal. But if your creative pursuits are among your top three values, your calendar or your day-to-day activities should reflect that. No creative time scheduled on your calendar? Then you aren’t acting as if you value your creativity.
To create time for creativity, you must value your time. You must value your creative endeavors. How do you show that? Prioritize your creative time.
Again, valuing your creative time doesn’t mean your creative time is equal to each of your other top two values. If you rate financial security as your number one value, then your money-making job will take more time than anything else. Where your creativity falls in the ranking of your top three values helps you decide how much time and energy to devote to it.
How do you adjust to make your busy days align with your values?
Take baby steps.
Look at your calendar and make an honest assessment of each appointment, activity, or task you’ve got scheduled for the next week. Decide which ones reflect your top three values. Mark them as high-priority.
Is your creative time on that calendar now? If not, figure out how to shuffle your calendar to make creativity one of those high-priority activities.
How?
Decide upon a specific amount of time (five, ten, fifteen minutes, etc.) will spend on your creative projects. Decide how many days a week or month you’ll do that. Look at your calendar, which now reflects your activities prioritized by your top three values.
Assess the activities that remain on your schedule. Are there any you can shuffle to a different week or delegate to a family member, or even cancel?
After you’ve done that, study your calendar again. Look for the “should dos” or the “only I can do it right” chores and other people’s demands on your time. Decide what you can shuffle, delegate, or cancel.
Don’t fill every minute of your schedule. Allow yourself some breathing room. Life will change your plans. Allow enough breathing room that you can juggle things around in a way that allows you to keep your top three values reflected in your schedule in most “must reschedule” situations.
When you move from creating a schedule that doesn’t prioritize creativity to one that does, you likely have to find your creative time in “creative” ways.
Get up half-hour earlier each day or stay up later. Take your creative project with you to work on in the car or bleachers while your child finishes school or practice. Decide what’s doable this week or this month.
If you have time-dependent obligations, you may need to schedule those first, then schedule your creative time. Ideally, prioritize your creative time, by scheduling it FIRST. Schedule other activities around it.
Protect your creative time
Inform your loved ones of what you want to do. Show them how you are working toward a more genuine life by prioritizing your creativity.
Be aware that your loved ones, and even your own brain, will push back against the changes you are making. To protect us from perceived and real dangers, our brains choose the most familiar thing—the one our brain has designated as “safe.” That means the pushback will make you feel like you should go back to the old ways. Be patient with your loved ones…and yourself. And remember, each time you prioritize your creativity, you are becoming the creative person you want to be.
Prioritize your creative time, and everything else will fall into place.
Energy
You’ve got a finite amount of energy each day. Protect your energy. Make sure you get enough rest, drink enough water, and exercise regularly. If you have to schedule those activities, do so.
Energy levels change over the course of the day because of your biology and your life situation. Some people describe themselves as morning people. Likely this is because they feel at their best, their most energetic, in the morning. Some people feel best in the middle of the day. Others prefer working at night. According to Penn State psychology professor Frederick Brown, “There is a strong genetic component determining whether a person is an evening or a morning type in their activity times.” He also says that for most people, mood is higher in the afternoon and most feel a “tiredness slump” between 4-6 p.m.
Surprisingly, many people think they are one or the other, but aren’t. We don’t get synchronized with our built-in biological rhythms until mid-adulthood. Discover which hours of the day you have the most creative energy. How do you do that?
Try one time of day for two to four weeks, then try another time for another few weeks. Remember your brain will want to choose the “familiar” option. Don’t rely on your memory; record the time of day and how much time you spent, what you accomplished, and how you felt. Once you’ve sampled your options, compare your results and you’ll know what works best for you.
Plan to use your energy so that your creativity gets a good share of it. If you have young children or are a caregiver, that may be difficult. If life situations keep you from giving your creativity your best energy, give it your second best. Don’t wait to tackle your creative endeavor with your last bit of energy. You’ll end up not doing well or give up entirely.
Attention
Today’s world is full of distractions. Key to creating the time for your creativity, is protecting your attention.
Respect your creative time by finding a distraction-free environment. Or at least as distraction free as you can make it. That may mean turning off your phone. Going to a no-internet available zone. If you have a door to your workspace, shut it. Teach your family and friends that you will give them attention after you finish your creative time. Then do it.
When I was alone with my young son, I couldn’t shut the door. So I created a play space in my office for him and taught him to respect my creative time. When he tried to interrupt, I’d ask him, “Is it:
- on fire?
- bleeding?
- dead?”
At first, he’d blurt out something he wanted or needed. I’d ask my three questions. If it were an emergency, I’d stop and take care of the problem. If it wasn’t, I redirected my son to his toys or activities and refocused on my creative work. It took months, but he learned two things: to respect my creative time and which things were urgent and which were not.
Some creatives I know use music or sound cancelling headphones to help them focus their attention. There are people who need to “brick” their phones or use software that blocks their access to distracting social media or other software that helps you focus on writing or other activities by tracking your time, word count, etc. Brainstorm how you can decrease or eliminate distractions so you can give your creativity your full attention.
Assess Yourself
Record your use of time. Make a record of your progress. It’s impossible to know what needs to change, how much progress you’ve made, and how much you’ve grown or learned without records. There are many physical and digital products for tracking your time. Use a spreadsheet, an organizer, a calendar, or photographs.
Make a regular date to assess yourself once a week or once a month. How did you use your time and energy, and attention? What progress did you make? Did you keep your creative time as planned? Why or why not?
As regular readers of my blog know, I assess myself at least monthly. (Note: the ways I assess myself have changed. See the learn more links below.) I record my time spent and what I accomplish in that time. At the end of each month, I evaluate my activities. How do I feel I did? What did I actually do? What worked and what didn’t? Based on what I learned from my records, I make adjustments. I write my goals on my Kanban board and my schedule in my planner for the next week, month, and ninety days. Adjust for unexpected events that life brings. Rinse and repeat.
Use the 3 Secrets to Creating the Time for Your Creativity
Over time, you’ll learn what works best for you. You’ll change what you record or how you record it because of changes in your lifestyle or in your skill level. But keep assessing yourself. If you stay true to your passion and mastered the three secrets, you will find time for your creative projects.
What ways do you create time for creativity?
Learn more about :
Using intentions rather than goals.
Using project management systems to track progress
My self-assessments
The Messy Second Quarter of 2020
Resources
What Makes a Morning person or Night Owl?
Image Credits
Featured image: photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Second image; purchased from Depositphotos.com
Third image: purchased from Depositphotos.com
Final image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay