Is your time, energy, and creativity being sucked dry by your must-do and should-do lists long before you get to your want-to-dos? The holiday season is rushing toward us. Holiday decorating, shopping, cleaning, meals, and events can be overwhelming and can consume so much of your time and energy there’s little left for creativity. Or maybe a change in your life has disrupted your normal routine, and you fear it’s killing your creativity. Breathe. It is only a season of life. You can find a way to make room for creativity even when life gets crazy.
Life’s Busy Seasons Can Affect Your Creativity
I’m not talking about the four primary astronomical or meteorological seasons. I’m referring to times when one aspect of your life occupies most of your energy and time. There are many seasons in life—everyone’s life. Sometimes, one part of our lives shifts, and suddenly family is your highest priority. Sometimes, it’s a job or education that becomes your top priority. These changes aren’t always easy, financially rewarding, or happy time. Of course, there are those glorious days when your latest creative project is your highest priority. But if you’re like me, the times when something other than your creative projects takes over your life, you might feel as if you’re wasting time or that you aren’t accomplishing anything because the only thing that counts is your creativity time. (Please don’t let me think I’m the only one who feels that way!)
How to Recognize When Your Priorities Have Changed
When my husband was ill, I had no idea when or if he would recover. I knew that a 100% recovery wasn’t reality, but I couldn’t allow myself to imagine him not recovering at all. No matter how well I cared for him, his recovery was not in my control. At first, everything frustrated me. His health was out of my control, and so, it seemed, was my energy and time for creativity. For a long time, I kept expecting to accomplish the same things I had before his illness. Eventually, I had to realize my circumstances—and my priorities had changed.
Like me, you may not recognize that the season of your life has changed. One of the very first symptoms is frustration. Frustration with yourself, with others, with whatever task you’re trying to accomplish. Once you recognize something has to change, take a few deep breaths.
Things get a little easier when you recognize your season of life has changed. But to help relieve some of your frustration, you’ll need to do a little work.
3 Ways to Protect Your Creative Resources
Part of the reason you’re so frustrated is that you’re running on empty. You’ve got no more steam. Stop demanding that you produce more things, get more done. Once you recognize and accept your current season, it’s time to take care of your resources, make creativity easier, and maintain your creative identity.
1. Take Care of Your Physical Energy
First, take care of your physical self. If you deplete your physical self, you simply cannot be as creative as you’d like to be.
Are you getting enough sleep? Drinking enough water? Eating well? Your brain and body need those things in order to get through a day with or without creativity.
Take inventory. Adjust what you can so that you get as close to what your body needs as possible. Once you are taking better care of your body, it’s time to take care of that impossibly long to-do list.
2. How to Make Time for Creativity
Your time and energy are creative resources too. No matter what any social media post or any guru says—no one can do it all. No. One.
When you spend time on things that don’t really need to be done, you’ll have less time to do the things that are important to you. Take a few minutes and look at all the things you have on your plate. Be honest with yourself and evaluate the tasks you think you need to do.
Ask Yourself:
Which deadlines are hard and fast? Which ones are self-determined and are flexible enough to be delayed a little or a lot?
What can wait indefinitely?
What can wait a limited time (month or week)?
What absolutely must be done today, this week, or this month?
What can someone else do? (Employee, co-worker, assistant, family member?) Delegate those things.
What must be done by you and only you?
Narrow down your list to what only you can and must do. Then, you need to transform that list of overwhelming tasks into something you can manage.
How to Make Creative Time Easier to Find
When life is crazy, thoughts of all the things that dominate this season can fill your mind. Finding the time and energy for creativity can be increasingly difficult. That’s why it’s important to prepare ahead of time. Make the most of your limited creativity time by making it easy to start creating when the opportunity arises.
1. Embrace “Good Enough”
In an ideal season, you could do everything you want to the level of perfection you want. But when you are in a season of life that is crazy busy (like the holidays) or crazy with urgent, unexpected interruptions, you need to embrace the “good enough” mentality.
Look at your to-do list and decide what the minimum you can do is. Maybe you only need to do part of a task at a time.
If one of your tasks is to get the holiday decor done, but clutter is in the way, maybe you don’t need to clear all the clutter. You can decide that clearing the clutter isn’t necessary in this season. Having a “tidy” house can be “good enough.” Maybe having only one or two holiday decor items on display is “good enough.”
Maybe you don’t have enough time to write a chapter, but you can work on one paragraph or one page. If you don’t have enough time to finish the painting you’re working on, you can work on one section.
When you decide what is “good enough” for this season, you are choosing where you will spend your limited energy.
Any time you can spend allowing your creative self to breathe and stretch will reinforce the feeling that you haven’t given up, that you will return to your project full-strength when you can. But with limited creativity time, you need to make it easier to jump right into your project.
2. Remove Obstacles That Keep You From Creating
Obstacles in this case are the small tasks that you do in order to achieve the larger objective. If your life is hectic, reduce the friction between you and your creative tasks. Have everything ready so that you can start the second you have time.
Ways You Can Remove Obstacles
Have your tools readily available. That may mean a clean desk with pens and pencils and notebooks out where they’re easy to reach. Or setting your computer to turn on at a certain time every day so you don’t have to wait for it to load. Knitting creators might keep their notebook and knitting materials by their favorite chair. Artist could be certain all their tools are clean and ready to use.
If you’re getting enough sleep, consider getting up 20 minutes before everyone else and go straight to work on your project.
Carry a notebook and pen everywhere. Or set up a file on your phone where you can dictate ideas whenever and wherever they come to you.
Reduce the number of steps it takes to get started. Think about the things you do to “get in the mood” or to get your workspace set up.
Once you remove the obstacles that make starting difficult, the next step is to make the work itself feel more manageable.
3. Break Big Tasks into Small Steps
For each task, break it down into the smallest possible steps. Nearly every large task is actually a number of smaller steps. If you attempt it and quit or can’t even face it, look at that task again. Figure out what you can do to chip away at that larger task.
Choose small, dedicated moments to focus on a piece of your project. Do one page, one color, one row of knitting. No matter what your creative project is, find the one thing you can do in the few minutes you can spend on it that day.
How to Maintain Your Creative Identity
Often, when other things take precedence over being creative, you risk self-doubt and a shrinking of your creative identity. When you’re in a season of craziness, you can maintain your creative identity by celebrating your progress, defining what a new season looks like, and by trusting your creativity will still be there.
Celebrate Your Progress
Your brain will tell you that you’ll remember the creative progress you make, but you won’t. Record what you’ve done. You don’t have to use a spreadsheet. It can be a list of tasks you check off when done, stickers on the calendar, or magnets on your refrigerator.
Use a method that is easiest for you. Put it somewhere near your workspace or pinned on your computer desktop. The easier it is for you to see, to use, and to review, the more benefit you’ll get from it.
At the end of the week, take up to ten minutes to look at what you’ve done. I’ll bet if you listed everything you do each day, you’d be surprised at how much you get done. You might even see those ten minutes of creativity a day as meaningful.
No matter how much you had hoped to accomplish at the beginning of the week, look back at what you got done during the week and give yourself an Attagirl! Treat yourself to a favorite drink, listen to a special soundtrack, or do a few dance steps. Celebrate with joy. You deserve it.
When you focus on what you haven’t done, your brain focuses there and keeps reminding you of what you didn’t do. Focus on the positives. Remind yourself that you did five minutes of creativity this very busy and stressful week.
Define What a New Season Looks Like
Sometimes, we know that a season will end because it’s tied to a calendar date, such as the winter holiday season. Other times, forces beyond your control dictate when the season begins and how long it lasts.
Define the end of your season with things you can control.
If I had defined the end of my “caregiver” season to be when my husband was 100% recovered from his illnesses, I might have missed opportunities to “change seasons” when he improved for a time. Don’t let something outside of your control dictate what season you’re in. Allow yourself to see slight changes as an opportunity to adapt to a new season of life, a new season of creativity.
Maybe you’ve got help for a few days. That can be a new season. It might be short, like a week of warm weather after the first frost, but take advantage of those brief changes. Allow it to reinvigorate your creative self. Even tiny moments of creativity can help you trust you haven’t lost your creative self.
Trust That You Haven’t Lost Your Creativity
You were born creative. Yes, you were. All of us were. Watch any toddler or kindergartner, and you’ll see some of the most creative people on the planet. As we grow up, most of us suppress that creativity for a lot of different reasons. Yet creativity isn’t’t limited to art. It’s the ability to imagine possibilities, to solve problems, experiment, and find new ways to do something.
You will not “lose” your creativity no matter how long this season of no-time-for-creativity lasts in your life.
Creativity doesn’t die. It can go dormant. Like a muscle that hasn’t been used, it may need some exercise before it feels strong again.
No matter how little time you have during a season when life is crazy. Small creative moments help maintain your creative identity.
Remember: Seasons Change
Even inside the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, where polar night causes it to be dark all day and night for months, seasons change. Slowly, the darkness lightens, and the sun stays up longer and longer.
Simple doesn’t mean easy and the end of one season doesn’t mean everything is rosy again. Sometimes a new season begins before all the problems of the previous one are resolved. Your new season may not hold all that you had hoped for. The best news is that your creative identity isn’t’t gone just because you temporarily have different priorities. You can recognize small changes and make room for new possibilities.
When life gets crazy, what’s one small thing you do to keep your creative spark alive?
Image Credits
Featured image purchased from DepositPhotos.com
Second image a collage of photos from DepositPhotos.com
Final image from Pixabay.com
