On Finding Time for Creativity

"Family. Work. Scene. Pick two."

Boxing Day walk in the forest outside my parents’ home

For the first time in seven days, I walked out to my tiny backyard office this morning and sat in silence, staring out the window at the trees and frolicking squirrels. I thought about what to write for this newsletter, but mostly I reveled in the lack of noise, the absence of questions and requests, the luxury of an hour or two that was wholly mine.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Christmas and spending time with family at my childhood home in Muskoka. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, as the saying goes, and being able to return to the cocoon of my own private space after days of socializing feels like a true gift.

The busyness of the past week has got me thinking about how to structure my life going forward. I’m a big fan of January resets (and September, too), which give us all a chance to reevaluate what worked for us over the past year and what didn’t and what we want to prioritize in the new year.

My favourite annual list of 10 end-of-year reflection questions comes from Courtney Martin:

1. What did you pay a lot of attention to this year?
2. What was one of the best conversations you had this year? What made it so memorable? 
3. What wasn’t yours to do that you did anyway? What is yours to do in 2024 that you are excited about? 
4. Where did you feel stuck? Where do you crave to have an adventure—whether literally or metaphorically?
5. How did your relationship to change, change this year? 
6. What are you grieving? How could you carry that grief more collectively?
7. When did you feel courageous this year? 
8. Who made you feel most safe this year? Who pushed you in ways that helped you grow? 
9. What was a thing you had a hard time admitting to yourself this year?
10. When did you feel more free this year?

These are valuable questions for all of us, regardless of our area of work. For me, I’ve realized that I desperately need more time to spend on personal creative projects—specifically, writing my next book. The first (very rough) draft is done, but I have found it hard to carve out time to continue working on it.

The Challenge of Choosing

This is a new and unexpected problem for me, induced partly by my layoff last January. Initially I thought that being laid off would be good for my personal projects, but it has had the opposite effect. Now that I’m a freelancer, every hour has a potential monetary value attached to it. I can either earn or not, and to choose not to earn in order to pursue a vague, non-paying idea in hopes that it’ll pay off someday is hard.

When I wrote Childhood Unplugged, I was a full-time salaried employee for a major digital publishing company, so there was more defined separation between work hours and personal hours. It was easy to say, “OK, work is done and I’ll get my paycheck. Now I get to do my own thing.” Now, it’s all my own thing, and it’s all mixed up.

Perhaps greed is at the root of this, or maybe it’s just a natural human fear of insecurity. All I know is that the extra dollars I made this year represent a sacrifice of personal creativity that does not feel worth it from where I’m standing right now. I wish I’d prioritized that manuscript more.

It doesn’t take a huge amount of time to make a difference, just consistency. This applies to any project, goal, or major life change that a person might want to make. Showing up for a few minutes each day goes a long way. Now I need to take my own advice.

Where to Find Time

My goal for 2024 is to diligently carve out daily time to research, think about, and write my next projects. The only way I can do this is through fairly strict adherence to a daily routine. I will use different methods.

Cal Newport is a proponent of time blocking, where he literally draws out the hours of the day and fills each block with its assigned task. A day can be redrawn partway through, but whatever changes are made must be stuck to. I like this method and it works; I just need to stick to it.

Newport also believes in the power of longer-term weekly and seasonal planning, which I wrote about briefly in my book as a way to get teens off their phones and develop other hobbies. Having deadlines is a huge motivator for me, so I need more of those, even if they’re self-imposed.

Ryan Holiday writes that you can only have two of the three: “Work. Family. Scene.” You have to choose, and “these choices take discipline…constantly.” He keeps a sign on his office wall that says “NO.” It’s a reminder to reject things that get in the way of accomplishing his two main goals of raising his family and doing his work.

He talks a lot about relying on good systems to achieve the things you want to do, rather than just winging it. He uses a notecard system for book research (I have used his method for years, too). He likes former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix, used to prioritize tasks:

“Eisenhower would group tasks into a 2×2 matrix: urgent and important (quadrant I), important but not urgent (quadrant II), urgent but not important (quadrant III), and not important and not urgent (quadrant IV). It is a system for channeling focus onto tasks that are truly important and contribute to your long-term goals, rather than just reacting to what seems urgent at the moment.”

I’ve realized that not everyone has the same number of hours in a day. If you’re a parent with three school-aged kids who need to be fed, taken to extracurriculars, and, of course, invested in emotionally and intellectually, your available personal time shrinks far more than if you are childless. This isn’t necessarily a disadvantage; I once read that the best thing to combat writer’s block is to have some kids. You’ll never waste a single minute that you’re given! Relevant to this is using off-hours, like getting up early before everyone else to be productive (or working in the evenings, if that’s your thing).

The message I want to imprint on my brain this January is that there will always be more to do. There’s always something threatening to replace creative time. It’s my job to push that aside and defend the practice that feeds my soul and boosts my quality of life in every area. And I will remind myself of Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem, “The Old Poets of China”:

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

My tiny backyard office will be my oasis this year, a place to creep into the pale mist of quiet solitude and do what I know needs to be done.

What do you want to achieve this year?

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