Creative Zen Transitions

Your Creative Garden: Time Again

Ultimately, time is a vessel which holds all our life activities. Our goal is to choose wisely, in order to fit in the things we value most.

Finding time for your creative work starts off as a time management question (am I managing my time wisely?), and ends up as a values question (which of two activities do I value more?).

Ideally, you will find an activity that you don't really enjoy anyway, eliminate it from your life, and use the time for something you do enjoy, like creating. But it is more likely that at some point, you may have to make some hard choices.

Only you know your life and its demands. Some of these suggestions aren't going to work for you, simply because they're not appropriate, or you've already worked through them. They may work for someone else, which is why they're here. Or they may work for you at a different time in your life.

Here are four situations regarding time:

Do you get to the end of your day thinking, oh, I really meant to spend time creating today ... I wonder why I didn't? You may have the time to create, you simply don't have a routine set up so that it takes place.

If this is the case, try putting it on your calendar.

If you have challenges scheduling on a calendar, try scheduling by activity links. An example is to exercise right before you shower. For me, creative time is after dinner and before my favorite nighttime show. Maybe not ideal for early-risers, but that's the point: do what works for you! This may involve experimenting and finding 100 ways that don't work. Enjoy it.

Do you find yourself doing something that you "know" is a total waste of time? You may not have any "spare" time, but you may have habits that waste time, which could be pruned back with some awareness.

Good news -- you'll probably improve the quality of your life doing something you actually enjoy. Things that fall into this category are activities that are unnecessary, and you're not crazy about. Identify them, then ruthlessly eliminate them. You'll generate energy in your life doing something you love, instead of feeling guilty and lethargic and helplessly wasting time.

If your schedule is efficient, you may still have some fairly straightforward prioritizations to make.

One way of finding time for our creative garden is looking at what is taking up time in our lives now, getting rid of lower priority activities, and keeping that time open by saying no to things in the future. This is about prioritizing our creativity within our lives.

Are lower priority activities present in your life? If so, weed them out. Before you commit to new activities, make sure you know what their priority is relative to your creativity. If they are higher, realize that taking them on is taking time away from your creative projects. If they are lower, saying no should be easier knowing that your creativity is your priority.

You've gone through the previous three categories, and everything in your life is important -- you are living your values. This is where the hard choices get made.

The question here is how much value you place on your creative time. Not how much you should place, or how much your friends or family place, it's how much your heart wants to place on it. Because you may have to choose between creating and other things that are dear to your heart. This is a values question.

The good news is that you may discover that some of these activities are not as important to you as you believed, and eliminating them actually frees up a lot of energy. The point is to find the things that you are committed to, that energize you, and that you must spend time on, and weed out the things that don't fulfill these requirements anymore.

You may experiment and find that everything in your life is necessary, and there is not a moment to spare. What then? Maybe this is the time when you have to choose between two things that you really enjoy. Creating may not be as important to you as everything else in your life, and that's okay too. You may create less in order to include something else that is vital to you. You may work on a creative project for six months, then switch to volunteer work that is equally meaningful.

You may get by with less sleep, though most people already aren't sleeping enough; you may find you are so energized by creating that you have a little boost of energy even though you are sleeping less -- give it a try. There is the ever popular and often impractical suggestion: delegate!

Finally, remember that you get to choose what priority things get in your life. If your creativity is more important than something currently higher up, don't feel guilty about making a change, or asking others to help out. Sometimes they'll surprise you, especially when they understand that creating is a priority of yours.

So begin with the easy fixes and work your way up. Keep changing things in your schedule until something works. It may take awhile to figure it out, but if you're serious about creating, it is worth it. If you are continually telling yourself that there isn't time in your life to create, you run the risk that you will never have creating as part of your daily life.

Time is a vessel, and activities fill it whether we choose them or not. By prioritizing, we can consciously choose to include creative time with the other priorities in our lives.

If you are absolutely positive that you've gotten your life down to the basics and there is no time for creating, consider whether you can trade time with someone else -- watching kids, running errands, etc. Look for new areas of responsibility to delegate to your kids -- teaching them how to do laundry or prepare a meal. Look for creative ways to solve the problem, for example dictating a novel while on the exercise bike, or setting your kids up to paint at a canvas while you paint at yours. Choose to change your priorities for 6 months of creating, then change them back. Instead of volunteering your time, donate a piece of your art.