I’ve created a short series of audios which answer questions I have been asked from people who have creative minds and a lot of ideas.
You can find them on Substack.
Episode 3 – How do I find time for my passion project when everything else feels more urgent?
Click here to listen
Transcript
I’ve started working on a passion project, but life keeps getting in the way. I feel like I can’t give it the time or attention it really needs. How do I make space to be creative when everything else feels more urgent?
So I was asked this by someone at an event I was at recently. I was chatting to her and to someone else about this problem. It’s something I hear a lot from people who are very creative and just have that desire to create. She was also saying that she had to stop herself getting stuck into the project on a Monday morning because otherwise she was worried that nothing else would get done.
So I suggested that she try one of two things.
Either to dedicate a specific time for it each week, so for example a Thursday morning or Friday afternoon, and make that a non-negotiable time that you really try not to give to anybody else and you just keep it for your project. It could just be an hour, it doesn’t need to be a whole morning.
And the other suggestion was why not just set a timer for 15 minutes at the start of the day and to do a bit before she starts her work so she went away and after the event and she tried that for a few days and actually she so she tried the 15 minutes a day suggestion. And she said it worked and she really enjoyed it because she started her work feeling like she’d been doing something creative before she started her day.
And it’s something I do sometimes with creative writing. In fact, I was telling someone about it earlier, how sometimes if I’ve got something tricky to write, I find that starting the day with a bit of creative writing Just 15 minutes will warm my brain up, get it into the right mood for writing something tricky.
So coming back to the 15 minutes, that might not work if you’re doing something that needs set up. For example if you’re wanting to paint on canvases or or even maybe if you’re wanting to do some sewing that requires you to set out bits and pieces to have everything organized but but it could help it could help if there are certain things that you’re you’re trying to do um. Because in fact, I also suggested it to a coaching client for the same purpose of creative writing. And I think she tried it. She tried to do that a couple of times a week and found it beneficial.
So that’s a couple of different ways that you could tackle that. um you know I think in terms of the in terms of the dedicating the longer amount of time to it so a couple of hours once a week it’s actually it’s partly about giving yourself permission to take that time to do something for you when you’ve got a busy week because as a freelancer someone working for yourself you do have things to do that are.. how many times have you got to three o’clock on a Friday afternoon and thought I really wish I’d done that thing that I really really wanted to do and remembering that probably across the course of that week you’ve probably spent those two hours scrolling through Instagram just doing nothing in particular so why not be intentional about it and actually put it in your diary and you just don’t spend that time scrolling Instagram you’re doing something creative for yourself.
So those are a couple of suggestions on how to do that yourself. There’s a couple of sessions that I’ve run with groups that kind of look at the same thing, really. So when I’ve run creative writing sessions, those are all about just getting together with a group of people for an hour and writing.
And I’ve also been running for the Doing It For The Kids group I have been running a creative co-working session where people bring along crocheting, sewing, calligraphy, I was drawing some weird penguin doodles um someone was doing some gardening any all manner of different creative things. And we’ll go away and create for 45 minutes and come back and just share what we’ve been working on.
So if you want a bit more inspiration to get your creativity going again, I have a creative prompt PDF that you can buy in my digital shop. [Send me a message if you’d like to buy one of these as I’ll need to send you the link.] That would be inspiration for writing or photography specifically although you could use it as in those as inspiration for other things.
Or if you’d be interested in a creative co-working session, an open creative co-working session that you could join, or writing sessions that I do run every now and then send me a message via my website ninalenton.co.uk thank you very much for listening I hope that has helped.