Creative Foundations: Time
Managing your schedule, time audits, and dilating your perception of time...
“Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time. Managing your schedule and daily habits well is a necessary component to free up the practical and creative capacity to make great art.” -Rick Rubin, from The Creative Act
When was the last time you heard someone say that they have too much time? Most often, we hear the too-common refrain that we don’t have enough time. One of the hardest things about maintaining a creative practice is clearing and maintaining enough time for it. Every artist I know wishes that they had more time for their art practice and we all struggle sometimes when other demands and commitments edge out our essential work time; studio time is usually the thing that gets squeezed first. It’s really easy to let time that we set aside for our creative practice erode. So let’s look at some ways we can allocate and preserve time for our creative practice.
First, how much time are we talking about? There is no set amount of time that constitutes a creative practice; a creative practice can be 15-minute chunks or whole uninterrupted days. Some people can dedicate themselves full-time to making art and managing an art business, but most juggle other work (paid or not), and all of us fit it into the rest of our busy lives. As I wrote in my post about continuity (link), I think that frequency is usually more important than quantity. If you can’t carve out a few substantial blocks of time per week, frequent small amounts of time are better than occasional long sessions. With frequency comes continuity and flow, and even in little bits, it adds up. If you only get to your work now and then, even if you are able to set aside a large chunk of time, much of it will be spent finding your way into your work. When you decide when you are going to work, write it down. Whether you use a paper or digital calendar, scheduling your studio time makes it a priority, acts as a reminder, and lets you see it in relationship to the rest of your time.
Developing awareness around how we spend our time is helpful. There are a kajillion time management experts out there, and I’m not one of them (!), but I can share something that has been really helpful for me. If you, like most of us, are not really sure where all of your time goes, try a “time audit”. The idea is simple but takes some consistent effort: Using an hourly planner page, note how you use your time as you go through your day. Do this for a minimum of a few days, but a week is ideal. Don’t change your behavior, this is not a planning or self-improvement tool. If you spend 45 minutes watching adorable animal videos on social media, write it down. If you spend 2 hours working after you arrive home from work, write it down. When you get sidetracked, write it down. If you wake up in the middle of the night to nurse a baby, write it down. Just a word or two is enough. It’s all information, and it’s all useful! As you look back on this time audit, I guarantee there will be some surprises, and some sobering realities. It will help you see exactly what your commitments are, where your “time leaks” are, how you procrastinate, what you are really prioritizing, and how some boundaries might be exercised. It will also be a reality check on how much time you do or don’t have at your disposal. For example, I’m someone who always thinks I have more time than I actually do, and I get frustrated when I don’t get everything done at the rate I think I should. When I do a time audit, I usually realize that I’m trying to cram too much in, that tasks take more time than I think, and I reign in my expectations. It helps give me valuable perspective every time.
Being purposeful with time and remodeling a schedule to accommodate a creative practice usually means giving something up. Sometimes it’s giving up things that don’t matter to us and that’s not so hard, but very often, we have to choose between something that does matter and making time for our creative work. Artists often make time by choosing not to do things they want to do or might be expected of them. These choices look different for everyone, depending on resources and circumstances.
I also think that how we think about and perceive time influences our creative practice. Do you remember what time felt like when you were a child? Does time feel different to you now? I remember a day feeling like an entire week, a thing of plenty, unfurling. I also remember receiving my first watch as a child (white leather band, gold clasp, Micky Mouse face) and how it changed my relationship with time, measuring and dividing it, and how I slowly began to believe in time as an external force that was separate from me. Time slowly became a source of anxiety as I evolved into a person who was regularly late and forgetful of time-bound events. As an adult, technology promised more ease and connectivity, but we all know how that’s gone, and the old sense of temporal flow and ease has become even more difficult to find. And it seems that our collective anxieties about running out of time, using time, and wasting time are contributing to the sense of time acceleration and constriction. So, is it possible to push back on this, to actually change our experience of time? There is so much to say about this, and how it relates to creativity, that I will try to write a newsletter entirely focusing on this in the future. For now, I’ll focus on three practices or re-frames that can begin to shift how we perceive time.
The first is a kind of thought experiment starting with this question: Where does time originate for you right now? We tend to think about time as being located outside of ourselves, something linear that we move along, measurable and limited, something that is acting on us. Try turning that around and considering the possibility that time originates inside of us, a human construct, and that we are actually generating our experience of time. If you have a meditation practice, try to locate your native sense of time in your body. This shift in thinking and perceiving opens up possibilities. If we see that we are generating our experience of time, we can potentially shape it.
Another practice is to change your language when you talk about time. Listen closely to how you talk about time. Do you use a language of scarcity and lack of control? Or do you use a language of abundance and choice? In English, we use a lot of words that are transactional or reveal subtle judgement: we “spend”, “save”, “make”, “waste”, and “use” time, as if time were a physical substance. At first, just notice, and then see if you can find ways of talking about time that are in alignment with how you would like to experience it.
Lastly, try to practice something every day or every week that takes you “out of time”. Maybe this is making art, but it could also be hiking or cooking, spending time with a child, or in an arcade, or reading or dancing, etc. Let it be in the real world, not on a screen. In other words, play. Our digital devices and apps are designed to take us out of time, but our physical lives resist this kind of time-abandonment and absorption in an activity; prioritizing and practicing it, we make an investment in our ability to step outside of time and into flow and engagement with actual life. We strengthen the neural pathways in our brain that allow for this. Over time, our sense of time expands a bit, and then a bit more, and we soon find that we have more room to be, and more patience and trust to let things unfold in their own time.
That’s it from me this week; as always, thanks for spending time here! I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.
Yours in practice,