The Creative Balancing Act
Hello and welcome, my lovely creatives! I hope you had an inspiring week with lots of artsy fun moments to inspire your own work.
Somehow, I ended up going from not a lot going on to too much going on for a couple of weeks. I’m not complaining but just wondering what happened. Did May take a few too many caffeine shots? And why isn’t May sharing the adrenaline?
This week, I was talking with a coworker and it just so happened to come up that we’re both struggling to find the balance between work life and creative life. Of course I had to show him that I’d already started writing this post. It’s strangely comforting that I’m not the only one who’s struggling with this. Even getting out this newsletter was a struggle because when I sat down to work on it at a coffee shop on Friday evening, a woman with the yippiest dog was there breaking my concentration despite my headphones and desire to just write this. Life sometimes just gets in the way.
Dear Lovely Creative Person,
If you’re not one of the lucky ones who’s independently wealthy or who already makes a full-time living from your creative work, then managing your time, energy, and finances for being creative can be a huge challenge.
The dream for many is to make a living or at least a decent side income from creative endeavours. But while you’re working towards the dream, how do you balance being creative with the need to pay rent, pay bills, spend time with loved ones?
But how do you make it work when you have to work to live? Here are three suggestions to squeeze in some creative things whenever you can.
Block time in your calendar specifically for being creative. Maybe you can sketch something in the first 15 minutes when you first wake up inspired by your dreams. Or perhaps you can write or compose something on your commute. Or set aside an hour every other Saturday morning to dance like Snoopy. Just make sure that if you’ve set aside the time that you actually use it to do something creative.
Put away your phone for dedicated creative time. I find my phone incredibly distracting so I will often put it in another room or in an awkward pocket inside my purse so I’m not tempted to check it constantly. I even considered getting a lockbox with a timer to keep my phone out of reach for dedicated time periods but then decided that might be a bit too extreme. But it’s an option if your phone is too temptation.
Set up a Create Date with a friend. It can be with a particular goal in mind (“We’re spending this time working on our artwork for the next two hours”) or it can be left open (“For the next hour, we’re allowed to just doodle and see what happens!”). There’s definitely something magical to two or more people with focused energy on creativity. I love my writing groups for this very reason.
No matter what, life seems to keep happening despite us wanting to block it all out and just be creative. Since that’s often not possible, we have to try to schedule our Muses to show up whenever we can spare a few moments. It can be frustrating to not have infinite time, but then, maybe it makes those stolen (scheduled) creative moments so much sweeter!
Much love and permission to schedule a dance break as needed,
t :)
Inspiration Of The Week
This week, I was inspired by Instagram creator Emy Tsai’s post showing how she draws the shadows of daisies and other flowers. It made me want to break out a watercolour brush pen and chase down some flower shadows to capture their essence. It doesn’t matter that I’ve never used a watercolour brush pen and my own creations would likely just look like blobs. I’m thinking I’m going to do this sometime in the near future and just have some shadowy fun.
I love the whimsical music and peacefulness of her post of one of my favourite flowers. I’ll post photos if I end up trying out this technique.
What inspired you this week?
Creative Prompt For The Week
This section is a weekly prompt to nudge you to do something creative this weekend. Sometimes we want to do something but just don't know what to create so we need a starting point. I'm going to help the creatively challenged by providing a word, phrase, or some other starting point where you can focus and create something. If you'd like to share it with me, please do, but there's no pressure. I'm here to inspire, not judge or tell you how or what to do.
Your prompt for this week, should it inspire you, is:
CALENDAR
My life this week has been spent mostly staring at my calendar trying to figure out a) how I became so overbooked and b) how to manage to squeeze everything in. Obviously that didn’t happen as cloning myself isn’t something I’ve figured out how to do.
So, I got creative with my schedule. I also started doodling in the margins of my agenda because seeing so many different obligations on a two-page spread for next week was giving me heart palpitations. I started adding cute cartoons and flowers along the sides to make it less intimidating.
Some ideas for calendar inspiration: add stickers and other embellishments to your calendar to spruce it up, check out Linda Fabry’s doodle calendar download (video of how it works below), or perhaps you can make your own kind of advent calendar to give yourself a daily reward for achieving goals (it’s something I’m trying out to see if it works to game the dopamine).
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