Guest post: One or two things I know about time and creativity

This is a guest post from Mary Gordon of Creative Voyage

Time is one of the big blocks that people put forward as impediments to being creative. Time is tricky. We know it doesn’t behave normally. Sometimes it crawls by and others it races like a crazy fake rabbit roaring along the racetrack of life.

Here are one or two things I know about time and creativity:

Stop waiting

Stop waiting for vast swathes of time to create your great thing. Wishing for this is tantamount to actually creating a creative block for yourself. It is very hard for anyone to carve a large chunk of time out of a life, which normally is crowded with of things like ‘work for money’, family, friends, getting to the supermarket, vet visits etc. If you are clinging onto ‘I could only write my novel if I had a month in the country on my own’- start to think about what you are REALLY afraid of if you start that novel. Go and write a list of all your fears all the big obvious ones (I’ll write it and discover that I can’t write) – then turn over the page and write out all the less obvious ones. (I’ll write it and find out that my mother still doesn’t love me). Then go and start your novel – a shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott would say. Write it in 5 minute segments waiting for the kettle to boil, standing at the bus stop, at lunchtime – steal the time but do it.

Use what you have

Making creative use of small splodges of time is more helpful in the long run. What ever you want to do break it down. Can you write a to do list for your exhibition organisation at lunchtime? Can you draw in a café while waiting for a friend? Can you write your novel while in the dentist waiting room? Or can you do something really radical like give up watching television and retire on your own of an evening with your ipod cranked up with 80’s music and write a novel about a band instead of watching television? A friend of mine did. The Artists Way has a brilliant exercise when you deprive yourself of all media for a week. Suddenly people discover swathes of time to create.

I have a friend who had trained as a painter then married a furniture designer. She painted for a while and juggled many freelance jobs for years. She admitted to me later that really she didn’t want to be an artist but really wanted to not have a Proper job. I do wonder if some people who say they want to be creative just want the lifestyle they perceive creative people as having. Autonomy / more time/ lack of rules? It may be a lot easier to find out what it is you crave and find a way of giving it to yourself rather than forcing yourself to desire to live and write on the left bank when all you want to do is not have to arrive at work at 9am on the dot. Think flexible job, freelancing, starting your own business rather than crying to be Picasso.

Work on your relationship with time

What is more important than 10 tips on how to manage your time for a creative life is your relationship towards time. I had a period of about 15 years in my life of relentless doing, creative doing, work doing, volunteer doing, teaching doing, friend doing but I didn’t enjoy my life I ran helter skelter from one thing to another. In one way I was ‘productive’. But I ran out of steam and my body depleted after years of abuse I developed ME.

Our relationship towards Time is a symptom or result of other things. Unravelling what is going on in our life makes it easier to heal our relationship with time. In my case I had to try and face the inner hole that I was trying to fill with activity. Enforced time not doing changed me profoundly. I now am now in a much more functional relationship with time. I don’t try and abuse our relationship with too many appointments. And when I do I start to ‘forget’ them so I know its time to cut back! I’m able to use small amounts of time to be creative. You will find me knitting at bus stops or in tea breaks and taking photographs in the supermarket.

I’ve learned that there are limits in my life – I can only do so much work for money or creative work before I need noodling time (unfocussed time) or time with friends.

Start to reconfigure your relationship with time

1. Get out your diary and a piece of paper.

2. Make a grid of the past week with each hour of the day down the side and the days of the week across the top.

3. Mark in all the activity you have done in the past week, work (inc commute and enforced socialising via work) time on internet, TV, cooking, socializing, hobbies, creativity, exercise, shopping.

4. Add up each category roughly.

5. Ponder.

I did this exercise some years ago and the results for me were astounding. I was smarting from a friend’s remark that I did very little work. I added up the work I did for money, my creative work and my teaching time and discovered that my average work week was 50 hours a week. I transformed my self-image from one of lazy to productive if not verging on the workaholic. It took time to change my relationship to time but it did start the ball rolling.

Mary Gordon has been facilitating creative workshops based on the principles of the Artist’s Way in Scotland for over 15 years. She is currently creating new film projects, doing lo-fi photography, knitting and planning travel adventures. She is convinced that allowing creative dreams out to play makes us happy and in turn makes the world a better place.

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