Three Best Strategies To Easily Make More Time For Creativity And Play

You want to make things. You also want to be good at making things. Creativity is a core part of our natures. 

I’m quite creative in the sense that I physically create things. However, not so much in terms of originality or imagination. It’s something I want to work on. My woodworking is fairly structured at this point. I have a number of designs I’ve tweaked over the years. I spend most of my time reproducing these designs. 

I try to exercise my imagination through social media posts, videos and blog posts. My last blog post was June 2021! I posted a video a month ago, but nothing in the eight months before that.

Our online lives have led us to confuse urgent with important. Instant communication makes everything feel urgent, but it’s not always important. Fostering creativity and spending time at play is important but rarely feels urgent. I haven’t had much trouble keeping up with the relatively low effort required to post social media. I haven’t done so well at applying my creativity to longer forms of media. 

In an effort to change this I’ve been reading around on how to be more creative. To help myself make sense of the information I’ve decided to turn my findings into a blog post. Hopefully you might find it useful too. 

Strategies vs Tactics

Tactics are highly individual. I’ll share some of the tactics I use to make more time for creativity and play. Feel free to try them yourself, but play closer attention to the headline strategies these tactics support. Strategies are universal and apply to us all.

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Schedule It

There is never the perfect time to focus on creativity and play. There will always be distractions, commitments and excuses for why now isn’t a good time to focus. The only way around this is to intentionally set aside time for it.

During this creative time, don’t open yourself up to distractions. Leave your phone somewhere out of sight. Work in solitude if you can. Be as stringent as you can about this. Just checking your phone once is the start of a habit that tells you this time isn’t as important scrolling through instagram.

You’re probably aware that multitasking is a myth. You can only multitask highly automatic behaviours like walking. Nearly all multitasking is actually task switching. If you work this way, your task will take longer and be completed with less skill and accuracy.

If you keep having distracting thoughts, try keeping a notebook close to hand where you can jot down the thought and deal with it later.

Try to give yourself a discrete goal for this time. Make it something that can be completed within the time allotted. Having a clear goal will help you stay focused. Make the task roughly equal to your ability. Too hard and it’ll cause anxiety, too easy and you’ll be bored. Completing goals prove that you’re making progress. Even if it’s just a little at a time, having clear evidence of progression is a huge motivator that will encourage you to keep coming back.

The time block shouldn’t be longer than 90 minutes. We naturally cycle through ultradian rhythms that tend to last this long. If you can schedule more time, take a break before 90 minutes are up so you can return refreshed.

Be Frequent

“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules” Anthony Trollope

Make it a daily habit. Habits don’t require motivation. It also takes the pressure off. We all have bad days, but knowing you can try again tomorrow frees us to take more risks. Creativity and creative breakthroughs are a numbers game. More time spent playing leads to more ideas which leads to more good ideas.

Regularly and reliably showing up to practice in a habitual way is really the only way to improve.

You don’t have to have a daily practice, but the more time between sessions, the less benefits you’ll see.

Often we say we don’t have enough time because it’s a convenient excuse to not have time.

57.6% of the world uses social media and is using it for an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes a day (Source)

While you might not spend this much time on social media, you can find time from somewhere to instead focus on something actually important to you.

Create a Space

Have a dedicated space for creative work and play. It doesn’t have to be a space that’s fully set aside for just creative work. Setting yourself up in the same location each time will help create associative triggers for you to enter your creative zone.

My workshop

There are other associative triggers you can use such as wearing the same outfit each time, or listening to the same music to help get you in the zone.

The space within which we work has an impact on the work we do. Having a dedicated space will allow you to remove distractions and tailor it to suit your needs. 

Marginal Gains

Sir Dave Brailsford took British cycling from having only won one Olympic gold to winning seven of the ten available gold medals at the 2008 Olympics. How? By adopting a philosophy of continual improvement through marginal gains. 

Sir Dave didn’t just look at cycling, but took into account things such as learning how to properly wash your hands, sleep posture and food preparation.

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he points out that if you get 1% better at something everyday for a year, you end up being 37 times better than you were at the start. Making continual improvements is more likely when you look at things holistically. 

When you step into your dedicated space, during your regularly scheduled time, you’re not doing it in a vacuum. Everything else in your life can add to or subtract from the success you have in your practice.  

Here are some day-to-day things to improve on that will not only make your creative time more productive, but everything else as well.

1. Sleep
   Most people need at least 7-8 hours every night. Try to develop a nighttime routine that helps you get the best sleep possible. For example, stop using electronic items at least 30 minutes before bed. 

2. Ego depletion
   Your willpower or self-control is a limited resource. The more decisions you have to make in a day, the more you use this resource up. Turning choices into habits is one way to reduce ego depletion.

3. Meditation
   There’s just tonnes of evidence that practicing some form of meditation has a whole host of positive

4. Attentional residue from unfinished tasks
   If you haven’t finished a task, you keep thinking about it. This reduces the mental resources you have available for the new task. Giving yourself a time limit within which you have to finish a task is a good way to effectively disengage from that task.

5. Self-control is a learnable skill
   Good habits in other areas of life improve self-control overall. Even entertaining activites, so long as they require concentration (reading, complex games) will improve your self-control.

6. Practice being present in the moment
   Don’t jump into your phone the first chance you get. Get comfortable with being alone with your thoughts! Inside your head is where your best ideas are hiding. 

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Schedule it, be frequent and have a space to be creative in. 

These are the main points that kept cropping up in the books and articles I’ve been reading. Marginal gains are definitely something to think about but it represents a bit of a catch-all for hints and tips mentioned less frequently throughout my reading. 

Is there anything you would add? Do you have tactics for carving out creative time that work for you that I didn’t mention? It would be great to hear what other people are doing.