10 Ways to Make Room for More Creative Time

Ideas and prompts for gaining more creative minutes in our days

As Spring begins, life gets busier. I find there is less time for creativity, but I am adding some tactics to squeeze more creative time into my day as a refuge from the demands of spring cleaning, tax prep, garden tasks, and spending more time outdoors. Here are some tactics I am using to free up more creative minutes in my days.

1. End the day by organizing. Make sure my palette is clean, my brushes are organized, and I have prepped a surface for the next painting: tape down the watercolor paper, or tape off the gouache square in my sketchbook, or gesso a canvas. Put away the paints that are scattered across the table.

2. Break down the creative work. Block in a painting, organize an outline for writing, cut some fabric for a quilt block. Small steps add up in those weeks when I just can devote a stretch of hours to a creative project.

3. Make screen time a reward for carving out creative time. Earn my screen time by defining it as a reward for a set number of rows of knitting or minutes spent sketching.

4. Start the day with a short creative warmup. For writers, try these 10 minute prompts. Here are some ideas for 10 minute art prompts.

5. Balance your creative outlets. Have some creative pursuits that are less time-consuming than your big creative loves. Painting, for me, requires hours of uninterrupted time. Sketching or knitting is better for filling smaller gaps of time in my day.

6. Go small. When time is short, switch to a smaller journal or sketchbook. Keep it in your bag or pocket with a pen so you can be creative anywhere.

7. Try something new. If your main craft is tedious and time consuming, you can still get a creative dopamine hit by:

   1. Creating with found objects like twigs, flowers, pebbles, grasses and pine needles

   2. Being more artful about arranging the food on your plate

   3. Write a haiku about sights from your morning commute.

   4. Doodle

   5. Make a wall collage of mini sketches on post it notes

   6. Use magnetic words on your fridge to write poetry or nonsense. (no affiliation)

   7. Make random splashes of coffee, tea, or juice on paper and turn it into a drawing.

   8. Make and sing a song about what you see out your window.

8. Declutter. The stuff we own eats away at our time. It has to be cleaned and put away. Clutter overload wastes minutes when we try to locate an object.

9. Manage expectations of the people you exchange emails and texts with. If you are answering all personal communications immediately. it will eat into your creative flow state.

10. Spend less time choosing what you will create when it’s time to start a new project. I have lost too many hours looking for an inspiration photo or poring over sewing/knitting patterns online. I am thinking of making numbered lists and using a random number generator to choose for me from my many inspiration files.

If you think of any other ways to squeeze in more creative time, please let me know in the comments.

It has been relatively quiet the past two days, and too cold to do any outdoor work, so I managed to finish gouache square #13 today. This was done from a picture I took last summer at a local preserve.