Creative Routine

Is it important to have a routine to be creative? What might such a thing look like?
A chart plotting the daily routines of creative people shows that there isn’t a simple answer to the last question, but nevertheless provides food for thought. What is clear from the chart is that being creative takes blocks of time. Grabbing a few minutes here and there probably won’t be much use. Being present with your work – be it text, painting, film, whatever – pays off.

Want to develop a better work routine? Discover how some of the world’s greatest minds organized their days.
Click image to see the interactive version (via Podio).
Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964, writer and essayist), apparently spent what little time she could spare in one three hour block before noon. A three hour day. Maya Angelou, on the other hand, constructed a routine that looks like a conventional job. She rose early, had breakfast and went to work in a hotel room, ‘the more anonymous the better’ before returning home. I like that in the early evening she read her work to her husband, too. By constructing a space, physical and temporal, she was free to invent. In my experience, artists and writers are creatures of habit as that tends to provide a structure in which to be free. Freedom to do whatever you like isn’t much use.
Even the people on the chart who have what might be thought of as more bohemian timetables work in extended blocks of time. Picasso, it seems, was apt to work overnight, sleep all morning, before starting work again in the late afternoon. My guess is that this makes sense if you’re working where the weather is hot.
So how might we adopt out a routine that suits us? First of all, and this is important: you might not. There are lots of artists who work when they can and balance jobs and childcare with no week resembling another. If a routine eludes you, don’t give up.
As I said, finding a decent amount of time to focus on work does help, but the quality of the time matters, too. It might be worth thinking which part of the day or week is most profitable for you. I read somewhere that its better to ‘write in morning and edit in the afternoon’, which make sense to me. Certain times of day seem to promote certain mindsets. Looking again at the chart, those that had ‘proper jobs’ tend to have a buffer between it and their creative work. If you find you have to make quick changes, taking a walk around the block to empty your head might help more than realise.
Trying to do three or four hours a couple of evenings a week while the family are making a racket might be worse than a quiet couple of hours once a week after they’ve gone to bed, or before they’re up. The important thing is to try and notice what works for you. I’m writing this in the middle of the afternoon, even though I wanted to write it first thing. It takes me a while to warm up and I tend to do some of the distractions first.
Today I’m writing, but the same is true of my visual art practice. I suspect that 2–7pm is my best time to work. That doesn’t mean that I don’t wake up with some seemingly amazing ideas, but that moment is unreliable and the WORK, that is the stuff you change, edit, consciously think about, and so on, is done in the afternoon.
While none of us is likely to have the freedom to construct a routine from first principles like a Picasso or a Murakami, it pays to listen to your practice to work out when it functions best. Getting some mental distance from more mundane life helps too.
Try and spend some of that time each day thinking or working and have something to show at the end of it. Do it for a month and see how you get on.
 
Check out our OCA Time Management tips here