Creating work routines to suit your personal style and needs.
As a creative professional, you know that every project requires a unique blend of inspiration, thoughtful choices, specific techniques and the right environment to produce optimum results. But what about the way you approach your practice or business itself? Our routine, workspace and workstyle all play crucial roles in nurturing creativity and supporting our productivity and sense of purpose. Just as you carefully choose your materials, tools, techniques and themes in your art or creative offerings, you can bring that same intentionality into how you work by creating routines that work for you. When you make thoughtful choices to personalize these things to suit your needs, your creative practice or business and yourself as an artist or creative can flourish in new ways.
Miles Davis, the jazz legend, said, “You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself”. (Brainyquote.com). To me this insight is transferrable to it taking time to be able to work like yourself as well. Personalizing how we work as creative professionals is something we have to learn and develop over time. This necessitates making it part of our creative practice or business to be creative, experiment and build awareness of the routines, environment and frameworks that work us specifically.
Here are some tips to help you develop routines that suit your personal style and needs as an artist or creative professional:
1. Create Structure WITHIN Your Creative Practice or Work
While creativity is often associated with spontaneity and freedom, establishing some structure within your practice can be vital. Without a framework, it’s easy to become overwhelmed or lose focus. But structure doesn’t mean rigidity—it means creating routines and personalized ways of going about your day, week, certain tasks or bigger projects that support your creativity and more importantly - you as a creative individual.
One approach to get started is by thinking about when you feel most energized and focused. Is it early in the morning, late at night, or somewhere in between? Incorporate these peak hours into your routine, and structure your days around them. For instance, you could reserve mornings for brainstorming or sketching ideas and afternoons for focused, detail-oriented or admin work. Remember, your practice doesn’t need to follow a strict 9-to-5 schedule. Ideally it should work with your natural rhythms and the nature of the aspects of your work that you want to focus on.
I realize too that many, if not most, artists and creatives are building a creative practice or business alongside other employment or responsibilities. That necessitates creating sustainable routines around and in balance with those commitments. If that’s you, consider how you could create practices or routines that work for you within this context. Even short sessions can yield results over time. For example, a writer that I worked with recently has a routine of writing for an hour in the early mornings before teaching and has a stack of published books over the years as a result of sticking to this personal routine consistently.
Routine and structure doesn’t have to relate to scheduling or how you time block your day or week. You can create structure and routine to your practice or business in how you go about getting organized or managing projects. A simple example that comes to mind is one that choreographer Twyla Tharp refers to in her book The Creative Habit. “I start every dance with a box. I write the name of the project on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, [recordings], books, photographs and pieces of art that have inspired me. I have separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done.”
Personalized routines and practices like Twyla’s starting with a box are examples of ways artists and creatives can be intentional about creating structure to work within, while leaving room for creative flow and flexibility.
2. Personalize your work environment and build routines around WHERE you do your work
The physical space and ambience of where you create can greatly impact your creativity and productivity. Your environment should support your creative process, focus and mindset. Start by assessing what kind of space helps you focus and feel energized. Do you prefer a quiet, minimalist setting? Or do you thrive in a space filled with inspiration—photos, books, or items that spark your imagination? Are you the type of creative who needs to work at a desk, table or in a space where you can move about freely?
How your space is organized can be crucial. Two examples of the importance of this come to mind. One, an artist client who was very established in her practice reached out to me for coaching because she was tired of feeling overwhelmed by too many projects at various stages of completion. Through our work and some experimentation she came to learn that she works better when her studio is organized so that only one project and the materials she has chosen to work with are visible front and centre. Everything else needs to be put away and out of sight - otherwise she loses focus. On the flipside, another client discovered through our work together that she needs to have a few projects out and on the go. She needs options to choose from depending on her energy and so that she can move from one to the other if she has to wait for something dry or needs to back off to mull over her next step. Having several projects on the go and visible has helped to fuel her creativity and create a more consistent flow of creative output.
If you work from home or have a studio, take care to make your workspace work for you.
Consider also that your choice of work environment may actually need to vary depending on what you need to work on. A multi-disciplinary artist client who lives and creates within a tiny condo has found it supports her creativity and productivity to designate different workzones - a specific chair for reading and listening, a deskspace for writing and another table dedicated for artmaking. Within her tiny space, she has worked on setting up dedicated zones for her various artistic interests. Each area is now set up to meet her needs with the materials, equipment, lighting and seating she requires to feel comfortable and focused for the type of work.
Conversely, some clients I’ve coached have discovered that some parts of their work are better done out of their studio, office or home and in a different environment altogether. They choose instead to go to a coffee shop or library because it supports their focus and mindset needed for tasks like writing, certain types of research, reflecting or planning.
3. Allow Space for Experimentation, Development of Ideas, and Flexibility
While routines are important, creativity thrives when we give ourselves room to experiment and develop our ideas. Not every session needs to have a rigid goal or outcome. Sometimes the magic happens when we give ourselves permission to shake things up and try new things, fail, and learn along the way.
Carve out time in your practice for brainstorming, testing out new materials or methods, and even exploring new genres or styles. The more you allow your ideas to evolve naturally, the more surprising and satisfying your work will become. A recent client shared that this year she is committing one studio day per week to experiment freely. Others make a practice of applying for residencies or taking courses in mediums that they don’t generally or may not have ever worked in as a way to create space for experimentation.
Give yourself permission to step away from a project and even your practice or business for a while. Giving yourself the mental space to recharge or think about your work from a different perspective helps ideas to develop in unexpected ways. I delved more deeply into the value of taking breaks from our creative work in my blog a while back. Link to that article here. Be intentional about allowing breaks and having downtime routinely.
4. Be In Tune with Your Needs and Progress
One of the most important aspects of personalizing how you work in your creative practice or business is being aware of your needs—both emotional and physical—and how they align with your progress. Creativity and progress can ebb and flow - you are not a machine. It’s essential to take care of yourself and this involves creating practices and routines of check in and making adjustments.
Pay attention to your energy levels, your motivation, and even your mental state. Are you tired or hungry? Are you feeling burnt out? Maybe it’s time to take a break or adjust your routine. Conversely, if you’re feeling highly motivated, take advantage of that momentum to dive deeper into your projects.
Tracking your progress can also help you stay connected to your growth and sense of accomplishment in your creative practice or business. This can be as simple as journaling your thoughts, keeping a log of your work sessions or even visually tracking your milestones. For example, a client I worked with last year put this into practice by creating a routine of logging what she had worked on or accomplished at the end of each day instead of focusing on making a new to-do list. Another great example is one that floral illustrator Adriana Picker shared on Madeline Dore’s Extraordinary Routines podcast. A friend helped her create a simple visual tool to track her progress on two hundred drawings for her fourth book Petal: A World of Flowers Through an Artist’s Eye. Not all progress is linear when you are building a creative practice or business. Personally, I have a routine of sitting down at the end of my work week to bullet journal my progress in relation to my core priorities (I like to call them my BIG ROCKS - creativity, growth, connection and my sense of balance in my work and life). In reviewing your progress, you build a sense of momentum and recognize patterns in your productivity and pinpoint what’s working—or what might need adjustment.
In conclusion…
There is no one-size-fits-all process to building a creative practice, creative business or creative life, so honor the way that you work best, and trust that your unique approach will lead to richer, more fulfilling results. Get creative about tailoring your work routines to your personal needs and style. You will foster a deeper, more sustainable connection to your work.
Looking for some further inspiration? I was honoured to be invited to have an in-depth conversation with creative entrepreneurs and Paper Talk podcast co-hosts Jesse, Sara and Quynh about the importance of being intentional in tailoring work routines to suit your personal style and needs and finding small rituals that bring joy and routine to your week. The four of us also shared some simple practices and routines that work for us as creative professionals.
Image: A weekly routine I've created that supports my creativity, focus and productivity as a coach and creative professional.
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