What is crowding out your creative space?

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou

This week we are thinking about protecting our creative space, and one of the slightly uncomfortable parts of that is noticing what keeps getting into it.

Because I think most of us would say we want more time to write, think properly, read deeply or simply hear our own ideas, but somehow that time keeps disappearing.

Sometimes it is genuinely because life is full, but sometimes it is because we are giving away the small pockets of space we do have without even noticing.

Ten minutes disappears into scrolling, half an hour disappears into messages, the quiet hour in the morning gets swallowed by admin, and suddenly the day is underway and creativity has once again been pushed to the edge with a vague promise that we will get to it later. I am certainly guilty of this.

What fascinates me is that the things stealing our creative space are not always the obvious ones. Sometimes it is distraction, sometimes it is work, sometimes it is other people, but sometimes it is our own reluctance to sit with the uncertainty of making something that might not work.

It is easier to answer an email than stare at a blank page.

Emails, after all, are wonderfully clear about what they want from you but creativity is much less accommodating.

It asks you to sit there without knowing what is going to happen next, which is perhaps why we can become incredibly productive in every other area of our lives just as we are about to begin.

So today, rather than trying to find another six hours in your week, notice where the time you already have is going.

There may be a little patch of creative space hiding there that you could reclaim.

Writing prompt:

What most often steals the time you would like to give to your creativity, and what is one small boundary you could put around that space this week?

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