The biggest excuse I hear when I ask others about their creative goals is that they don’t have time.
I’m sure you feel the same way sometimes.
There’s no time to pick up your pencil and sketch. You don’t have time to use your acrylics to create your next masterpiece. How could you even learn how to hold a guitar properly when you are running around all the time? These thoughts stop you from moving forward.
The reality is that you do have time. You just don’t realize it.
3 Ways to Incorporate Creativity into Your Life
Today we’ll be covering 3 ways that you could start incorporating creativity into your life. The more time you spend on being creative and are creating, the happier you’ll start to feel, and the more time you’ll start to find to continue being creative. It’s a wonderful cycle.
1: Start small
We think that in order to create something, anything, we need to invest a lot of time upfront to do so. That’s not true. If you ever heard the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, you’d know that the Tortoise managed to win the race because he just kept going and never stopped.
This means that while you may not get the results you want instantaneously if you don’t invest 5 hours upfront to work on your creative projects… It does mean that spending 15 minutes every day will help you get to that same result in about 3 weeks, 4 weeks if you want to be generous.
15 minutes does not feel like a large amount of time to invest. If you commute like I do, 15 minutes is a train ride that I’d otherwise be on Reddit or napping. 15 minutes could mean for you part of your lunch break for you to take out Google Docs and write.
2: Keep a journal
As creative individuals, we get the best ideas when we least expect it. There are people who are inspired while they shower, others while they are on the train, and several more while they are at work. While I don’t know the reason for this, the reality is that this happens and we need to take advantage of these moments.
There are special boards online (just make sure to get a Mr. Clean Eraser) that allow you to write while you are in the shower and could be found on Amazon. In all the other cases, keeping a journal (digital or traditional) are great options for you to quickly jot down your ideas so you could refer back to them when you experience any creative blocks.
If you are unsure of what kind of journal to keep, here are a few recommendations:
Notion - A digital personal ‘wiki’ that you could use for all your notes, ideas, and projects. There’s a free version if you are interested in giving it a try. The Keep Productive YouTube channel is a great way to help you set up and learn how to use this.
Evernote - The oldest and most reliable way to keep digital notebooks. It’s a very popular and well-known system that has digital and now traditional ways of being able to keep your notes in one place. There is a free version if you want to give it a try.
reMarkable - This is an electronic notebook that I use to reduce the amount of paper clutter in my life. It’s lightweight and doubles as an e-reader. If you are interested in learning more about how a reMarkable may be worth it for you, here’s some more information.
Composition Notebook - Sometimes the best method is the old school traditional method of notebook and paper. I highly recommend composition notebooks because they are cheap which allows you to save your well-earned money on other tools to enhance your creativity. Personally I recommend getting a notebook with some color, but that’s up to you.
3: Ask questions
A critical part of creativity is asking questions until you come up with different solutions. Ask yourself, what is a better way to do ‘x’ or how can I make ‘x’ look better? Remember that creativity is all about ‘thinking outside of the box’, so don’t forget to ask yourself, “why why why” over and over again until you start to stray from the usual path.
This means being okay with getting ‘wrong answers’ and this also means that you must be okay with a little bit of trial and error.
When we see great things being created, it’s because that individual probably went through several batches of failures and less than ideal versions before they managed to create what you are seeing on social media or Pinterest. Expertise comes with practice. Practice is all about doing and learning from your experiences.
Start creating today
The best way to start implementing creativity into your daily life is to start today. While reading about being creative can help you think differently and act differently, if you don’t do anything then you’ll still feel unfulfilled.
You need to start carving out time to work on what makes you happy. You need to take small steps to achieve your creative goals. You cannot write a novel, if you cannot write a page. You cannot create a beautiful melody without knowing the keys.
Need inspiration?
Take the 10 Week Prompt Challenge
Creating takes time.
However as mentioned above, there are ways to reduce the amount of time it takes for you to get to your goals. If you start small and keep a list of ideas on hand, then you will already be ten steps ahead than when you started reading this.
If you start asking questions and practice, then you’ll be fifty steps ahead of the game.
It’s all about creation and doing.
What’s Next?
I was featured in a podcast created by Kenny Aronson that was all about incorporating creativity into your life and why it’s so important to do so. If you found the three steps above helpful, then you should definitely give it a listen.
Habits Which Will Make You More Creative: On Spotify • Habits Which Will Make You More Creative : On Stitcher
Otherwise, feel free to share in the comments below about ways you could start incorporating creativity into your daily lives. I’d love to hear them.