Find a Creative Routine
Depending on your personality, it can be a sweet sound or a nagging clang.
Routine.
Whether you chafe at the sight of calendars, or diligently plan your days in a color-coded planner, I think it’s safe to say—most of us long for some kind of rhythm to our days. Developing a creative routine can help each of us shake off some of the mental load of doing what we all must: run a household, work, referee sibling fights… the list goes on—in order to carve out more space for our creativity to flourish.
But how, exactly, do we create a routine? That’s what Sonya and I work through on the Exhale Podcast with Kendra Adachi this month. And it’s what we’re going to do right here.
At least, we’re going to make a plan that hopefully becomes your routine. And maybe the routine is actually making the plan? (Semantics!)
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Here’s how it works in my house: each week (usually Sunday), my husband and I pull up our calendars. Some weeks we make a big deal out of it: fancy mocktails and a cheese plate at naptime. Other weeks, we’re just standing in the kitchen after finally getting the kids to bed, counting down the minutes until we can reasonably collapse ourselves.
We make sure we know who is going where, and when, and how, and plot out what we think will happen in the next seven days. There are, of course, things on the calendar farther out than a week (dentist appointments, haircuts, vacation time off), but I find that if I try to plan too far in advance, I just end up re-planning things, disappointed (angry) that I’m doing the same work over again. So a week at a time it is.
We sort out all the have-tos, plan our meals around our schedule and our best guess as to what we will get in our CSA that week, and then fill in the extras: he needs to go to the hardware store and Wednesday looks like the best option. I have a chiropractor appointment on Friday afternoon, and since I’ll be in town and alone, I’ll grab groceries afterward and maybe even takeout before heading home. Saturday is that event with those people, so we’ll need to make our dish-to-share on Friday night. Childcare this week lands on Tuesday, which means something easy for dinner so I can maximize my work time. We need to run a vacuum (always), but I can save that for a random morning with the kids circling around me like sharks waiting for their next meal.
Is this fun? Not really. But it does make us more efficient, and we’re more likely to be able to carve out time for what we want to do if we spend a half-hour at the beginning of each week plotting a rhythm for our days.
While my Type-A, super black-and-white self longs for a “Mondays I clean the house; Tuesdays I run errands; Wednesday I make appointments, and Thursdays I write” type of routine, I am taking what I can get in this season. Right now, that looks like childcare that changes each week, a meal plan that changes each week, and a schedule that changes each week. The ebb and flow of our current season aren’t always ideal, but I’m learning that preparation and intention (and flexible expectations?) go a long way.
Feeling like you could use the same strategy to make your weeks flow and hopefully offer up a better chance of creating in some slightly larger (or more predictable) margins?
Here’s one way to plan:
Get the Worksheet
Download this PDF worksheet: it will help you brain dump all the things you have to do, all the things that you probably need to do, and all the things you want to do—and then (hopefully) put each of them in their place so that you can make progress on both your squirrelly schedule and your creative goals.
Add in What’s Fixed
Take those have-tos that have fixed times and add them to the weekly calendar. This includes baseball practices, big meetings, and anything that might affect the day, like a partner being out of town or in-laws being in town.
Schedule Rest
Take a look at what you’ve got and—instead of adding in the “probably should dos” like you’re tempted to—schedule rest. (Kendra’s got a great podcast episode on this, as well as an entire chapter of her book devoted to it!) Decide two things: a) how to rest each day in a small, life-giving way, and b) how to rest each week (and month!) in a bigger way. PUT THEM ON THE CALENDAR. By prioritizing rest, you can fill yourself for the days and weeks that pull you in all directions.
Go In the Right Order
Next, we’ll tackle those “probably shoulds”: if you need a teacher gift by Friday, you likely need to grab that Target gift card before Thursday at 11 PM. If your kid has games on Monday and Thursday, you might need to do laundry on either Tuesday or Wednesday so they have a clean jersey to wear in time. But before we dig in, we want to “go in the right order” as Kendra says, which is:
Name what matters.
Calm the crazy.
Trust yourself.
What matters this week? If it’s the first week of school, maybe what matters is that everyone gets where they need to go on time and feels safe and loved while they do it. If that’s the case, maybe having a family meeting at the beginning of the week to go over who needs to be where and who is in charge of dinner and what clothes need to be clean in order to make each kid feel their best is what needs to happen. You can then calm the crazy by assigning laundry duty—or even immediately having everyone gather those clothes in the laundry room and start right then. Kids can find the shoes they want to wear with the outfit and line them up by the front door. Once the chaos settles a bit, you will better be able to see what’s next: You could quickly choose a favorite meal for each person and choose when to get groceries that week.
And maybe everything in that above paragraph makes you cringe and the idea of doing any of it gives you hives. That’s the third step: trust yourself. You know you best. If letting kids near your washing machine will result in a repair call, keep them far away. If you know cooking meals catered to your family’s taste will be one hill too high the same week you have to be out of the house five consecutive days before 8 AM for the first time in a year and a half, plan your takeout rotation or raid the freezer to see what kind of casseroles are stashed in there ready to help out this week. Trust your gut on what to get ready ahead of time and what you can do day-of, and let go of the “shoulds” in the process: this routine is about you and your family, not anyone else.
Maybe what matters is that after a week of being everyone else’s chauffeur and homework-finder, you know you are going to need to walk out the door alone on Friday night to recharge before the weekend chaos. That’s great that you know what you need! Then you can schedule it and make sure it happens, rather than be resentful that it didn’t.
Add In Creative Time
My guess is that many of us, when asked “what matters this week?” also want to add in creative time. YAY! I love and support this. My advice here is this: look at the week and ask when do you have the best chance of working creative time in? Notice I didn’t say your ideal creative time. Most weeks, our ideal isn’t likely to happen. But we can claim time for creativity when it (hopefully) won’t get pushed off the schedule for something else that feels more urgent at the moment. This could be the hour after your kids leave in the morning and before you have to take the dog to the vet. It could be during swim practice when you know you’ll have terrible cell reception anyway so you should just bring a notebook and freewrite for that 45 minutes. Or it could be that you see three glorious hours on Thursday morning that you can claim for yourself (!), making sure that groceries, work meetings, and that Target gift card run don’t crowd it out because you’ve already found those things their own place.
Pick a Principle or Two
After you’ve decided what matters, calmed the crazy, and trusted yourself to pick what’s right for you, you might be looking at a full, full week. That’s when the other Lazy Genius Principles can come into play. What can you Essentialize? Batch? Decide Once about? Let People In? What lens can you look at your week with in order to make it work for you?
be kind to yourself
If you feel shame rising in you as you work through this, stop: what is causing that shame? Is it accurate? Is it fair? Would you let a friend feel that same shame? Probably not. “Be Kind To Yourself” is Lazy Genius Principle #13 for good reason: we’re all going to need it in order to hold ourselves gently as we work through the other twelve and integrate them into our messy, marvelous lives.
A Final Reminder
As you work through this PDF: remember that you can’t “succeed” or “fail” at creating a routine. This isn’t a measurement of your discipline, your talent, or your worth. It’s just a structure to help you be you—and if it doesn’t help, it’s not for you. Change it up. Print a dozen of ‘em. Burn them in your backyard as a ritual cleansing. Or just let your kids color all over the ones that don’t work, turning something that might have caused you shame into something beautiful.
Resources:
This episode of the Exhale Podcast.
The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi
This episode of The Lazy Genius Podcast on rest.
This episode of The Lazy Genius Podcast on making a weekly plan.
Photo by Renáta-Adrienn on Unsplash.