Creative Work Needs More Than Good Intentions

Meaningful work gets made when you stop giving your own work only the leftover parts of you.

After my daughter's wedding, I made a decision.

My book was going to get the first hour of my day.

I had been working on The Midlife Permission Slip, and I knew that if I wanted to write the book, I needed to give it a fresh mind.

My corporate work involves a great deal of context switching. Meetings, decisions, problem-solving, moving from one subject to another and back again. By the end of the day, I may still have time available, but the kind of mental energy I need for writing is usually pretty well spent.

What makes this interesting to me is that I've been creating choreography for years, often after a full day of work.

And that works beautifully.

I can walk into the dance studio tired and walk out with more energy than I had when I arrived. Creating dances, teaching, moving to music - those things restore me.

Writing doesn't work that way for me.

I enjoy it. I want to do it. I have ideas I want to share, and writing gives me a way to get those ideas into the world.

After all, not every idea can be shared through interpretive dance.

Although I might be willing to test that theory.

But writing requires a different kind of attention from me.

So I stopped expecting it to thrive on the same arrangement that worked for choreography.

I began writing first thing in the morning. Before my corporate day began, before the usual activities that fill my mornings, and yes, even before coffee.

That decision gave the book something it hadn't consistently had before: access to my freshest thinking.

And the book moved forward.

Not every morning produced brilliant writing. Some mornings were spent reconsidering a paragraph, sorting through an idea, or discovering that something I thought belonged in the book really didn't.

But the work had a place in my day where I could give it what it needed.

I've been thinking about that distinction as I look at the different kinds of things I create.

We often talk about making time for our creative work, as though all creative work asks the same thing of us.

My experience suggests otherwise.

Some work gives us energy as we do it. Some asks us to arrive with energy already available. Some requires concentration, some requires movement, and some needs room to wander before anything useful appears.

Knowing the difference can change how we approach the work.

A Gentle Reframe

Perhaps the question isn't simply whether we're making time for the things we want to create.

It's whether we're giving those things the kind of attention they actually need.

For my book, that meant giving myself the best hour of the morning.

And I'm rather glad I did.