Curating our creative time
Pursuing deep work in the age of distraction
In my last post I wrote that ‘to get the most out of being in the midlist, we need to stop racing the time and start curating our time’.
But what does it truly mean to curate our time? It was a phrase that stuck with me – because it felt both important and slightly glib – so I wanted to wrestle with it a bit further. When I talk about ‘curating time’ here, it means intentionally creating time or saving time for the things we love rather than just the idea of general time management. And it’s a lot harder than it sounds when so many valuable, exciting and essential things are also competing for our time.
Why curating time feels hard right now
Estimates suggest that today we take in about five times as much information as we did 25 years ago, and that we process as much data in a day — approximately 34 gigabytes — as our 15th-century ancestors would have in their lifetimes.
In the last 30 years, most people haven’t experienced the rapid development of tech as gradual evolution. Instead, vast new tech has been dropped on us on multiple occasions, and we’ve been required to adapt and keep up in only a few years. That is lightning fast in evolutionary terms. No wonder so many of us struggle with overwhelm.
If any of your time is taken up by:
social media, this didn’t exist 20 years ago.
navigating your smartphone, this didn’t exist (for most people) 25 years ago.
constant emails, this problem didn’t exist (for most people) 30 years ago.
grappling with the rise of AI, this problem didn’t exist (for most people) 3-4 years ago.
All of these developments are world-changing and life-altering, turning the ways we communicate upside down, shaking us up daily with practicalities and repercussions exploding in all directions. I know many of us have read these kind of stats before, but even when we stop for a moment, and try to take this in, it’s hard to truly feel the weight of how much our brains are being asked to do. There are so many things we think about constantly that just weren’t an issue a generation or two ago. Do we even have time to think properly any more?
But this is now the world in which we try to curate our time. Our phones are primed to ping with endless updates and notifications from endless apps and then offer us a summary of how we wasted our week responding to them. No wonder curating time is hard. No wonder it’s exhausting.
The Conversation article goes on:
We tend to think of all that data as a rather cold and rational collection of numbers. Yet, on an individual level, the information we process is often quite emotional.
The idea of a person having some kind of emotional response to every piece of information they see is beyond exhausting. No wonder the sensitive souls are floored and struggling. No wonder some of those much lower on the empathy scale are the ones conducting business as normal while drawing the world into increasing conflict and division.
It has never been more important to come back to centre. To focus our intentions. To ground our bodies in time and space. To remind ourselves of who we are and what is true and meaningful – and what needs to remain a priority in order for us to thrive.
There can be no general prescription for curating time when our lives are unique, but here are some ideas to help curate creative time:
Keep creative intentions and purpose central to the day. Becoming deeply and emotionally invested in goals drives motivation.
Use autopilot. Build good habits, work on knowing which events happen at particular times of day, so you don’t have to think about everything all the time.
Batching: group tasks as much as possible rather than flitting from one thing to another, whether it’s housework, making phone calls, going online, shopping or paying the bills.
Know what your ideal week looks like: so you know when to say no and what it might cost to say yes. Remember that whatever you say yes to might also be a no to your creative projects. Become aware of any people pleasing habits that drive you to say yes more than you want to.
Stay off anything that has a scrolling feed - or be super strict about your boundaries/time limits.
Put reading time in the diary - don’t leave it to chance at bedtime!
Have ‘dark days’ during the week where you try to leave yourself as much time and headspace as possible: avoid appointments and social events or take it further and make yourself uncontactable.
Keep all lists simple. Otherwise it becomes procrastination.
The Conversation article suggests a ‘dashboard approach’ to checking in on goals - i.e. tracking data over time rather than focusing on short-term results. For example, a few lost days of writing don’t matter if your project is developing over a longer period of time.
Focusing on your creativity as early as possible in the day.
Don’t look at your phone first thing in the morning. During the first 30-60 minutes after waking, your body is in cortisol awakening response where cortisol naturally rises to increase alertness. Emotionally charged input can feel disproportionately impactful in that window.
Delegate any tasks that you can easily hand over. Always look for more things to delegate!
I hope some of these resonate. It’s easy to say ‘let’s curate our time’, but some people are more fortunate than others in having natural access to creative time. For many of us, much of our time isn’t our own, thanks to parenting, caring roles, paid jobs, travel, health needs, appointments, stress levels, cooking, exercising, chores, etc. etc. All this and more will erode our access to creative time.
And yet, time is the most valuable thing we have to give and to use in our lives. So how we protect our time for deep work truly matters. Curating time isn’t something we can fix or solve in one go, it’s an ongoing process of renegotiation and adaptation depending on what life is throwing at us. But the better we get at it, the more we’ll have time for the things we love the most.
Apparently Pizza Hut had a beloved reading program in the US and now it’s back! I don’t know much about the specifics of this one but it’s great when big brands support reading and always a reminder to authors to reach out to brands that might help market their work.
I enjoy a lot of the articles by Lincoln Michel on Counter Craft, and this one is a nice little duet of publishing gossip and practical advice about royalty statements.
The latest scandal to his Australian publishing is the story about what’s happening at UQP after a children’s picture book was cancelled due to an article written by the illustrator. Authors are understandably not happy and quitting the press. The Guardian also wrote about this one.
Authors know all about email scams – we get them daily. Here Brooke Warner breaks down why we’re targeted so often and how to spot the scam:
And a few more insightful articles from the past week:
Middle Grade Is “Dead” And I Think That’s Good News by Vicky Weber
Everyone’s mad at Reese Witherspoon because she told women to learn AI by Nicolle Weeks
‘They’re trying to narrow the worldview of young people’: how book bans are on the rise in the US (The Guardian)
Are We Building Careers… or Burning Through Them? On trad publishing, indie success, influencer culture, and the growing pressure to peak too fast by Buzzing about Romance (thanks to Rachael Johns Author for sharing this one)
The Money in Books Is Showing Up Somewhere and HarperCollins Shows That With A Record Quarter by Alex Brown
What Nobody’s Telling Querying Writers About What’s Happening to Publishing Right Now by Vicky Weber
What is a high-concept premise? Why publishers love them, writers fear them, and how to come up with one without losing your soul (or your mind) by Sanjida Kay and Devon Halliday
Publishers are telling bestselling authors to write shorter books by Kaitlin Phillips
Apologies for a little bit of radio silence lately: I’ve been in the weeds of getting my books ready for publication with a few deadlines looming. However, I’m almost there and I’ll be sharing lots about everything I’ve learned so far in the coming months. Now I’m about to start trying to juggle writing with self-publishing goals and writing this substack and so let’s see how I go!
My regular posts are returning to Tuesdays as of this week. I’ll be in touch with paid subscribers later this week as I’m a little late getting going with the face-to-face calls, but I’m planning to schedule them for later this month. There will be two different calls: one for new and emerging writers to discuss the state of the publishing industry in general and any pain points you’d like to chat about. And another for authors with at least one book published who want to discuss more about how we innovate and stay close to our creative joy at this moment in time.
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MY AI REPORT: Nothing in this post was written by AI.
This really great thank you! I am excited to check some of the resources and other articles.
This was so great - thank you. I even shared it with my son. And thanks for curating all the great articles too. x