The life-changing power of creative mornings
Make a sacred meeting time with your art.
It’s the last full week of Get Shit Done September! Last week, I shared my Sunday productivity routine and my writer’s tech stack. Now, I want to share another of my most powerful rituals: creative mornings, the sacred 90 minutes I spend writing before I do anything else.
My morning routine has completely transformed since I became a freelancer four years ago. In my final employed days in New York City, I’d wake before the sun, frantically gather everything I needed for the next 12 hours, hop on the subway, get to the gym for a 7am lift, shower, do my hair and makeup, and be at my desk by 9am.
I can barely imagine that life now.
These days, I wake most mornings around 7 a.m., cuddle my cats, and laze about in bed. Around 7:30, I sit outside at my patio nook, journal in hand, and write morning pages. Minerva (my cat) joins me. I sip iced coffee, listen to birdsong, greet passing neighbors and their dogs. I try not to look at my phone till 9am. It’s just as lovely as it sounds.
It took a long time for me to discover that my most energetic, clear-minded creative time is from 7 to 11am, probably because those hours have never been available to me before. In the last year, I made it a priority to protect that time and hoard it for myself.
Within this tranquil time, I clear my mind, process any anxieties or to-do's, and open myself to the day's possibilities. I journal, do Tarot pulls, think on future newsletters. Sometimes I simply use it as time to get my most important task of the day done, one I’m scared I won’t have time or energy for later.
How I think, move, and produce as a writer has totally changed because of this sunup reunion with a blank page. This daily brain dump is where my craft begins.
My creative mornings are sacred. You need sacred, protected time for your art, too.
This June, I used my creative mornings to tackle something completely new: I wrote the first 10,000 words of the novel I’ve been thinking about for years. I finally completed an entire 1,000 Words of Summer, author
’s project where thousands of people come together to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks. Every morning at 7:30 a.m., I greeted the blank page and let my mind wander. I experimented. I didn’t even think of editing.The most surprising part of this experiment was how fun it felt, how the ideas kept flowing out of me. That’s what writing feels like at its best: a joyous discovery.
Guess what? Your “creative morning” does not have to be in the morning! Maybe you’ve got kids to take to school, or your favorite workout class, or your brain actually feels most awake at 10 p.m. Cool!
Your creative morning starts whenever you want. But you need at least 45 uninterrupted minutes to devote to your art. Very few of us are able to sit down at a desk and produce for 45 minutes straight; you need some time to settle in, create, then transition out. You get to decide the frequency your life’s other demands will allow that —whether it’s once a month or every day, that’s your time.
Once you decide on that time, don’t let anyone or anything take it from you. Steal away to greet your art like a clandestine lover. Do what you must to be reunited with your creativity.
Put your phone in a drawer where you won’t accidentally see it and feel the Herculean pull to pick it up. Put your laptop on do not disturb. Get rid of all the tech entirely whenever you can, and just meet the page as you are. Ask your housemates not to disturb you, or wake up before them or stay up after them if that’s what it takes to get some damn silence around here. Block an hour on your work calendar for an important meeting — it’s for you to meet with you, and no, you can’t change it.
As a freelancer, my days are often filled with a dizzying array of tasks: editing, emailing, interviewing, writing, recording, client calls, and much more. It can be a real challenge to maintain space and time for my personal creative projects. But I've learned that if I don't prioritize that time for myself, it simply won't happen.
When you put your art first, it will reward you. Only you can give yourself that gift. Don’t wait any longer. Don’t wake up in three years and lament all that time you could have been writing, drawing, designing, painting, sewing, podcasting, researching. Dreaming.
Do it now.
I love this! Sitting on a patio sounds lovely and I also relate to having once worked that wild workday schedule that feels inconceivable now.
I wrote about protecting writing time in my newsletter recently -- I have a newborn so I knew how easy it would be for my creative time to slip away. I've been writing during baby's first nap of the day. Even if I only get a 15 minute nap/writing session I know I made space for my creative time and that keeps me motivated to protect the time for the future.
This is such good advice -- thank you!