Do you ever sit down to do your creative work or biz stuff or just life stuff and freeze?

Where to start?

At the first item on your list or somewhere else?

What’s most important? No, that’s too scary to start with.

Pick something easier like answer that email…

Oh shit, I opened my email. I’m totally overwhelmed now

How about we check Instagram for a minute, just to chill out?

(Or bake a cake, walk the cat, call your sister, or my personal favorite: organize the Tupperware drawer which contains only two genuine pieces of Tupperware, bought more than 20 years ago at an actual Tupperware party and probably full of nasty chemicals that leaching into the avocados they hold so perfectly.)

Deciding at any given moment what you are going to do with your time is a big cognitive challenge.

Your brain isn’t interested in doing hard things. That resistance you feel? That’s your brain saying no thank you.

Your brain is interested in naps, snacks, and sex (or at least it used to be interested in sex, now it needs a little help).

I haven’t got a perfect system for creatives to share to help you get things done.

Doesn’t exist.

We are all too different. And life is too challenging for anything to work perfectly at least not for long.

Instead, I’ll share what I do that sort of works. Some of the time.

Pick whatever resonates, jettison the rest.

🌟Every day is different.
I spent too many years thinking if I could only dial in the right morning routine, I would never feel lost or flounder again.
All that made me do is feel like a loser by 8 am.
Now I look at my calendar before bed and I plan what a good day might look like.
Maybe it means drinking coffee in bed with Bob, reading my email.
Or maybe it means drinking coffee while writing my novel in my office.
(Either way, there will be coffee.)
Maybe it means I write for 20 minutes and then run with my friends.
Or I write for an hour and half, transition into ​working with clients​ and exercise in the afternoon.
My point? I make every day fit reality. Not someone else’s ideal.

🌟Time blocks feel so good.
I resist them, I forget about them, yet every time I decide “For the next hour I will do X and only X,” I am happy.
Multi-tasking makes me unhappy.
Interrupting myself makes me feel shallow and unsatisfied.
Happiness means doing one thing at a time more of the time. 

🌟 Lean hard on my to-do list.
I use a free app called ​Todoist​.
Everything I need to do goes in the app and gets a date attached.
Everything.
At the end of the day, I look at my calendar and see what else do I have scheduled?
Aka how much time do I have to do the things on tomorrow’s list?
I prune my list to reflect the actual time available.
Not what I wish was available.
This is HUGE for my motivation because most days, I feel like a winner – I did what I said I would do.
Instead of, “look how many things I didn’t get done.”
Also, my list means I never start the day cold, with no idea of what my priorities are.
I love this practice!

🌟 Do a few small things before the big thing.
The old time management advice of doing the hard thing first doesn’t work for me.
It freaks me out.
I do a few very small discrete items on my list first thing – check email, check the team slack, review a client’s manuscript, something like that.
Yes, those things are at the top of my todoist list.
I get a little dopamine hit, my anxiety goes down, and I’m able to move into a writing time block or whatever my big thing is for the morning.

🌟 Miscellaneous
I keep my phone out of my office most of the time. If I don’t, I pick it up without thinking and start scrolling.
I never have any alerts on my computer pinging at me. Ever.
If I get panicked in the midst of the day, I stop, close my eyes, and ​practice this, too​.

What do you do that helps you navigate your day with focus and love? Hit reply and tell me I read everything even if I can’t always answer.

Thank you for being here!

As you may know, if you’ve been here awhile (and if not howdy new reader and welcome!) I started writing a novel after a 10-year (or 15? I’m so bad with time) hiatus from writing fiction.

The idea for my contemporary fantasy novel came to me while leading my last ​writing retreat​ (those retreats make some serious magic!)

But I didn’t jump right into writing.

I sat with the question: do I want to do this?

Because trying fiction again is so fraught for me.

So fraught. Overwrought with fraught. Fraughtly fevered. Swivel-eyed. I will now tear myself away from the thesaurus.

I was so disappointed in myself years ago for not rewriting a promising novel after my agent loved the writing but not the main character.

This after I had moved my family 1200 miles north, disrupting our lovely life and leaving our loving community, to live a simpler life so I could have more time to write.

So while the desire to write a novel was strong, the baggage was heavy.

As I wrote in ​Why Bother?​, desire brings you back to life, to caring, to trying but it doesn’t come with any guarantees.

This means taking on a desire you tried before but didn’t succeed at can feel inconceivable.

It’s a rocky scary place most of us find ourselves at, especially as we age.

Do I give up or do I try again?

There are costs to both choices.

And only you can decide what you want to pay.

If there is one skill we need as we age, it’s the ability to desire and dream anew, to not hide behind it’s too late, I tried, what’s the point, why bother?

I don’t want to die while I’m still breathing.

I’m 7 months into the first draft of my novel and here’s what I’m noticing:

• Staying with the process and not focusing on the outcome is its own form of meditation. I must return again and again to the object of meditation: savoring the process, not imagining a finished masterpiece.
• I get stuck every time my book coach praises me which is a common reaction — ​some of my clients ​get stuck when I praise them. I have to remind myself — and them — that instead of seeing praise as a bar you now have to surpass or fearing you’ll mess up what’s working if you write another word, consider praise as evidence you are dedicated, learning, and making useful progress.
• Being challenged is hard work for my brain and of course, my brain would rather watch The Great or tick off a few to-dos on my list. But what will bring me more gratitude at the end of the day?
• Almost all procrastination means I’m afraid of failing and the only answer is to write something, anything, and build a little more of my world.
• ​Freedom is my friend​. One-hour blocks of writing without interruption are better than dark toffee chocolate, cold lake plunges, and reading an epic novel.

What will you regret not trying again? And is that a regret you can make peace with… or not?

If you’ve been around for awhile (and if you’re new, waving hi! Thank you for subscribing!) you know I’m the author of ​nine non-fiction books​ and I’m working on a novel. Woot!

I’ve been a working writer, and now ​non-fiction book coach​, supporting herself and her family for more than 32 years. 🥰

I’m so grateful.

And I’m always looking for ways to make my writing process easier and more fun.

Here’s my current list of tools I use to enhance my creativity. I hope some are useful for you!

PLAYLISTS

If I can’t concentrate or I’m feeling too anxious to write, I pop on a writing playlist. Here are a few I use:

​Ludovico Einadui complete playlist ​

​All kinds of classical music playlists ​I choose from.

​I love weird binaural sounds​. And here’s a ​more varied playlist​.

If you like ambient sounds and want a whole bunch to choose from, ​check this site out​.

NOISE-CANCELING HEADPHONES

I went for the cheaper ​SoundCore​ headphones because I wasn’t sure how often I would use them. They are super comfortable and the sound is good but the noise cancelling is only so-so. If you need more silence to write, ​get the Bose​.

PENS

I start most scenes and newsletters (including this one) using pen and paper. My favorite pens are ​PaperMate Flare ​and ​LePen​.

JOURNALS

I always loved the idea of sticking to one kind of journal and having a shelf filled with neatly matching spines that grow year by year but about a few years ago I realized that is so not going to happen. I love trying different journals, using cheap drugstore notebooks, and using those beautiful journals friends gift me.

I’m writing a lot by hand especially when traveling this summer because I want to stay off screens. We shall see how it goes.

BOOKS

Writing books are dangerous for me because it’s much easier to read about writing than to actually write but here’s an approach that works for me: when I get stuck on something specific, I read just enough to help me out of that stuck spot.

For example, I’ve been struggling with writing interiority which simply means what my main character is feeling, thinking, experiencing inside.

I pulled out ​Writing the Breakthrough Novel ​by Donald Mass and ​took a class from CeCe Lyra ​and revisited one of my very favorite writing books ​The Science of Story​. It’s helping!

MY CREATIVE CAVE

I’m a huge believer in having a creative cave to work in by which I mean a spot that feels comforting and where you aren’t distracted.

This can be anywhere as long as you can’t see your phone and there are no visual or auditory distractions.

Which means turn off your email! Close your tabs! Face the wall if you have to so you don’t see clutter and unfinished projects.

And most of all? Turn off and hide your phone!

I write fiction almost exclusively in bed. I turn off my phone and pop it in the bathroom, slip on my headphones and go.

CANDLES

This is a cheat as I don’t use ​these candles​ or ​these myself but I give them as gifts to clients and they love them!

DO WHAT YOU NEED TO MAKE WRITING OR CREATING MORE FUN

It’s not the specifics of what I use that matter but that I give thought to how to make my writing life more fun and easier.

Your creative process deserves the same.

Happy summer!

There is a pesky phenomenon rearing its pesky head fairly often for my coaching clients and my artist pals.

It shows up whining and lamenting:

“I’m a has-been, a dud, I can’t pull this off. I don’t have what it takes.”

Or

“My project is doomed, doomed I tell you, and I’m giving up.”

Any time we craft anything – from a digital course, a watercolor series, a juicy non-fiction book, to a thriving marriage or a flourishing garden, we’re bound to trip hit bumps.

And some days, bigger than bumps. Mountains! The Rockies!

But here’s where we make that very natural occurrence a bigger ding-dang-do than it needs to be.

Too often we mistake the normal ebb and flow, the stop-start, the delete-redraft aspect of creating as us lacking some magical creative pixie dust or picking the wrong project.

Enter Stage Left: The Importance of Understanding Your Creative Process.

What if it’s not you or your project but it’s about your process?

One vacation, while I was hammering away at a deadline early in the morning, my then-husband Chris strolled out onto the porch and asked how it was going.

“Awful,” I retorted.

“I’m sorry,” Chris offered.

I shot him a puzzled look. Then it dawned on me: I’d come to expect creating a lousy first draft. It was my norm. There was nothing wrong, and definitely nothing to apologize for.

But if I hadn’t been up to my ears in understanding my creative process for two decades, I might have spiralled into panic, ditched my column, or spent our vacation fretting.

Rewind another six years: I was wrestling with my fourth book, The Woman’s Retreat Book. Feeling defeated, I called my agent, Barbara, to say I was throwing in the towel. But she retorted, “This is when you usually freak out.”

I was taken aback, “I do?” I was clueless about my patterns, my process. But Barbara, who’d worked with me through all my books, knew my MO.

So, here’s the takeaway…

The next time you feel rough about what you are making or how the process is going or both get inquisitive.

What stories are you spinning about your work or how it should be progressing?

I can dig myself into an abyss of self-doubt if I start believing I should be further along than I am.

Where are you forgetting what works best for you?

Even though you’re way too clever to do this, I can get a major bout of “my book is garbage” if I compare it to whatever masterpiece I’m currently reading. It’s like sizing up a violin beginner to Yo-Yo Ma. Not fair, right?

Got any nuggets of wisdom from past hiccups that might come in handy now?

For me, it’s always a return to my meditation practice. It helps me realize there’s no problem that needs to be fixed.

Need to fine-tune how or when you work?

Different stages or types of projects often call for different strategies. What worked for your book’s first draft might not cut it when you’re near the end, sick of your own words to the point of nausea. Maybe you need to switch up your environment, shorten your work sessions, or team up with a pal for that final stretch.

Has there been any shakeup in your sleep pattern, work schedule, or family obligations?

Are you still trying to create as if everything’s the same? That alone can sink you without you even knowing it. Life changes, please let yourself adapt.

Are you taking breaks? Filling your creative well?

The fastest way to burn out as a writer or creator is always pushing, always feeling behind, always trying to catch up, always working.

Bottom line: don’t abandon your work or be mean to yourself when writing or creating feels wonky.

Tweak your process, tweak your mindset, take a break, and remember you get to do this. You choose this!