5-Minute Creativity: Find Time in Your Busy Day to Create

1. Map Your Day: Now, we're going to get started, and the first thing is setting aside the 10-15 minutes. I thought there was no better way to do that than to start with a mini exercise about how to find those 10-15 minutes. We'll be going through a pie chart in which we lay out our day as it is today. It's really important to get super honest about how much time you have, so you can understand where you're taking the time from. One of the things that stop me from continuing writing is they just start integrating into their already busy schedules and it seems like it's not that important in the beginning, so it's usually the first thing to go. Like, you know what? TV time sounds way more important than journaling, so I'm going to just stop. But when we say, okay, I'm going to give myself this 45 minutes to watch TV, and I'm taking 15 minutes from that hour, I would usually do watching this show to journal, then it begins to become a little bit clearer and we can meet the space for that. Let's get started. I'm going to create my pie chart as it is today. I like to always start by going down the middle, that way I can just create the different blocks as we go along. Just really quick, I'm going to write here is working out. You can write it however you want. It doesn't have to be fancy. But then you can even go a step further and say working out, these like blocks that look like this is one hour. So you know how much time it is throughout your awake time. For me, I just like to write it out and get it started. Work is always the biggest for me, then the second biggest is family. I like to put under work what I'm doing. So admin tasks, lots of phone calls. Family, Sesame Street, taking walks, whatever family wants to do that day. Then I'm going to change mine and put downtime as one of my resolutions. I like to call them actually like New Year's intentions, was to spend a lot more time reading. I had been spending about an hour and a half every day reading. It's been life-changing and it's been a real place that I can get prompts for writing as well. I've been reading during downtime and I've also been watching the news, which it's like a soap opera right now, so I'm enjoying it. I also have self-care. Again, I love that this is not coming out fancy because it doesn't have to be. Self-care. I'm going to change it up a bit and put just a little bit right here for travel time. Anywhere from about one to an hour-and-a-half, and I'm going to write the time there, specifically because if I'm in a car or on a train, I don't know how much time I have. I want to journal on my phone. Then I'm going to split this in half and do errands. For me, errands is the grocery store. People don't really go to the post office that much anymore, but I do. So the post-office, school, the kids, and then all around adulting. This is the stuff that sucks. Paying bills, customer service, etc. Once you have your pie chart completed, you can begin to look at it from the perspective of, wow, I didn't realize that 45, 60 percent of my day was spent doing work. I didn't know that I spent so much time doing errands. I really wish I had a little bit more time with family or maybe I wish I had more time with self-care. But you begin to be able to get an idea of what to do each day and how you spend your time, and a lot of times just this in itself is really eye-opening for a lot of people, because we don't know how we spend our time every day because people call us people, text us, people ask us to do things, work access to do things and before you know it, you don't realize like, oh wow, I'm working 12 hours every day. No wonder I don't have time for reading, no wonder I don't have time for self-care or for whatever is important to me. Looking at this today, I already have on my pie chart, self-care and this is where my journaling would go, but let's pretend that I didn't. This was watching TV, because a lot of people use that as a way to just unplug. For me, I would probably not want to get rid of my watching TV time. That's the only time that I have to be free and do nothing and just watch TV. That's why most of my clients do not want to give up TV time. I don't force anyone to do anything that doesn't feel good in the beginning. But one thing that you could do is just take five. We're going to take five minutes away from work. This is our way, I've been taking away time from work with the shading it away. Then we can't stop adulting, bills had to be paid, but maybe we don't have to go to the post office week. I'm going to take ten minutes from errands, and then I like to give myself a little grid. This means Journal Class Skillshare. This exercise was whether you can dive into seeing like what your day is like, and really just get an opportunity to dive into the ways in which journaling can be very unconventional. This is an easy way to get started with journaling in any of the prompts, and using it as a way to come back to this and say, "This is what I have going on, this is how I can take my time back." I hope this was really helpful for you, and I am excited to get into the rest of the prompts throughout the class.