No one is going to tell you to make time for yourself. Or rather, many people will tell you to do this but few will offer you unsolicited, tangible support to actually make that happen.

Instead, you must be the one who claims and carves out creative time for yourself.

You may have to ask for help, perhaps quite a lot of it, to make this happen. In my case, I started asking my husband to take our boys on weekend afternoons. Sometimes I decide that I need to go to a cafe to write after the kids fall asleep. And I devote most of the 13.5 hours my boys are in school together each week to my creative work rather than errands and grocery shopping.

When I claim this time for myself, the world within me changes. I become immersed in my projects without feeling the gravitational pull of dirty dishes or the mountains of unfolded laundry.

Reclaiming my time allows me to know myself as an embodied writer. Meaning I am a woman who shows up every day to write. Not just a woman who talks about it or wishes she was writing while gazing at the dusty pile of blank, empty notebooks.

So what gets in the way of taking time for your creativity and your soul’s deepest work?

If you’ve tried to find the answer in the hundreds of books on productivity, time management, and personal boundaries, you probably still feel stuck and confused.

Too often, these books are written by people whose lives are drastically different than yours or mine. When you’re buried under the obligations of working, parenting, caregiving, nurturing, and other emotional responsibilities, it’s nearly impossible to ‘time manage’ your way out of that scenario.

There is an unspoken expectation for most women to put themselves last in order to take care of everyone else around them.

But have you stopped to look at that picture to clearly see the underlying challenges?
How are all these obligations serving you?
What would actually happen if you stopped doing some of these things?
What are you getting out of this wild system of light speed action and hyper productivity?

What if you hopped off that train and instead, you declared your creative time to be as essential as breathing, eating, or brushing your teeth.

What if you decided that just because time for nurturing your creative self isn’t handed over to you doesn’t make it unnecessary or unimportant.

You deserve to have time for your creativity. You deserve to surrender some of the demands you’re shouldering.

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Tending, nourishing, and practicing your creativity is a worthy endeavor. It’s thirst quenching on a deep, soul and cellular level.

Dedicating your time and devotion to expressing yourself in joyful, creative ways is what brings you to life and fills you with love, compassion, and warmth to share with the people around you.

This is truly the first step in claiming your creative time: to see it as essential, not frivolous. To see your creative expression as a top priority, ahead of what anyone else has tried to convince you to do.

It’s only when you arrive at this place of a deep feeling of deserving this time that you can shift your life around your devotion to creative practice. From this place, the steps start to feel easier to put into place.

Finally believing how necessary it is to reclaim your time, you can move on to weaving it into the fabric of your life, step by step.

1 - Ask for help and support

Women thrive in community, but many of us aren’t sure how to create this within a culture that idolizes individualism and self-reliance. However, it’s vital to ask for help, even when it feels a little uncomfortable. It’s also important to look at the places where perhaps help is being made available to you but you haven’t allowed yourself to take it.

When you’re clear on how important it is to receive this support, other people can feel it and are more likely to find ways to say yes to you.

2 - Commit to showing up for yourself

Treat your creative dates with the same level of commitment you would a work obligation or appointment with a lawyer who bills hourly. When you find that time for your practice, carve it into your calendar. Write it down in your planner or set a reminder in your phone. Make sure it lives and breathes with a level of importance that mirrors your desire to thrive and blossom.

3 - Be deeply present with the time you do have

If my on again off again meditation practice taught me anything, it’s that true presence makes time stretch or practically stand still. If you take the time to clear your distractions and commit to being deeply present with the time you do have, it’s a little bit like getting a bonus from the Universe. Twenty minutes might feel like forty.

Even if you have the experience that your creative time flew by, if you stayed present with the experience, you likely feel more energized, renewed, and inspired by that time than if you’d spent it vacuuming or numbing out with a social media scroll session.

4 - Regularly review where you’re investing your time

I personally review my commitments in alignment with the phases of the Moon. Right after the Full Moon I take stock of what I’m doing or what I’m working on. I ask myself what can be released in some way. Maybe it’s time to stop doing something or I just need to tie up a few loose ends to get something off my plate.

You can find a schedule that works for you but the basic premise is that a monthly ritual of accounting for your time and attention is essential to keeping your energy clear so you have the resources you need to devote to your creative endeavors.

Time is your most valuable asset and the best way to assure that it’s being directed towards the things that matter most to you is to review your commitments regularly.

I think this conversation around how to claim our time as creative women has never been more important. We’re living in a time of unprecedented demands on our attention. We’re connected yet splintered.

This paradox has awakened a need in many of us to slow down and consciously redirect our time, energy, and attention towards things that matter on a deep, soul level.

Just like so many changes swirling around you right now, it’s essential to talk about these issues with the other women in your life. If we all reclaimed this time, together, the world might start to see this as just the way it is. Not like some outrageous, revolutionary notion that belongs to a misfit band of wild women wearing scarves and tattoos and straw hats.

We’re all wild, creative women and it’s time for each and every one of us to reclaim our time and use it to nurture the true brilliance that burns brightly within our fierce, loving hearts.

{I’d love to hear how you’re claiming your creative time…please share your brilliant ideas in the comments below. Or have a question? Ask in the comments so I can answer what’s on your heart in a future post!}