How I Got Back On the Wagon (This Time)

People ask me all the time what my secret is. How do I manage to keep doing my creative things, despite all the other demands on my time? Making money demands and relationship demands and house demands and oh-my-god-I-have-multiple-small-businesses-to-manage demands, etc. etc. etc. ad nausuem.

Here’s my secret (wait for it, ’cause it’s a big one):

There is no secret.

Or at least there’s no silver bullet.

Or perhaps there is, but the silver bullet is one you have to keep shooting over and over and over and over again. And it’s not very sexy. It’s mundane and boring and, I’m sorry to tell you, not glamorous or exciting at all.

It’s just this:

Get back on the wagon.

Because you will fall off the wagon. You will get stuck. Things will get in the way and pull you off your beautifully-laid track. Over and over again.

Your job is to just keep reminding yourself of what is really important. What makes you happy? What are your core values? What are your top priorities? What do you want to be able to say you did, rather than regretting that you didn’t, when you come to the end of your life?

Your job is to keep looking at where you’re saying yes that you might, just possibly, try saying no.

Your job is to be “your own bodyguard,” as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it in this 44-second video:

Your job is to be constantly vigilant about closing the inevitable cracks where Other Stuff seeps in to get in the way.

Your job is to keep committing and re-committing — over and over and over again — to putting your creative thing(s) at the top of your priority list.

Falling Off the Wagon (Again)

Here’s the truth: I fell horribly off track in the past few weeks. First, I realized that in maintaining my goal of writing 750 words minimum every day (which, me being your classic “overachiever” [even though I really despise that word*], actually averaged more like 1200+ words/day) toward completing my Book-Like Object (or BLO for short**), I was NOT maintaining my goal of getting to all the other writing I needed to.

{Translation (for those of you for whom my stream-of-consciousness run-on sentences are a bit much): I realized that in maintaining goal of writing 750 words every day on my BLO, I was NOT maintaining my goal of getting to all the other writing I needed to.}

In fact, I was stressing myself the hell out, because although I LOVED that I was starting my day on my BLO (while at the same time, I have to add, riding my exercise bike  [me being the Queen of Multi-Tasking]), and it was AWESOME that I was often spending an hour, two hours or even more on said BLO-writing (bliss!), I was falling horribly behind on Other Important Stuff That Needs To Get Done.

{Translation: In fact, I was stressing myself out, because I was falling horribly behind on other stuff.}

This is not a good thing.

My solution, then, was to set aside 3-4 days/week to do my other Important Writing (blog posts for Living A Creative Life, guest blog posts, web pages, Important Email Missives). And to set aside the other days to write on my BLO.

Except that it never really worked out that way.

Instead, somehow I ended up pretty much just doing work-work all the time, rather than Important Work That Doesn’t Pay The Bills (But Might Someday). And given that I had put my Making Art pot on a back burner of my Passion Pluralite Stove in order to rotate my Writing BLO pot to the front burner, I wasn’t making art, either.

Something was very wrong with this picture.

(Though I should interject [if one can be said to interject upon oneself] that I was playing my ukulele every day, and even learning new songs [videos coming soonish!]. So it’s not like I was completely ignoring my Creative Spirit, just that she wasn’t getting enough of what she needs to be totally happy. Just sayin’. A Passion Pluralite Creative Spirit is rather more demanding in some ways than a Single-Focused Creative Spirit.)

So my attempt to bring more balance into my life actually threw me out of balance in the other direction. And THEN I went away on Retreat.

Which was wonderful (and really, really hard in some ways, too), but even if it had been 100% wonderful it was a disruption of my home routine, and when I came home there was a ton of catching up to do, which exacerbated the disruption.

And nothing throws me off track like a disruption to my routine!

I am a Newton’s Laws of Motion kind of gal. A body in motion stays in motion and all that. And a body at rest (or at motion-that-isn’t-doing-my-creative-things), stays that way. Ie. inertia.

Time For a Course-Correction

So I stopped and took a moment to ask myself what was I doing differently when things were working? What tools in my toolkit could I pull out and put to use?

One of My Favorite Tools: My Intention Chart for Multiple Commitments

Back at the start of the year, when I decided to take on the #12in12 daily commitment challenge (a different 30-day commitment every month of 2012), I created a chart to help me keep track of my growing list of commitments. I call it my Intention Chart. There’s space for me to write what each commitment goal is, to mark off if I kept my commitment goal on any given day, and even to write a note about that day’s commitment goal.

(Psst… I put a downloadable version of my Intention Chart in my new Secret Treasure Chest for subscribers, so if you want one of your own, sign up in the form at the top right and you’ll get the link and password in a few days.)

Something about the ritual of filling in the calendar days, writing down my daily goals for the month, and setting a Primary Intention (by filling it in at the top of the chart) makes my commitment to myself more formal. I’m keeping track now, after all, and I don’t want to break a consistent record!

One of the things that had changed in the past month, I realized, was that I’d fallen off in my use of the chart. Hell, I hadn’t even printed one out for March!

Hmmm…

When falling off the wagon coincides with falling off in the use of a particular tool, it’s a good sign that it’s time to bring that tool out again and add it back into the mix. It may not be a silver bullet, but it may help, and when fighting inertia and Resistance, my philosophy is to use all the help I can get.

So the other day I printed out a fresh copy of my Intention Chart. And today, right after my Journaling In Bed time and a yummy breakfast of broccoli pancakes, I started back up on my morning Write-Ride (in which I write on the on-its-last-legs laptop while working up a sweat on the old-as-the-hills exercise bike). In 45 minutes I was dripping sweat and I had written 849 words of this blog post and 635 words of notes for my BLO.

And I felt great!

Marking off those accomplishments on my Intention Chart felt great too. I now have the chart posted with magnets on a file cabinet just to my left as I type on my iMac — a constant reminder of my commitments to myself.

Then (BONUS!) later in the day, lo and behold, I even did a little 15 Minutes a Day ArtSparking, playing with pastels on a painting that I’d layered with watercolor ground at the Retreat:

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I woke up this morning I also had a breakthrough on a possible way to structure my BLO (which is what I wrote in my Journaling In Bed time and typed during my Write-Ride). After all, everything affects everything else.

Aaaahhhhh… It feels like I’m back on the wagon. 🙂

At least until the next time I fall off.

But as I like to say, in my year of Self-Compassion, Untangle and Practice, the most important practice of all is the practice of getting back on the wagon.

Tell me, what tools do you use to help get yourself back on the wagon after you fall off?

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

* Because it implies that one has somehow managed to achieve more than one is capable of. Which doesn’t make any sense at all! If you achieved it, you were capable of achieving it, period.

** I call it my BLO (or Book-Like Object), because that nasty little gremlin, aka my Inner Critic, goes absolutely nuts when I so much as think about the possibility of writing a book. But for some reason, I can talk til I’m blue in the face about my BLO and the gremlin doesn’t bat an eye. I toss her some pretty nail polishes (with sparkles), and she’s entranced for hours. It’s awesome.

Photo by Crysti at Flickr