Ever feel like life’s chaos is drowning out your creative spark? The secret to unleashing your creativity isn’t finding more time—it’s organizing your life to support it.
This guide explores strategies for building a creative life, plus additional insights from books like Keep Going by Austin Kleon and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. You’ll learn why a day job can fuel (rather than hinder) your art, how boredom sparks brilliance, and why choosing life over work paradoxically makes you more creative. Whether you’re struggling to find time for your projects or battling creative burnout, these practical tactics will help you build sustainable habits that keep inspiration flowing.
Editor’s note: This article is part of Shortform’s guide to creativity. If you like what you read here, there’s plenty more to check out in the guide!
Table of Contents
Organize Your Life for Maximum Creativity
According to Austin Kleon in Steal Like an Artist, to do your best creative work, you need to set up the rest of your life to support that creativity. You can do this by prioritizing financial security, setting aside time for your hobbies, and using the right tools. We’ll discuss each of these creative life tactics in more detail.
Prioritize Financial Security
Part of prioritizing your creative work is not allowing the rest of your life to get in the way. For that reason, Kleon recommends being proactive about your finances so that you won’t be constantly distracted by money worries.
One way to get your finances in order is to find a job outside your creative endeavors. Having a day job provides benefits beyond financial stability: It gives you a routine to build on, so you can easily slot in creative time every day. Furthermore, it maintains your connection to other people who might inspire you.
Set Aside Time for Hobbies (and Boredom)
Although financial security is important, Kleon cautions against spending too much time at work. He recommends finding a hobby—something that you do purely for the joy of it. It doesn’t need to be related to your creative work; rather than being a distraction, hobbies will actually improve your creativity because they’ll encourage you to draw new connections. For example, if you’re an architect, you may not think your birdwatching hobby could have much value for your career—until you draw inspiration from the shape of a bird’s nest for your next project.
(Shortform note: In addition to promoting new connections between ideas, bestselling author Dale Carnegie argues that hobbies provide another important benefit: They help to ward off anxiety. This may be especially important for creative people as studies show that artists are more prone to anxiety than non-artists.)
Between your hobbies, day job, creative work, and necessary life tasks, your schedule could fill up pretty quickly. However, Kleon recommends allowing yourself some time for boredom. Boredom gives your brain the space to be creative because it’s not cluttered up with other thoughts. To capitalize on this effect, take advantage of boring tasks like household chores—if you let your mind wander while you tidy up the house, you might come up with a brilliant new idea without even trying.
(Shortform note: To take advantage of these moments of boredom, you first have to resist filling them with distractions like social media. In Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that over time, pulling out your phone every time you experience the slightest sense of boredom weakens your overall ability to focus. Therefore, allowing yourself to experience boredom not only paves the way for new ideas, but it also strengthens your ability to focus on your creative work.)
Use the Right Tools
Kleon’s final advice for organizing your life to support creativity is to use the right tools. First, use a calendar to track your creative progress. Kleon recommends crossing off each day on the calendar that you work on your creative projects. Aim to work a little bit every day so that you have an unbroken line of X’s on the calendar. The more X’s you accumulate in a row, the more inspired you’ll be to keep going.
Second, Kleon advises keeping a notebook to record the details of your days. You don’t have to write detailed, long-form journal entries—just jot down a few highlights to help you remember the highs and lows of your life and work. Over time, your notebook will become an artifact that tracks your progress as an artist and a person.
Balancing Life and Creativity
In his other book, Keep Going, Kleon talks about the interaction between creativity and life as a whole and how you can live a creative life that is healthy. This interaction is important because one benefits the other:
- A healthy life keeps you motivated and interested in your creative work, preventing burnout or feeling overwhelmed.
- Healthy creative work makes your life and the lives of others more positive by providing emotional or intellectual inspiration.
Kleon provides three methods for living a creative life: choosing life over creative work, embracing change, and accepting where you are.
Method #1: Choose Life Over Creative Work
To ensure healthy interaction between your creativity and your life at large, Kleon says you have to choose a healthy life over good creative work. Art should have a net positive impact on the world, both in how it affects others and in how it affects its creator. He specifically argues against the idea of a “tortured artist”—someone who causes suffering to themselves or the people around them in pursuit of creative work. Being a good and ethical human being is more important than making quality creative work.
Method #2: Embrace Change
To stimulate creativity, you have to be willing to embrace, confront, or accept new ideas in your life. By opening yourself up to the option of changing your mind or understanding alternative perspectives, you’ll also be more open to new creative ideas and experiences.
Embrace change in your life by talking to people with opinions and life experiences that differ from your own. Be aware that doing this in a productive way requires engaging with people who recognize your good intentions and don’t judge you for your ideas—otherwise, you won’t feel comfortable or open to new perspectives and experiences. To find alternative opinions productively, Kleon suggests talking to people who disagree with you but still respect you and want to hear what you have to say.
Method #3: Accept Where You Are
You can’t control how and when you’re creative, explains Kleon—you just have to learn to accept where your head is, creatively speaking. Everyone encounters and experiences creativity differently—don’t judge yourself as a failure if you go through a creative dry spell or don’t become wildly successful at a young age. Judging yourself when you’re not at your creative best means you’ll regularly suffer feelings of inadequacy.
To accept where you are, Kleon suggests that you learn to recognize the times in a day, week, month, or year when you are or are not creative. Then, you can work with those creative rhythms instead of judging them as “wrong” or “not good enough.” Persist, don’t get discouraged, and keep going.
Additional Ways to Live a Creative Life
According to Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic, creativity is not a one-off project or pursuit only for the young. It is, rather, a lifestyle and mode of being you should maintain throughout your lifetime. Here are Gilbert’s suggestions for living a creative life.
1. Don’t Set Time Limits
Living a creative life means, first and foremost, abandoning the notion that there are time constraints on your creativity. You and only you decide when you’re ready to start and stop being creative. Believing that you can become “too old” for creativity can rob you of years of happy and fruitful work.
(Shortform note: Others agree with Gilbert’s claim that you are never too old to start creating and add that there are negative repercussions of this societally-held belief: For instance, there is too much pressure on young people to be prolific creators and too much pressure on older people to stay out of the creative game entirely. You can fight this unhelpful conviction by being aware of when you tell yourself you’re too old or too young to do something. Whenever you say this, stop yourself and correct the thought to: “I can do whatever I want in whatever time frame suits me.”)
2. Hunt for Your Creative Time
Another way to stay creative indefinitely is to be willing to hunt for creative time, says Gilbert. Throughout history, creators have never had enough time to be creative. To cope with this dearth of resources, Gilbert advises thinking outside the box about when you can squeeze in an hour or half-hour for your work. You can accomplish a lot in “between times:” during lunch, before bed, on your commute.
3. Be Disciplined
To keep up a productive creative practice long-term, be disciplined, insists Gilbert. According to Gilbert, a disciplined practice means you try hard at all times, but don’t take your work so seriously that you lose the joy in it. This is the only part of the creative process you have full control over: your commitment to your practice and the efficiency of your efforts.
4. Be Inquisitive About Everything
To stay creative over months and years, Gilbert also advocates a policy of gentle inquisitiveness about everything. This lets you contact Creative Sorcery and reignite your creative flame at times when your inspiration inevitably falters.
Creative Sorcery is at all times leaving clues to assist you in your creative work. Gilbert believes that when you adopt a policy of inquisitiveness, you’re more likely to notice and follow these clues. When followed, they can eventually lead you to a new creative pursuit.
Inquisitiveness Can Be Subtle
Your inquisitiveness needn’t be overwhelmingly strong, writes Gilbert. Even a subtle interest or curiosity in something can, in small steps, lead you to an exciting new endeavor. In fact, Gilbert stresses that “subtle inquisitiveness” is a better approach than the similar-seeming advice to “pursue your passion.” Passion implies there must be a deep-seated, burning desire to do something. Subtle inquisitiveness, meanwhile, allows for mild interest.
5. Frame Failure as “Interesting”
As a long-term creator, writes Gilbert, learn how to reframe all your work, and in particular your creative misses, as “interesting.” All creative output, no matter how beloved or reviled, can be seen through a certain lens as “interesting” and educative.
Gilbert notes that a mindset that frames everything as “interesting” encourages you to wonder what can be improved. A “good vs. bad” mindset, conversely, doesn’t encourage growth. It instead encourages giving up if you produce “bad” work.
6. Make Yourself Appealing to Inspiration
Gilbert suggests making it easier to stick with your creative work long-term by inviting more visits from Creative Sorcery. You can do this by physically making yourself more appealing: Dress up as if you were going on a date with inspiration. Put on clothes that make you feel good, style your hair, and use a scent you like. When you take yourself seriously as a creator by presenting yourself well, ideas and your genius are more likely to see you as committed to your work and to visit, claims Gilbert.
7. Don’t Expect a Reward
You shouldn’t be creative to receive a reward. While this remains true, there is one form of reward Gilbert says you can look forward to as you create long-term: touching Creative Sorcery.
You can’t predict when Creative Sorcery will visit, adds Gilbert, so just keep plugging away at your creative work. But know that when it does come, you’ll get to experience a transcendent feeling of communion with a higher life force. This, not accolades or praise, is what makes creativity worthwhile, she claims.
8. Praise the Process
When Creative Sorcery keeps at bay, as it may in the long term, it might be because you’re expressing negativity about it, writes Gilbert. If you complain a lot about the creative process, stop. Complaining frightens away ideas and your genius, which see in you a being that’s not open to inspiration.
Instead, suggests Gilbert, proclaim to yourself and others that you love creating, that you love the creative lifestyle, and that you’ll carry on creating simply because you enjoy it. Saying this invites the forces of Creative Sorcery to visit more often. They’ll sense your receptivity and grace you with their presence.
View Creativity as a Journey
In his book Creative Quest, Questlove writes that making creative work takes time and patience, so he suggests you view creativity as a lifelong journey. He argues that creators must work regularly on their craft, even when they don’t feel inspired. Some days you’ll feel excited to create, while on other days it might feel like a chore. Both types of days are normal and necessary. The key to lifelong creativity is to keep showing up and doing the work, knowing that mastery develops over time.
Questlove urges you to continue doing creative activities as you grow older because creative activities keep your brain sharp. Some people stop being creative because they think they’re too old or find it harder to do things they used to do, but giving up creative activities makes doing things harder.
To maintain your creativity as you age, Questlove suggests two strategies:
First, spend time with younger people and learn about new trends—attend their concerts, look at their art, or join their book clubs. This exposure to fresh perspectives keeps your mind open to new ideas.
Second, adapt your creative routine to match your current abilities. If age-related changes make your usual creative routine difficult—for example, if your hands aren’t as steady for painting—adapt by using larger brushes or trying digital art.
Dive Deeper
Do you want more advice on how to live a creative life? You can check out the full guides to the books mentioned in this article here.
