I have a confession. I own a planner. Actually, I own four planners, because I keep buying ones with softer paper or more pleasing grid patterns, convinced that the right one will finally turn me into a person who wakes at 5:45 a.m., drinks hot water with lemon, and produces a thousand flawless words before the sun has fully committed to the day. This has never happened. Not once. The planners sit on my desk in a little judgmental pile, their pages as blank as my mind at 6 a.m.
Here is the thing about me and routines: I love the idea of them. I love the crisp, cinematic montage of me tying my hair back, lighting a single tasteful candle, and writing something so achingly good that my future biographer will weep quietly into a cardigan. But the reality is that my most productive creative moments have arrived when I was wearing one sock, hadn’t brushed my teeth, and was technically supposed to be doing something else—like answering an email from my accountant or finding out why the refrigerator is making that noise again.
The Myth of the Perfect Creative Routine
I spent years believing that I was simply bad at being an artist because I couldn’t stick to a schedule. Every interview with a successful writer seemed to feature someone who rose at dawn, wrote for exactly three hours, then took a brisk walk and ate a single hard-boiled egg for lunch. I tried this once. I spent the entire three hours staring at a blinking cursor and composing an elaborate fantasy in which I was a potter living in a small coastal town and never had to write anything again. The hard-boiled egg was fine, but it did not make me Patti Smith.
What nobody tells you is that routine and creativity are not in a simple, monogamous relationship. They’re more like two people who met at a party, had one interesting conversation, and then spent the next decade trying to figure out if they actually like each other or just admire each other’s shoes. Sometimes a routine will hold you gently by the shoulders and guide you to the page. Other times it will lock you in a room with your own expectations and refuse to let you out until you’ve produced something, which is a fantastic way to produce nothing at all.
When the Routine Becomes a Tiny Tyrant
I once read that Anthony Trollope wrote exactly 250 words every fifteen minutes, timing himself with a watch. If he finished a novel before the fifteen minutes were up, he would simply start the next one. I find this information personally offensive. My own writing process looks more like this: stare at ceiling for forty minutes, write a sentence so beautiful it makes me briefly emotional, delete it because it doesn’t fit the tone, eat four crackers while standing up, write 700 words in a frenzy, realize they are all about my childhood dentist, keep them anyway because the dentist bit is actually pretty good.
The danger of a too-rigid routine is that it can start to feel like a boss you’re disappointing. You miss your morning writing block because you had to take the cat to the vet, and suddenly the whole day is shot. The creative part of your brain, which is a sensitive and slightly dramatic creature, decides that if it can’t have its perfect conditions, it will simply take to its bed with a cold cloth on its forehead. I have lost entire weeks to this phenomenon. The routine, which was supposed to support me, has instead become a very small man in a very tight suit, tapping his foot and looking at his watch.
My Brief, Disastrous Affair with the 5 AM Club
Let me tell you about the month I decided to become a morning person. I bought a sunrise alarm clock that gradually illuminated the room like a gentle dawn, which I immediately hated because it reminded me that it was morning and I was awake. I laid out my yoga clothes the night before. I prepared a beautiful journal for my morning pages. On Day One, I woke up, meditated for three minutes, then fell asleep sitting up and dreamed I was being chased by my own to-do list. On Day Two, I wrote exactly one sentence: “I am very tired.” On Day Three, I slept through the alarm entirely and woke up at 9:47 with a sense of profound failure and a cat sitting on my chest.
What I learned from this experiment, besides the fact that I am not constitutionally suited to sunrise, is that creativity has its own circadian rhythm. Mine happens to be approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a strange second wind around 10 p.m. that is usually worthless but occasionally produces a single perfect paragraph. Fighting this rhythm in the name of discipline didn’t make me more productive; it made me sad and sleepy and resentful of the sun.
The Tender Side of Structure
Now, before you think I’m about to tell you to abandon all routine and simply wait for the muse to strike while you’re in the shower, let me be clear: I am not a monster. Some structure is not only helpful but necessary, particularly if you, like me, have a brain that would happily spend an entire Tuesday investigating the history of Victorian hair jewelry instead of doing the work you actually need to do. The trick, I think, is to build a routine that feels less like a prison and more like a gentle suggestion written on nice paper.
For me, this looks like a handful of small, non-negotiable anchors throughout the day. I make coffee. I sit in the same chair, because my brain now associates that chair with writing and will start generating sentences just to be polite. I light a candle, not because I am a lifestyle influencer but because the smell of bergamot tells my lizard brain that we are doing something special now, please pay attention. These tiny rituals don’t guarantee that I will write anything good, but they do guarantee that I will at least show up, and showing up is roughly 60% of the battle. The other 40% is not immediately checking your phone, which I am still working on.
The Guilt Spiral and How I Am Learning to Step Out of It
Here is a scene you may recognize: it’s 3 p.m., you haven’t created anything, and you are now convinced that you have wasted your life and will die unremembered in a ditch. You try to force yourself to work, but the guilt has made your brain into a clenched fist. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out. You eat a bag of chips and watch three episodes of a show you don’t even like. I have lived this day more times than I can count, and it has never once led to a creative breakthrough.
What has helped, slowly and imperfectly, is learning to treat my creative self like a skittish woodland creature. If I miss a day, I don’t berate myself; I just quietly set out some metaphorical birdseed the next morning. I tell myself, “We’re just going to write for ten minutes. If it’s terrible, we can stop.” Usually, it is terrible. But sometimes, on the other side of terrible, there’s a sentence that surprises me, and that sentence leads to another one, and suddenly the woodland creature is eating out of my hand and I remember why I do this at all.
What I Do When Nothing Is Working
I have a list of things I try when the writing has stalled and my routine has crumbled into dust. None of them are original, but they are honest:
- I walk. Not a brisk, purposeful walk, but a meandering, stop-to-look-at-a-weird-leaf walk. Something about moving my body through space unlocks the stuck thoughts. I have solved whole plot problems while waiting for a pedestrian light.
- I read something completely unrelated. A cookbook, a field guide to mushrooms, a biography of someone I’ve never heard of. Other people’s words are the best fertilizer for your own.
- I write by hand. There is something about the physical act of pen on paper that short-circuits my inner editor. The words come out messier and truer.
- I accept that today might be an input day. Creativity requires both filling the well and drawing from it. Some days you’re just filling the well, and that’s not laziness—that’s maintenance.
The Routine That Works (For Now)
So what does my actual, real-life creative routine look like? It’s not glamorous. I wake up whenever my body decides it’s done sleeping, which is usually around 8 a.m. I make coffee and drink it while reading something that has nothing to do with my work. Then, around 10 a.m., I sit at my desk and light that candle. I write for as long as it feels good—sometimes an hour, sometimes three. If it stops feeling good, I stop. I refuse to chain myself to the desk anymore, because I have learned that the muse does not respond to hostage situations.
In the afternoons, I do the other parts of my life: the errands, the admin, the staring-into-the-fridge. I often get a second creative wind in the evening, which I use for revision or for playing with new ideas that aren’t ready for prime time. I go to bed when I’m tired, and I try very hard not to feel guilty about any of it. This routine is not impressive. It will never be featured in a productivity podcast. But it’s mine, and it works, and I have finally stopped apologizing for it.
FAQ: Routine and Creativity, Georgie-Style
Do you really think routine is overrated?
I think the wrong kind of routine is overrated—the kind that’s built on shame and rigid expectations. But a gentle, flexible routine that respects your natural rhythms? That’s gold. The goal is to create a container for your creativity, not a cage.
What if I can’t find my creative rhythm at all?
Pay attention for a week or two. When do you feel most alive and open? When do ideas come most easily? Keep a little log, not of what you produce, but of how you feel. Your rhythm is probably already there, just buried under a pile of shoulds.
How do you deal with the guilt of an unproductive day?
Poorly, sometimes. But I’m learning to reframe it. A day spent refilling the creative well is not a wasted day. Watching a movie, reading a book, having a long conversation with a friend—these are all part of the work, even if they don’t look like it. I also remind myself that no one has ever been creatively productive every single day. Not even Anthony Trollope, probably. I hope.
Is it bad to write in short bursts instead of long sessions?
Absolutely not. Some of my best work has come from twenty-minute sprints between other obligations. The idea that you need vast, uninterrupted hours is a luxury that most of us don’t have, and it can become an excuse to do nothing. Work with the time you have, even if it’s just fifteen minutes while the pasta water boils.
A Final, Slightly Mushy Thought
I used to think that creativity was a wild, untamable thing that would be destroyed by any attempt at routine. Then I thought that routine was the only way to be a “real” artist, and my lack of discipline was a moral failing. The truth, as it usually does, lies somewhere in the messy middle. Routine and creativity can be friends. They can even be lovers. But only if you let them be themselves, and only if you stop trying to make them into something they’re not.
So here is my wish for you, and for me: may we build routines that feel like home. May we light our candles and make our coffee and sit in our chairs, but may we also forgive ourselves when the chair stays empty. May we trust that the work is happening even when we can’t see it—in the walk, in the shower, in the dream we barely remember. And may we finally, mercifully, stop buying planners.
