Where do I find the time?

Prioritizing creative living

As a mom of four kids, time is in short supply. Where do I find the time to do art or sew or write? The first step for me was admitting how much time I wasted during the day on my phone. Most phones have a time tracking feature for different apps. It can tell you in a second where you are spending your digital hours. As I mentioned in a previous post, my drug of choice is Facebook. I realized that Facebook was sucking too much of my time and not adding color to my life. I used my Android phone’s Digital Wellness features to put a time limit on my Facebook usage. When you reduce time wasting and mind numbing activities, it’s amazing how much time you can free up and how much more alive you feel.

Once I stopped surfing my phone so much, I had to make the more active choice of what to do instead. At that point, I was left wondering what I wanted to do. For me, the first life giving activities that I began were journaling and fitness. The fitness gave me more energy and a lighter mood, so I had more pep to try new things. The journaling helped me figure out what exactly I wanted to do. Picking up a phone to surf is easy. Trying new creative pursuits is a larger hump to climb over. I started with a small morning routine of just 5 minutes of fitness and a tiny bit of journaling. At that point, my journal writing was more list making and mind mapping. Those first dives into my creative thinking were important to figuring out the next steps in the journey.

An unexpected benefit of replacing phone surfing with creative hobbies is the modeling it does for our children. My kids love their devices and they don’t need anyone to model getting sucked into the digital playground. It has been good for me to paint in front of them or write in front of them. When Mommy is doing fun crafts, it makes the kids want to try their hand as well. In this upside-down world, when even school is virtual, it’s nice to have a regular enticement for the kids to write stories long hand or learn how to sew something. I definitely feel that living creatively leads to better living and now my kids can see that acted out on a regular basis.

Do you feel like you never have enough time? Are you wasting too much time on your phone or watching TV? How can you be more intentional about your daily use of time? What kinds of adventures have you always wanted to try? How can you take a tiny step in that direction?