Increase Creativity - What Would You REALLY Do With A 36 Hour Day?

“If only I had more time I’d be able to create the things really important to me.”

“I have the creative energy, the ideas, the enthusiasm. What I don’t have is the time.”

“There are only 24 hours in the day, that’s my biggest problem!”

How often do you find yourself saying things similar to these?

If you were to list the top 10 reasons why you’re not creating as much as you want to be creating, how high would “lack of time” rank?

Number 5? Number 3? Number 1?!

Most of us feel some kind of time pressures and time constraints in our life. And naturally these restrictions extend to our creative lives and the time we dedicate to working on creative projects.

Often, in the priority list of things that need urgent attention, creating tends to start off fairly low and slide ever downwards as we’re bombarded by more and more demands from every angle.

So imagine this scenario:

What would YOU do, if tomorrow a worldwide treaty agreed to change the number of hours in a day from 24 to 36?

At first you might think:

“Fantastic! That’s exactly what I need. More hours in the day will allow me to work more on my creative projects and increase my creativity. I’ll now have time to fit in all the daily necessities, then have time left over to be more creative. What a great idea!”

But what if you soon found that actually lack of time wasn’t the main factor in stopping you from being more creative?

What if you realised that now instead of working 8 hours a day, to fall in line with the new calendar system, people were now working 12 hours a day?

What if, to relax and wind down, we began watching 3 hours of TV each night instead of 2, or spent 45 mins in hot bubble bath rather than 30?

And to catch up with our rest, we started sleeping 10 or 12 hours a day too?

What if pretty soon, we realised that EVERYTHING had expanded to fill the extra hours?

Everything, that is, EXCEPT the time we spend on our creative projects, and the time we allocate to pursuing and developing our creativity.

So maybe it’s not about time after all?

Ask yourself honestly: “If I was given a week off from all obligations, a week purely to myself to focus on my creative projects, what would I actually do?”

“Would I actually KNOW what to do, which creative project to work on, where to start, how to focus my creative energy?”

And if the answer to these questions isn’t immediately clear to you, maybe this is in fact a perfect place to start to devote your time?

Maybe looking a little more deeply into what you would do given more time – focusing on what you really DO want to achieve in your creative life rather than focusing on feeling you don’t have enough time - could actually be one of the most valuable and beneficial things you can do in the long term for your creativity?

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