The Key To Joyful Creation is Time Flexibility and More Autonomy Over Your Day by Chelene Knight
“Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays.”—Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
This blog post was originally focused on being content with outgrowing your writerly tools, but after randomly picking up a money book—The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel— and reading it cover to cover in two days, I tossed the entire post and shifted my topic to money, time, and joy. I mean, as writers, isn’t that what we are all after? How can finding more ways to control what we do each day lead us to more joyful creation?
When we are told a specific narrative over and over, it can be difficult to unlearn it, to let it go (trust me, I wrote an entire book on letting go, and it takes a lot of work on the self to completely let go!) How many of us creatives have been told that in order to write well and to be taken seriously as writers, that we had to write every single day? How many of us with full time jobs and families were told that in order to make time to write we had to essentially, magically build more hours into the day? We believed this. We still do, right? Because we don’t have enough time, we can’t write. We aren’t writers. Oh well. But we have to unlearn that. We tell ourselves this narrative because it’s the only one we’ve heard. Most of us don’t yet know how to let go of this old story because it would mean writing a new one to replace it.
When I left my day job five years ago, I was terrified. I didn’t have any savings, nor did I have any big projects lined up. But what I did have was a bunch of soft skills that I had no idea would actually be more valuable than the daily labouring I did at jobs all my life. More on these soft skills later.
Sidenote/disclaimer/transparency: I’m not telling you to quit your day job. In fact, please don’t do that. I struggled … a lot. You can take back more control over your time in smaller, more intentional ways, and that’s what I hope to cover here. Ok, now that that’s outta the way, let’s proceed.
The day I walked away from my old job I was a single parent of a fifteen-year-old and I was worried. But the desire to have autonomy over my day spoke louder than the fear of not being able to survive. I’ve been in some rough spots as a young girl where survival was always on the tip of my tongue. So today, when I feel fear, it doesn’t immediately stop me. It does, however, give me pause, but now I know that this is actually a good thing. Before quitting I could have prepared myself by researching the odds of someone quitting their job and then making a good living as a creative. But what could this historical data have told me? All it would have done was slow down the unlearning process. The fear I felt when I left my decently-paying job was necessary because, as I would learn through Housel’s book, “studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior.”
So if I wanted to change my behavior, what should I start with? Time. This is probably the biggest conversation topic for writers (aside from money, which is totally connected to time by the way). We don’t have enough of it, we fear running out of it, and we don’t always know how to make the best use of it. What I’ve learned as a writer-preneur, is that in order to find more quality time to write (and to enjoy it), I wasn’t supposed to create more hours in the day, but instead learn to be intentional about what I said yes to. And to do this I taught myself how to say no with love. And part of saying no with love meant looking at and acknowledging what gave me energy so that I could try my damndest to spend more time on those things vs the stuff that sucked me dry. We are all different so what gives me energy is unique to me. So start there, with a question: How can I spend more time doing things that fill me up? What are these things? And follow it up with: Can I delegate the energy-depleting things to someone who doesn’t need as much energy to perform them? Or can I ditch the task altogether? Ask yourself what you have control over in your day and you might surprise yourself. Sometimes the tasks that find themselves attached to us, are not there because we are the only ones on earth who can do them, they’re often tethered to us because we never thought about saying no. We never tried wholeheartedly to let it go because saying no means #BoundariesWork and that’s one of the most difficult “soft skills” to acquire.
But what do I mean by soft skills? This was actually how I came into Housel’s book because I was doing some research on money mindset and the patterns of behavior attached to money and building wealth and his book popped up. I bought it, read it, and felt validated in that some of what this book was telling me to do, I was instinctively already doing. I understood that the soft skills that I left my old job with were now so valuable that the return on my initial time investment had compounded more than I could have ever dreamed. My energy was now being used in all the right ways. I’m working a lot, yes. But all the things I am doing align with my personality, my energy, and my priorities. Some of that was planned, some of it was luck (for example, me meeting the right people at the right time).
One of those people was Krystal Clark, the systems strategist extraordinaire. I’ve always loved automation and processes and solid workflows because having these technical skills taken care of allows me to hyper-focus on my soft skills (empathy, communication, boundaries work, and soon … financial success). But from Krystal I learned that there was a freedom attached to building out processes. Time, energy, money, joy, and the ever-valuable flexibility were all connected to taking back control over exactly what I did in my day. So randomly falling into Housel’s book kinda felt like a full circle moment.
I still have a lot to do, this is lifetime work after all! But I am patient, I do the work and try hard not to expect immediate results. The gains we get from looking at ourselves and the daily minutia of our lives, and being so bold as to make big changes isn’t instant work. We live in a time where we want things at our doorstep at the click of a button. But the results—our gains, cannot be dictated by Amazon Prime! I’ll leave you all with one more Housel gem: “compounding only works if you can give an asset years and years to grow. It’s like planting oak trees: A year of growth will never show much progress, ten years can make a meaningful difference, and fifty years can create something absolutely extraordinary.”
It may take time to see how all of these things are connected because this is not easy work. But you don’t have to do it alone. Start by recognizing the complexity of unlearning a lifetime of narratives that no longer serve you. Remember that these old narratives are the ones that continue to hinder the work we so desperately want to do as creatives. I built Breathing Space Creative as a first step to detangling this mess. And for me, this was the real first step into joyful creation. I’m writing my books and using my valuable soft skills to help others and feeling pretty darn good about it. I trust that the financial freedom part will come. I look at the shape of my days often. I continue the boundaries work because flexibility is anchored to it and always will be. I can’t see them but I trust that the roots of my own oak tree are flourishing, doing what they need to do. At least this is the new narrative I wrote for myself.
Chelene Knight is the author of three books. She is currently working on a commissioned book on self-love and joy called Let It Go forthcoming with HarperCollins Canada in 2024. Chelene is the founder of Breathing Space Creative.
Two ways to work with Breathing Space Creative: