How to Make Space in Your Life

Alternate title: How to make space in your life so you can fill that space with really awesome things. But that’s a bit long.

The hardest part about changing your routine, especially adding something to it, is making space for the changes. I’ve been switching things up a bit lately and making space for certain things in my own life – it can be difficult, but it’s so worth it. These tips are intended for/geared towards spiritual practices (ritual, prayer, divination, meditation), and that’s what I used them for. But they could easily be used for your creative practices as well – setting aside time for writing or painting or whatever works for you.

Take Stock

First off, you need to take stock of how you’re currently spending your time. Chances are, to make space for something, you’re going to have to remove or move around something else that takes up your time and energy. Example: I used to get on the computer and check my email first thing in the morning; now I have a morning routine that pushes that back until anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour after I get up.

Take a critical look at how you’re expending your time and energy, and see if there’s anything that you want to cut out. Don’t cut out something because you feel like you “should” – if looking at cat macros for an hour every day makes you laugh and lifts your spirits, then you don’t need to remove it. It’s not a time waster if it makes you feel better! Rather, look at how things make you feel, and see if you can cut out anything that leaves you feeling stressed out, angry, upset, or just generally down in the dumps.

Making Time

Now that you have some extra free time, you can fill it with something that makes you happy! Yay! In my experience, the easiest way to do this is to have some sort of schedule (the strictness of it depending on your taste) to make sure you make time for it. Here’s some suggestions:

• Time of day – set aside a specific time every day to do something. Fairly simple, but if you don’t have a regular schedule, this can be hard to do and difficult to stick to.
• Time of week – schedule a certain day every week to work on whatever. This can be a little easier to fit in, since you have all day to do it as long as you do it that day. I don’t suggest scheduling something for every day of the week starting out, since that can be overwhelming.
• Time of the month – this could be something like moon phases (I have specific things scheduled for the new moon and the full moon), or something like the first Monday of the month. This is the trickiest way to coordinate something into your schedule, since it only comes around once a month so it can be hard to set up a routine (as opposed to daily, where you do it a few days in a row and it starts to stick, or weekly where two or three weeks in it’s your normal schedule). If you do this, make sure to note it more that one place so that you don’t forget!

Making it Stick

After you’ve got extra time and your schedule, the next hurdle to adding something to your routine is making it stick.

• Stick to your schedule. Try very hard to pick something that won’t need to be switched around two weeks later. The usual number quoted for stickiness is 30 days, but that doesn’t necessarily apply if you’re doing things once a week – my personal rule is to not switch around routines for at least three months. After 90 or so days of sticking with a change, I can rethink it and switch things around a bit if I need to, and chances are that since I’m used to doing it, I’ll continue.
• Get a calendar. Write your schedule on there, and leave it someplace prominent. I’ll admit I tend a bit towards the forgetful, but I have a daily planner that I look at every morning for smaller tasks, and then a calendar on the fridge for really important things. I forgot things a lot more before I set up this system.
• Start small. When I first started meditating on a regular basis, I tried to start out with ten minutes every day. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was really hard to stick with! After a few patchy starts and stops, I started meditating again – but this time, with three minutes a day, then after a few weeks, five minutes, and so on. Starting small makes you a lot more likely to accomplish your goal, which helps you build momentum and makes you more likely to stick with it.
• Block your internet access. This isn’t 100% necessary, but I find it very very useful. Find an extension (Chrome Nanny works great for Chrome; I know there are similar plug ins for Firefox) that lets you schedule blocks of no internet time, or bans time wasting websites for certain hours. That way, you know you won’t be reading fifty pages back on your tumblr dashboard or playing Scrabble online instead of meditating or journaling.

These ideas make it fairly easy – or as easy as it ever gets – for you to incorporate changes into your routine. Using one idea or all of them should help you to have more time for things you love to do or things you’re always meaning to get started on, but never do!

Any other tips that work for you?