Managing energy for creative work

It's not about how much time you have.

I want to write an advice post today, which is an odd thing for me to do for a few reasons:

1. I don’t think advice works. Or rather, I think the only advice that works is what the recipient can recognize as true for themselves.

2. Offering advice on how to do creative work makes it seem like I have it all together, my deadlines are met, my goals are reached, and my dreams a palpable reality. This is — ha ha ha ha. Ssshhhhh. Let us talk of this no more.

3. My advice is probably only useful for people like me, i.e., people who have a lot of flexibility in how they manage their time, a level of material comfort, and whose brains tick the way mine does.

So with those caveats, let me offer the following reflections on managing energy for creative work. Test these out for yourself, see what works, throw the rest away.

There are two problems with a lot of the advice out there on getting writing (or any other creative work) done:

1. People assume that time is the single relevant factor to the work that gets done

2. People assume all time is equal and can be used in the same way

According to this way of thinking about things, if you have more time, you can get more creative work done. And if you have an hour free at 4 pm, that is the same thing as an hour free at 9 am, or at 10 pm.

If you think this is true, I suggest you clear out a nice sweet eight-hour day and use it to work on your most important project. You should, at the end, have eight times more words (or however you measure your progress) than you would if you’d only had an hour. If this is indeed the case for you, you can stop reading now, because none of the rest of this post applies to you.

If you are like me, however, you will find a few things. First, you have a hard time getting into the work. Maybe you distract yourself with social media or aggressive nose-picking. Maybe you realise you really should put a load of laundry in, because your child is running around town like a Dickensian ragamuffin. Maybe you remember that you have lots of emails you need to answer.

And then, let’s say you finally get started. Can you go on for eight hours? Can you go on for three, or two? Or do you crack, fizzle, and pop before that?

For the past few years, I’ve observed my own energy pretty closely. This is partly because I’m usually exhausted, and have been for the past, well, twelve years. I can write an email on exhausted, sometimes, but I can’t really do creative work on exhausted, so I’ve had to figure out what works for me. And here is what works for me:

1. When it comes to creative or intellectual work, amount of time available is not nearly as important as energy. It still matters, but it’s not the main thing.

2. All energy is not the same. The energetic state that’s good for answering emails and ticking off items from my to-do list is agitated, hectic, amped up. For highly imaginative work (poetry, memoir writing), I need calm and mellowness, combined with enough strength to keep going. Analytic thinking is somewhere in between. Teaching requires being amped up, but with greater focus than small tasks do.

3. It is very hard to do a particular task if I am in the wrong energetic state for it. If I’m mellow and dreamy, it’s going to take me half an hour to answer an email. If I’m agitated, there is no way I’m doing concentrated work. I will distract myself immediately, and waste any time I have at my disposal.

4. It is relatively easy to move from calm energy to agitated energy. It is very very hard to go in the other direction. If I check email before a writing session, I can say goodbye to that writing session.

5. Nir Eyal describes distraction as “an unhealthy escape from bad feelings.” I think this is true. But we can also think of distraction as what happens when our energy is mismatched to our task. When I am in the right energy state for the work, the work flows much more easily.

6. An enormous amount of creative and intellectual work consists in observing your own energy patterns and managing them to suit your projects. This means also observing:

   1. The quality of your sleep and what improves it

   2. What times of day you are most creative, most focused, most positive, etc.

   3. When your energy shifts and what causes it

7. What feels like “low energy” can also be useful for certain tasks. For a long time I thought writers got up early in the morning because they were morning larks, unlike me. Now I understand that some, at least, take advantage of the fact that their critical mind is not yet fully “on”. Still half in the dreamworld of sleep, they can be more creative than they are after fully awake. I am actually so stupid at 5:30 am that I can’t even take advantage of that, but I can use the fatigue before bedtime to tap into a particular creative space I can’t reach during the day.

8. It’s useful, if you have any control over your time, to layer your schedule in a way that moves from calm to agitated energy. Do the work that requires calm and focus first. Do the bureaucratic and social things later in the day. (A lot of brilliant, productive people throughout history have organized their days in exactly this way, though it’s also fair to say they were usually wealthy dudes with staff.) Now, I can’t always do this due to work and life responsibilities, but I’ve noticed I’m a lot more productive and happier on those days when I manage it. This is my ideal energetic order, even though I am a night owl — I’m best off doing my calm work in the morning. I’m not only tired in the evening, but too hyper to do real work.

9. For many of us (for example, parents), morning is not a calm time. Starting the day will involve a certain level of hectic energy. In order to do good work, or even begin doing it, I have to come down again to a calm space. Activities that help me:

   1. Reading

   2. Short breath meditation

   3. Short freewriting

   4. Doodling

   5. Knitting

   6. Autogenic training practice

   7. Co-writing sessions

10. The items in the last category are also good for winding down at night, for the obvious reason.

11. Some activities are good for more nuanced shifts in energy, or for moving through blocks in thinking. These include:

    1. Showers

    2. Walks

    3. Repetitive chores

    4. Music

12. Some activities are good for breaking through major fear or blocks, whether in creative work or in other anxiety-producing tasks. These include:

    1. A solid, sweaty weight-lifting session

    2. Meditation

    3. Some people use alcohol or drugs for this. I’m too terrified they'll work, so refuse to try. But send me whatever tips you have that are not harmful to health.

13. When the energy for a certain task is exhausted, there is no point continuing to push. I’m much better off stopping and doing something else, or resting. If I get hyper-focus and can write all day, however, I might as well ride that wave, that beautiful, beautiful wave.

14. Pauses during longer work periods are useful, but the trick is to recharge using a task that doesn’t fundamentally change the energy or fill up the mind with distracting nonsense. I find the “quick search” or “quick check of social media” deadly for this, unless I’m writing hard and fast in which case they keep me pepped up.

15. Creative energy can also come from doing creative work and, at least for me, sharing it. If you can’t write that essay, write a poem. If you can’t write a poem, write a few observations on a receipt or a bus ticket. Or dance, or cook. Or write a substack post about how to manage your creative energy.

16. Creative energy can also come from new input, whether it is a movie, an exhibition, an unexpected book, travel to a new place, or an artist’s date à la Julia Cameron. Some people seem to like nature for this kind of thing too. I’m personally fonder of nature when it’s been reorganized into a bustling city full of restaurants and brightly coloured objects, but to each her own. The point is charging the creative batteries.

17. Other people can be an excellent source of energy too, though depending on your constitution that also has to be managed. This is why co-writing works. A conversation, even a well-placed note, can give the right sort of boost as well. I find large groups of people both energizing and exhausting at the same time however, so have not been able to write after teaching or meetings. That period is useful for taking down notes, to be expanded on at a calmer time. But I’d love to learn how to write after teaching — it would potentially be lifechanging.

18. Rest is a job too. Real rest, not productive rest. For a certain personality type, this is harder than working.

19. Boredom can be a great source of energy. Putting the phone away and looking around, including at easy-to-miss boring details — the crisped, yellow leaves nestled on the windshield of a grey-green car, the tired faces of people on the bus at the end of the day — can provide the same kind of an input as an artist’s date. Simply noticing things can provide energy, without being material for anything in particular.

20. Some people talk about writing books in 20-minute snatches of time, while picking up kids or whatnot. I personally have not figured out how to do hard, concentrated work in that amount of time, simply because it’s too hectic — I can draft some real prose given 20 minutes of calm in the morning however. I do find small bits of time useful for brainstorming, taking down notes, thinking about an opening line… which are also writing. Given minimal time or control over energy, match the task to the energy.

21. A smartphone with a working internet connection is generally the enemy of calm, reflective energy.

I would be very, very grateful for your thoughts and experiences. What works for you in managing your energy? How do you schedule your days, when you have control over them? What helps you “reset” your energy? What are your biggest challenges as you try to do creative work? And if you apply anything you read here, I’d be particularly interested in hearing how it worked for you.

Irina

Updates

• I’m pretty ridiculously happy to have a poem in the Times Literary Supplement, inspired by my teaching Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde last summer: “Criseyde.”

• Also for the TLS, I reviewed a book on medieval women’s literary culture, and contributed to their Summer Books roundup.

• I’ve had four TLS columns come out since I last wrote: on Jorge Luis Borges’ use of medieval literature, the perfectionism of desert saints, the rise and fall of literary reputations, and outsider art.

• At the London Review of Books, I have a review of an exhibition in Constance, Germany on 1300 Years of the Monastic Island of Reichenau.

• Also at the LRB you can listen to four more episodes of Medieval LOLs, my podcast on medieval humour with Mary Wellesley: The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, Solomon and Marcolf, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, Part One.