I’m not sure about you, but I get my best ideas when I create some space for them. In the bath, lying in bed at night before I go to sleep, when I am going for a big walk (or run!), when I’m sitting quietly, in the early morning when everyone else is dozing, when I’m driving, or when I am with like-minded souls and we are talking about ideas.
Sometimes those ideas are about things for my blog. Often they are about other things that sit alongside my blog. I’m VERY into growing the alongside parts of my blog (in case you haven’t noticed!) Always the things/ideas sprout best when I make room for them, which sounds obvious, right?
The thing is, modern life can be full of busy-ness and filling up the calendar or taking more and more things on is pretty much de rigeur. We’re often more than happy to pop other people’s things/ideas into our calendars, but somehow we think less of our own and most of us wouldn’t even dream of scheduling ‘time for ideas’ or ‘thinking time’ or ‘blog hatching time’. I think we should.
YES, picking up the dry cleaning or doing the laundry are pressing to-dos, but making time for ideas is even more important and should be prioritised accordingly. Once you get one brilliant idea, the others have a funny way of flowing forth too…
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck
Perhaps you feel a bit funny about setting aside time to plan/brainstorm your blog? I want you to take yourself a bit more seriously. I want you to know that creative work might just be your life’s work (in a way that laundry seems to be, but is definitely not!)
This might seem like a tricky thing, especially if you have children. But like all things, you just need to start doing it. Start somewhere. Please start!
Even if it’s 15 minutes a week to think about the things you want to be doing blog-wise, where you are headed, where you actually WANT to go, how you can get there, what you can do to expedite it all.
For me, this means getting up nice and early before the house wakes up, having a cup of coffee and some toast and working on my blog plans or creative plans for that day. Perhaps you could do that too?
If you do wrangle a bit more free time, it’s a really good idea to do some get-it-all-out, stream of consciousness type writing – piling everything in your head onto the page for a good 15 or 20 minutes or so just to clear the decks a bit. You’ll probably/possibly find that this clears a path for big ideas, once the busy, life stuff is down on the page and put away.
Not all ideas are good ideas, but if you get into the habit of documenting them and letting them bloom a little bit as you mull them over, you can make decisions about the ones that really speak to you, the ones that might lead you a bit further down the creative path you’ve chosen, the ones that make the most sense and warrant more attention.
When can you make time for ideas? Or thinking time? Are there some snippets of your day that you can commandeer for this?
Are you giving yourself time to come up with the good stuff?