What Happens to the Minutes You Don’t Use?
Reclaiming Time as a Creative Act in a World That Wants to Steal It
Time is a funny thing. For me, time moves faster in the morning, slower in the afternoon, then speeds up again at night.
I want time to work for me. Time works for no one unless you channel it. In the early morning, I ask myself how I channel it, or if I let it pass me by. Do I track its approach while I am sitting at my writing desk? Or does it wash over me and recede while I am lost in a YouTube rabbit hole?
What happens to the puddled minutes when I am writing? How am I channeling that puddle into creation, into a unique culmination of ideas?
The next day, I submerge my hands and gather up more time.
I have started working in sprints. Using what is essentially an upgraded egg-timer for 25-minute creative sprints. After a five-minute break, I start another 25-minute sprint.
It works for me.
I don’t want time to be a passive element in my life, one that swirls around and moves on.
There is something empowering about thinking of time as water, something you can hold, freeze, shape. During each 25-minute creation sprint, I am living in time, writing while it passes.
I that time, I will write a poem, start a short story, spark an idea, and watch it gather heat. I take another five-minute break. The next five minutes are me considering what is giving this writing life? What is making it feel more solid, more true? How do I access that part of myself, that part of my brain?
What I am looking for are incendiary moments, moments where I cross some Rubicon, and the writing, the voice within it, becomes a living thing. At that point, a timer is no longer necessary, time is less relevant, and all that matters are the words and the story they are trying to tell.
How do you manage time when trying to create?
Share any specific methods you use to channel time and live in the minutes you have set aside for your creativity.
We can support each other in reclaiming the time and space needed to feel fully human.
In solidarity,
Olu