Hello my creative friends,
About two years ago I made this video titled “How To Make Art Everyday With a 9-5” which you can check out here. Within that video, I discussed a level of daily creative productivity that was sustainable as a long-term lifestyle choice. I also spoke on how to give your creative projects an average of 22-28 hours a week or more without burning out and how a creative schedule could help you stay on track with maintaining those hours and moving the needle consistently.
Since that video came out my life changed a bit due to the global pandemic that keeps on giving. If you existed in 2020 you know exactly what I’m referring to. I mention that to say that my work life became fully remote, and because of that I started to slip up on my early morning routine. Not having to drive through traffic to get to the office led to me setting my alarm an hour later initially and then that changed to setting it to 20 minutes before I had to be online for work.
What can I say, I’m human.
Because of these newly developed poor habits, I was now missing out on my daily morning creative hours. The other challenge I was dealing with was the new expectation of being on call at all hours for my day job. For whatever reason, in those early months of working in a remote corporate environment, new expectations were created, and it felt like your boss could call you at any time to ask you to look at a document together. This was not the case back in the day when you would leave your work computer at the office when you went home for the day. As I was navigating this new 9-whenever work lifestyle and learning how to set new work boundaries effectively and professionally, I was simultaneously losing my drive to work on art in my evenings as well.
A cycle was born, where I would wake up 20 minutes before work and feel bad about myself for not getting up early enough to work on my art projects. I would tell myself “Tonight I’m going to go hard on this painting, for real this time.” And then the workday would end, and I’d be too drained to do anything creative. The only time I was working on my creative projects was on the weekends and I hated that I had become a weekend creative. I just felt like “wow you’re never going to achieve your creative goals and dreams by just working on your projects for a couple hours on Saturday.” A bit of a drastically negative thought but sometimes they can be necessary.
So, enter the new year of 2022. New year new me, right? I wanted to rekindle my early morning routine, but I couldn’t find the discipline to wake up as early as I had used to. I would hit my snooze button for 2 hours straight at times. And then I discovered the sunrise alarm clock which has really changed my life so far.
I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again because I truly believe this. If you’re an artist and/or creative with limited time due to a 9-5 or any type of day job, I highly suggest incorporating an early morning creative routine. I still truly believe this because since investing in a sunrise alarm clock this year I have been getting up comfortably around 6 AM, with no need for a snooze button. This has given me 1-2 hours before having to get ready for my remote corporate job and I’m planning to start even earlier.
Those 1-2 hours of quiet in the morning will be very productive for your creative projects because you are significantly more clear-headed in the morning, especially at such an early hour.
The best way to make getting up earlier than you normally do easier, is by investing in a sunrise alarm clock. The reason they work so well is because sunrise alarm clocks have a functionality where the clock itself gets brighter over a 30 min period and at the 30 minute mark is when the alarm sound goes off. This function causes you to slowly wake up organically before the actual alarm sound, so that by the time it does go off, you’re pretty much awake at that point. The alarm sounds themselves are very peaceful to wake up to compared to the blaring sounds of the default alarm settings on most iPhones these days.
This is not an ad for a specific brand of sunrise alarm clock so I will say that Amazon has a few solid options for you to check out. All you must do is search for “sunrise alarm clock”. These clocks also come with a bedtime ritual reading light to promote the habit of getting off your phone. There are guided meditations that you can listen to as well as white noise settings that can play while you sleep.
I have now been using the sunrise alarm clock for 3-4 weeks and it is a game changer. Thanks to this new early morning lifestyle I have added 2 hours of productive creativity a day during my work week. That’s 10 hours a week not including any additional time I spend in my evenings. Thanks to this early morning routine, I now walk into the day feeling accomplished and when I spend another hour on my creative projects at night, it feels like I’m accomplishing so much towards my creative goals. I am now back to a creative productivity level that I am proud of. If I’m really on point I can see myself giving my projects 10-15 hours during the week in addition to 4-8 hours on the weekend.
I hope reading this has inspired you to invest in a sunrise alarm clock and take the leap of faith into an early morning creative routine.