Coming back to my blog after a babymoon, I thought it would be interesting to touch on a topic that has been prominent in my mind, and something that I know many people struggle with: how to manage a job, a family, and personal time for creative expression.
Most people have a 9 to 5 day job (if they’re lucky; for many folks, it’s longer). Then, if they can muster the energy, they carve time out for their personal projects around their bumpers of sleep. Be it late in the evening or early in the morning they must preserve a time for creativity.
For me, as a new father to an infant, my world has suddenly dramatically shifted from focusing on my own personal projects to ‘how much sleep can I recoup‘ or ‘when can I have a walk with my wife alone’. My energy and inspiration has gone through a dramatic reality check and I’ve had to evolve my discipline and schedule to meet the challenges of managing a baby. Simultaneously, as all parents know, I’ve been exposed to a new level of inspiration and love that has pushed me further to create.
To help myself try to balance everything, I created an ideal schedule to serve as a starting point, a foundation to help keep my work-life balance in order.
Schedule Foundation
While this schedule may be my ideal, reality has forced me to move things around. For example, I’ve recently been shuffling my professional networking and social time to adapt to the baby’s sleep schedule. While it used to be on Tuesday evenings, recently, I try to schedule this time over lunch, or on a night when my wife has more flexibility in time to take care of our daughter. However, in moving one activity, I try not to steal time from another. So, if I need to have 2 or 3 networking or social events in one week, I then need to be accountable for the time that I didn’t have with my family and I have to shift time the following week to balance out the month.
Schedule Reality
Currently, with my new fatherhood responsibilities, my biggest challenge has been managing my lack of sleep. While this exhaustion has made getting up early to exercise or carving out time for writing difficult, having a foundation schedule has helped me keep reasonable short term goals. And now, as my daughter is getting a little older and settling into a routine, hopefully I will be able to as well.
Most importantly, despite my creative world being turned upside down, I’ve got one of the most inspiring little creatures at my fingertips now!
There are several ways to plan writing a story as a First Draft. Some people have a clear idea of what tale they want to spin, they write it, and then they find a way to publish it. Other writers start by testing their market, and then writing a story to reach their specific target audience. In my case, I am pursuing a hydrid approach- we’ll see how it works… I’m still trying to figure out the right balance.
Today, most people have very little time or patience to deal with sub-par storytelling. I’m constantly reminding my friends and colleagues that web browsers are not the only reading devices with a back button; tablets have them too. The back button has become the new trash can. It’s easy to delete a downloaded digital book that doesn’t connect to you, thus freeing up your time for something more interesting.
For the last year and a half, I’ve been working on a book tentatively entitled The Heir to the Unexpected. This project has turned out to take a little longer than expected! While working on this project, I met and married my wife, have traveled around home and abroad, and have maintained my day job. During this process, my book began to change with me along the way. Sometimes it was more prominent in my day-to-day activities, and sometimes it was placed in the background as I reflected on life. Recently though, I decided it was time to complete this writing project.
