It’s pretty common for us artists to piece together multiple gigs to make ends meet.  Maybe you teach in a school or after-school program. Or, you teach private lessons in your home studio in between a restaurant and a babysitting gig.  Maybe you’re a performing songwriter, orchestra pit musician, church choir director or run an after-school musical theater program.

It’s also common for these gigs to pay poorly in order to earn enough money to live on, we end up working crazy hours.

Long hours and gigs that require a lot of energy can leave us completely drained of our creative energy.

For years, I taught 6 days a week at a Sunday school, K-8 school, a vacation camp program, summer camp, private lessons and evening classes for adults.  Somewhere in there, I managed to play some gigs.

After not writing a song for two years (!!), my husband and I went on our first vacation in forever.

We spent the week imitating domesticated pets: napping made us really tired, so we had to rest. That made us hungry, so we needed snacks, followed by sleeping and practicing our passive solar energy collection.

And when we got home, I wrote a song.  When it was done, I wept with relief because I'd been terrified that I had nothing left, that I'd never write a song again.

Since then, I've been more mindful about scheduling downtime.

It’s often uncomfortable scheduling dedicated time in our weekly schedule for creative work.  How many times have you set the intention to write or learn a new song, just for fun only to allow outside demands to take up the time you’d allotted to do it?

Here are some strategies I use that I hope will be helpful to you:

1. Schedule dates for creative work. Guard it with your life. 
2. Notice how often you want to schedule other things in that space, acknowledge the feelings, then choose not to participate in them.
3. Make plans to text a trusted friend just before you begin your date with yourself, and after you’re done.
4. Forgive yourself for wanting to avoid this date you’ve made with yourself.  The feelings are normal and you can always choose to do it anyway. If you stand yourself up, take a deep breath and schedule a 'do-over'.  Remember, if we said to our friends the things we say to ourselves, we wouldn't have any friends 😎.
5. Keep it small and manageable - start with 30 minutes. If you have time and feel like it, let your date go longer.  Remember that it's not a moral issue: if you spend more time on your date, it doesn't make you a better person.
6. Treat this time like you would if you had plans with your favorite person in the whole world.  You wouldn't interrupt time with them to do the dishes, check Facebook or start your laundry.  It would hurt their feelings, and you wouldn't do that to yourself because you'd want to be totally present while you're with them.  Treat yourself this way.
7. If the terrorist committee convenes rent-free in your brain, acknowledge them and say, "Thank you for sharing, I've called you an Uber". Then gently bring your attention back to whatever you want to focus your attention on. Rinse, repeat.
8. Act your way into feeling vs. the other way around.  If you keep showing up for personal creative time, your feelings will catch up.

Sound good? Schedule a date with yourself this coming week and enjoy!

p.s. I was the music director at Camp Grossman for 10 years, and it was one of my fav gigs ever.  Check out some sweet feedback from the mom of a camper, Molly, about me singing Joni Mitchell's song, Circle Game during unit music time (also from some of my fab colleagues in the comments):