This blogging adventure began with the encouragement to find time and make space to create. Here we addressed the figurative space held just for your creative pursuits, which are so easily lost to the hustle and bustle of daily life.
Physical space is important, too!
In this series, your friendly neighbourhood bean counter explores the spaces in which our fellow creatives work and play, from office to home, paper to digital.
(I’m also just trying something new blog-wise and wondering whether making a “series” will help me focus and be more succinct. Wish me luck!)
The Significance of Space
I started thinking a lot about physical spaces in anticipation of a return to work after a number of years switching between working from home and being on maternity leaves.
I like to think the physical space we give ourselves speaks volumes about the figurative space we give ourselves.
Dedicated spaces set up to perform certain work, whether the kind covered in a job-description or the just-for-fun kind, invite your energy there. They work on intention. A dedicated space will help you get into the best mindset for that work. Once you’re in it, that space keeps you focused, signaling to the outside world (literally or figuratively) that I’m working.
Setting up a dedicated space for your work also reminds you that whatever it is you’re doing in there is important.
What you put in that space helps to form your relationship with the work. Add enough cozy personal effects to your office space, and the office starts to feel a bit like home (making your employer feel like family, for better or for worse). Add the stuff that inspires you, and embrace your individuality.
Then there’s the ways in which we work. Keep it minimal for efficiency and clear, logical, result-based work. Add interesting pieces for dreaming, ideation, and inspired outside-the-box thinking.
With this in mind, before I got back to business this time around I made a couple significant changes:
- I rearranged my home workspace and creative space so that they were, for the first time, separate and distinct.
- I switched to a digital organizational system after ten years in physical bullet journals.
Underlying these changes was exactly what I’ve spent so much time writing about: a major reprioritization of my creative practice rooted in the commitment to find time and make space to create.
Series Post Roundup
I’ll update this space as the series progresses!
Since this is technically the first post, here’s a teaser of the next post to come:
