You don’t have to do everything all at once, overnight. You don’t need to build a self sustaining business in a year. If you haven’t reached a goal you have in mind yet, that’s fine, as long as you maintain progress over time. Sometimes it’s easy to rush or worry that you aren’t working hard enough, but as long as you maintain productivity, your effort can accumulate. Keeping a healthy routine, or some sort of a schedule, helps this. If you create a routine that gives structure to your days and weeks, you can build productive things into the extra space.

You likely already have some sort of schedule from work. If you’re a freelancer, maybe you don’t. If you have a traditional job with regular hours, then your creative time can be when you have free time around those hours. If you’re a freelancer, you may have to do some structuring in order to build personal creative time into your day to day life.

If you freelance, start with waking up at a set time every day if you don’t already. Decide to cook food for yourself more, if that’s not something you already do. Figure out a way to incorporate exercise into your week, even if you just go for a walk. Maintaining a routine that’s based around these things can give structure to your day, where you can then find new creative time.

Keeping a routine can help unlock new time to work on creative pursuits, build businesses or otherwise work on self development. You don’t necessarily have to keep a rigid schedule either, maybe you like operating at set times, figure out what works for you. Think of a handful of things to start at your routine, either daily or weekly. Don’t stress about missing days. Once you find what works for you, keep at it, and your routine will become second nature.