Taking on other’s work as a Rescuer gave me a temporary rush of purpose and service followed by lots of guilt, worry, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. What it never did was give them the tools to engage in more effective behaviors, or change how they worked or prioritized tasks, or even how to make more value aligned choices.

Routines can give you back your sanity, time, and spaciousness for your creativity. And even more than that, routines train your brain - when you have a creative routine you are prepping your neural pathways for the work. Creativity needs the support of some variation of routine and discipline/commitment.

The topic of practices to unblock creativity is closely tied to the previous one on creative rest and to the next one on routines. I’m a big fan of framing activities - especially the ones on this list - as practices because every day and time will be different based on mood, energy, context, time, space and more.