How to Build a Sustainable Creative Practice

Building a creative practice that actually works with your schedule and lifestyle.

This is part of the Well-Designed Life series, a framework for creating & inhabiting your dream life. Think of this as a field guide for self-discovery, style excavation, and living with intentionality, creativity, and joy.

If you ask most people what their goals are, I guarantee time and time again, the phrase that comes up is something like: “I want to be more creative” or “I want to get back to crafting or creating art or sewing or whatever.”

Since you’re here, I’m going to assume you fall into the creative or creative-adjacent profile. Maybe you consistently do craft projects and create things that make you feel fulfilled. But most likely, if you’re anything like me, you loved taking art classes in school. You’ve dabbled in a ton of different hobbies and crafts. You’ve got piles of unfinished (or unstarted) projects lying around in your house. But without fail, if you try to make something, you feel stumped. Creatively blocked. Unsure how to proceed. And you end up doomscrolling on your phone again.

Or maybe you have all these grand ideas, but end up scrolling Pinterest and blogs to gather inspiration… until you realize you’ve spent three hours thinking about this project without actually doing anything about it, but you’re exhausted mentally now and just call it a day.

Or, then again, maybe you successfully create stuff all the time. So much so that friends and family are always asking you to make stuff for them. Or hey, why don’t you sell them on Etsy and make a few bucks? You could try local craft fairs too! And suddenly, your nice relaxing creative outlet is a side hustle that has sucked all the fun right out of the endeavor.

Sound familiar? I’ve been there. For, like, a decade. Between creative dry spells, forcing everything into a side hustle, turning one of those creative side hustles into my full-time job and then burning out spectacularly… I’ve seen it all.

And in the past couple of years, I’ve been slowly restructuring my relationship to creativity. Busting myths I’ve believed for years (such as waiting for inspiration to strike). Figuring out how to build a practice that is sustainable and realistic to my actual lifestyle, not some imaginary life where I spend endless stretches of time painting in a sunny garden studio.

So, if you’ve felt creatively burnt out, overwhelmed by inspiration, and unsure where to start—this post is for you.

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In this issue…

• What actually counts as a creative practice.

• The difference between waiting for inspiration to strike and building the infrastructure that lets you be creative on demand.

• What resistance and perfectionism are actually protecting you from.

• Permission to make bad things on purpose (in fact, I’m begging you to!)

• How any of this fits into a schedule that’s already full.