The Time We Think We Have or Need or Don’t

On time pressures, notions and noticing the gap between how we use time and how we want to.

April, the first full month of a new season. The clocks have moved forward, the days are stretching out, and there’s a quiet sense that we’re at a new beginning.

But spring rarely arrives all at once. Where I live, it comes in fits and starts. A few warm days, then a return to freezing temperatures, snow, and ice. Often, it’s well into May before we see the warmth and new life we expect.

Experiencing this in real time and some recent coaching conversations has me thinking about our relation with time as artists and creatives. How easily we cling to ideas about how quickly things should happen, much time we spend diverted or avoiding. How quickly we absorb pressures about what we can accomplish in a given stretch of time.

A new season is an invitation to pause and reset our relationship with our creative work and with time itself.

Almost every creative I work with carries a heavy, constant pressure about time. I hear things like, “I should use my time more efficiently,” or “This should take less time,” “I should be further ahead at this stage” and “I need a full day, week, or longer of uninterrupted hours to do meaningful work.” Or, “I don’t have time for my important projects because of all of the other demands on my time.”

I’ve been there too—assuming I should be able to create social posts in minutes, write an article in an hour, or that I need to wait until I have a two-hour chunk or half a day to even start a project. Agreeing to conflicting deadlines. Holding these expectations often leads to procrastination, feeling behind, and the added weight of thinking we’ve failed to manage our time.

I’d just like to pose that some of these expectations are really just notions. Ideas that don’t properly reflect the reality of our creative work, lives, the time things truly take or our personal capacities. These ideas come from past versions of ourselves (hello recovering type A personalities like myself!), from comparison to other people’s workflows and often idealized versions of creative work and life. The truth is that creative work is often slower, messier and more fragmented than we admit. When we stop to question these expectations we have about time, we open the door to considering reality and resetting how we relate to, plan and make use of our time as artists and creatives.

Over time, we often realize it isn’t just about time—it’s about alignment. It’s not always that we don’t have time. It’s that the time we have doesn’t reflect what matters to us. This shows up when we feel frustration, guilt and even disconnection from the projects or types of creative work that we want to be doing. Reconnecting with priorities and goals is often the first step toward reshaping how time is structured and used.

As we move into this new season, it’s worth asking what time we actually have over the next few months. What’s already committed? What truly matters for our growth right now? What capacity and constraints are real in this season? And what time is genuinely available to us—not ideally, but honestly? Taking a moment to get clear on this can shift more than we expect.

In the spirit of a spring reset, let’s start with getting more honest about time. The time we think we have, the time we assume we need, the time we actually need to do good work and feel good about doing it and the time that actually exists in our lives right now. From there, we can begin to question our expectations and consider what might need to change to build a more honest rhythm in our creative work and lives..

 Where are we overestimating or underestimating the time we need?

What expectations are we carrying about how much we can do

in a given period of time?

Where does our time feel misaligned with what matters most?

Later in the Month — For Paid Subscribers 

We’ll look closely at both the internal shifts and the practical adjustments involved in resetting our relationship with time.

In the meantime you might want to check out this related older post Making Time and Space to Do Our Work as Creative Professionals

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