(Photo by Steven Salazar)

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I had the privilege of attending a creative conference called Creative South.

All week leading up to the conference I felt anxious and a little overwhelmed, because there was still so much writing work to do, and I could not see how I could possibly get it all done when we were traveling one whole day, so that was a day lost, and we would be meeting people from our creative community another day, and that would be a whole other day lost, and we were going to be tied up in sessions for two whole days after that.

I’d look at my to-do list and everything that needed finishing, and I would get a sinking feeling in my stomach.

And then we spent 18 hours in the car brainstorming topics for the podcast my husband and I will be launching May 7. We brainstormed courses we want to develop about real-life parenting. We brainstormed a marriage book I plan to start writing later this year.

We spent several hours in Georgia coffee shops meeting face-to-face with people in our online community and digging right in to deep, challenging conversations and making new friends.

We spent days in sessions on creative strategies and building platforms.

My to-do list sat neglected, but do you know what?

I came away with so many new ideas for topics and projects and wisdom about how to do things that I finally just had to cut those ideas off (not really. I never cut ideas off. I have a brainstorm binder that’s just a lot thicker now.).

What I’ve found is true in my life is that sometimes we have to step away from our idea of the way things should go so we can embrace a better way we didn’t even know we needed.

There is a point in every creative life when we have been working for so long and in the same environment with the same amount of time and the same people and the same challenges that we become, maybe just a little bit, stale.

Sometimes it takes getting out of the normal routine to find new life in our old creations.

Routine is helpful in the life of a creative. It gives us specific, consistent time in which to create. Every day. Without exception.

But throwing out the routine, every once in a while, is also helpful in the life of a creative. It invigorates our creativity so we can push through to the finish or just remember why we started doing it in the first place.

Julia Cameron, one of the best teachers on creativity, calls these getting-off-routine blocks of time “Artist Dates.” She recommends that artists take one a week.

It doesn’t always have to look like a weekend conference. It can look like a 30-minute break where we get outside our house and see other human faces, besides the ones we see every day, and hear other voices and observe new beauty.

Being a creative can be a lonely life. As a writer, I hole myself away for hours at a time, just working on my craft. Sometimes, if my kids don’t barge in right after school to say hello, I can spend that whole five hour without any human contact whatsoever.

It’s good for me to get out once in a while. It’s good for me to sit beside my husband for an uninterrupted road trip and brainstorm what we’re passionate about. It’s good for me to meet new people and hear new stories and share in new experiences.

The out-of-the-ordinary informs our art just as much as our ordinary.

At the end of our trip, my husband and I had 77 podcast episodes, the beginnings of a new sci-fi novel, a dozen article topics and more. I edited a book, wrote on another novel and wrote fifteen poems.

My to-do list wouldn’t even know what to do with productivity like that.

Sometimes a to-do list can be filled with all the exact right things when we take time away from it.

After all, the unexpected can hold some of our greatest inspiration.

Challenge: Try an Artist Date this week. Take a walk. Visit a bookstore. Have coffee with a friend. Don’t think of it as work time you’re giving up but as time you’re using to inform your work. Our mental shifts can set us up for new perspectives, which, in my experience, is always a win.