I’m still thinking obsessively about time—not just how to make more of it, but how to relate to it differently, especially when it comes to creative work.
I’m working on a short book called Making Time. When I started thinking through that project I had a very particular kind of person in mind: someone who feels drawn to their creative work but struggles to stay focused. I was imagining someone with competing demands, a noisy mind, and a deep desire to do their work justice—even when time feels scarce or scattered.
The book offers a structure: four three-hour sessions per week, each with a specific function—sound selection, composition, arrangement, and rough mix. It’s a rhythm designed to be repeated, but not really perfected. And for the right person, it’s a relief. Not a demand, but a direction. Not a claim that structure is necessary for everyone, but a practical field manual for those who need a way back in.
It’s a weekly and monthly system for producing meaningful work, yes. But even when that system is working well, there’s often something else happening underneath—a slower kind of time, harder to define, but no less important.
This slower rhythm is something I’ve been thinking about more since picking up a copy of Hands-on Research for Artists, Designers, Educators from a small bookshop in Glasgow last winter. Published by Set Margins’ Press, it’s part handbook, part pedagogical provocation, and it speaks to the deeper rhythms of practice—what it means to pay attention over time, to dwell with an idea, to learn by doing rather than racing to finish.
Set Margins’ is a publisher that frames creative work as a site of inquiry, resistance, and plural authorship. Their mission supports experimental formats, marginalized voices, and critical design—always in service of something broader than marketable content. They build infrastructure for autonomy, curiosity, and moral individuation. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
Because while Making Time is about building systems for creative output, it’s part of a larger vision I have for Open Studio: to offer tools, frameworks, and support structures that help artists not just make more, but think more deeply—about time, form, process, and participation. I want Open Studio to evolve in this direction: as a platform for thoughtful, critical resources that support the lived experience of being a working artist, producer, or soundmaker today. It is my response to the hyperbrained universe of attention grabbing music tutorial content. I am aiming to create a channel about channeling.
The Creative Cycle
All of this is why I’ve started thinking more about creative time as cyclical. Not just weekly, but seasonal. Not just structured, but lived. And while the timing of each phase may vary, I keep coming back to a recurring pattern: exploratory, input, output, recovery.
Let’s break them down.
1. Exploratory (The Wander Phase)
This is the least linear, most misunderstood phase of creative work. It often feels like “not working,” which makes it incredibly vulnerable to guilt and self-sabotage. But exploration is foundational. It’s the part of the cycle where you reacquaint yourself with instinct—following curiosities, drifting through ideas without trying to frame them.
You might feel like you're wasting time, but you're not. You're building intuitive fluency. You're learning how to hear yourself again after a period of noise, distraction, or exhaustion. This is the part of the process that resists naming. You’re playing with forms, sketching loose ideas, collecting materials, textures, and moods.
It’s hard to trust this phase unless you’ve lived through it enough times to know it always leads somewhere. That trust is part of becoming an artist.
In Hands-on Research, this might be called a kind of “material exploration,” where you're simply making contact with the world. Rick Rubin refers to this part of the process as “receiving”—making yourself open enough to notice what wants to emerge. The mistake here is to force clarity too soon.
The work is starting, even when it doesn’t look like it.
2. Input (The Gathering Phase)
After a period of wandering, most artists crave nourishment. Input is the part of the cycle where you turn outward with intention. You’re still not producing final work, but you’re feeding the system: watching, reading, listening, absorbing.
This is where you refill your well of reference and resonance. Julia Cameron writes about this in terms of the “artist date”—a weekly solo adventure, away from work, designed to awaken your sense of surprise and pleasure. It’s research, but not in the academic sense. It’s about putting yourself in the path of aesthetic and emotional stimulus. Hands-on Research aligns with this phase too, describing it as the part of practice where you're building familiarity with a question or condition—not analyzing it, but dwelling with it.
The danger here is overconsumption—taking in so much you lose the signal of your own intuition. The goal isn’t to become a library; it’s to feel freshly connected. When this phase works well, it leads to new questions, new language, and new internal permissions.
The real signal of this phase isn’t how much you consume, but what it activates in you.
3. Output (The Build Phase)
This is the most visible part of the cycle—the one most people associate with “doing the work.” But what often gets missed is that output is only sustainable because of the previous two phases. Without wandering and gathering, output becomes mechanical. Burnout comes fast.
When you enter this phase, you need structure—not to constrain the work, but to give it a tempo. That’s where Making Time fits in. Its purpose isn’t to make you more productive, per se—it’s to give your creative ambition a weekly rhythm. To help you show up consistently. To help you finish.
I think about this as a interplay between energy and focus. You don’t need to feel inspired—you need to feel anchored. You need to trust that the system will hold you through the middle part of the process, when everything looks uncertain.
Output doesn’t mean perfection. It means progress. This is where projects begin to take shape. Where you make decisions. Where things become real.
Structure lets the work breathe in time. It doesn’t shrink the work—it shelters it.
4. Recovery (The Compost Phase)
This is the part of the cycle we rarely talk about, because it feels like a kind of failure. The work is done (or abandoned), and the energy is gone. You feel emptied out, unsure, maybe even ashamed. Shouldn’t you be onto the next thing already?
But this is the wisdom of compost: it’s quiet, subterranean, and absolutely essential. Recovery is where you process what the work took from you, and what it gave you. It’s where you metabolize feedback, reestablish your identity apart from the project, and return to being a person.
Hands-on Research refers to this kind of temporality as durational and layered—an embodied cycle that includes breakdown and rest, not just output and resolve. This is also where your nervous system gets a vote. You can’t work meaningfully if you never give yourself time to come down.
That said, there’s danger in this phase too. If you don’t mark it intentionally, it can turn into indefinite avoidance. You might convince yourself you're still resting when you're actually avoiding the next beginning.
The key is to make space for stillness without abandoning your creative identity. To let the compost do its work, and to reemerge—eventually—into the next exploratory phase.
Recovery is not the end of the cycle. It’s the precondition for beginning again.
Micro and Macro Rhythms
This cycle can help you navigate a long project or understand where you are after a big release. But it can also work on a smaller scale—across a single day (assuming you have an entire day to devote to creative work).
For example:
Exploratory: A morning walk, no headphones—letting your mind drift.
Input: Reading, listening to music, exploring references.
Output: A focused session in your creative medium.
Recovery: Something joyful and unrelated—ideally social, embodied, or restorative.
Working this way doesn’t guarantee results, but it does honor the natural ebb and flow of creative energy. It gives you permission to shift gears, without losing momentum entirely.
Where are you right now in the cycle?
And what would it look like to work with that time, instead of fighting against it?
As Open Studio grows, I hope to offer more resources like this—tools that support not just creative output, but creative life. Not just how to finish things, but how to live with them. How to return, with care and clarity, to the next beginning.
Thank you for reading.