I’ve written before about the importance of creating a box for ourselves.

Creatives need the box, because they need routine, a rhythm that invites creativity in, every single day.

So every morning I wake up at the same time, and I engage in the same rhythm.

1. Write
2. Read
3. Meditate

Writing first thing in the morning is something I picked up from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and I’ve been doing it since the new year. Cameron calls what’s written “morning pages,” and they’re a way to unleash all that’s cramping up our minds so we are freer to create.

The first few morning page practices I did, my pages filled with mostly mundane things, like how I needed to pay the water bill today because I forgot to pay last month and how the kids really wore me out yesterday and how I am so done with this pregnancy.

But now that I’ve had three weeks to settle into them, I’ve found some deeper thoughts and truths coming out—dreams I had that will make great stories, ideas for essays, what might really be going on behind my needs-a-clean-house-to-function neurosis.

I’ve found myself writing words that may, someday, make it into final drafts.

This is valuable.

After my morning ritual, it’s time to get kids ready for school and hang out with the younger ones who don’t yet go to school, and then it’s lunchtime and story time and nap time. The few hours between school-leaving and when my husband takes over kid-duty are spent in productive ways—watching kids play (or playing with them), making notes about writing ideas, reading poetry aloud so they’ll learn to appreciate the power of words, too.

And then, once naptime rolls around and my boys have been moved into their separate spaces and the kitchen is cleaned of its lunch prints, my afternoon schedule begins.

1. Work out
2. Read
3. Write rough drafts
4. Write final drafts
5. Revise other projects
6. Read again

I bookend my hours of writing and revising with reading, because I believe that just like writing practice makes us better writers, so does reading.

A writer who doesn’t read will never reach her full potential.

I follow this schedule every weekday, with a few exceptions for special school programs or doctor appointments.

Weekends, though, have challenged me.

Most of the time, we stay up later the night before, because we know we don’t have any “real” reason to get up early, since kids don’t have to go to school. And then we’ll sleep until we hear the boys moving around.

The key to establishing a weekend routine, when you have children, is to get up before them, since anything you do while they’re awake takes twice as long.

Last weekend I slept too late both days, so I took my morning pages in the car, because we were traveling, and it took me an hour to do the recommended three pages of writing, where normally it only takes twenty or thirty minutes, because kids were so noisy and wild and my husband kept forgetting I was trying to concentrate and would talk, too.

And maybe that’s okay. Because it’s the weekend.

Weekends make me glad I have my week routines, since I feel irritable and unproductive when that routine looks more like out of control than orderly.

Productivity needs a box.

Some think routine is an enemy to creativity. But in my life, routine is the only way I can create on a consistent basis.

So I will keep leaning into my routine, and I will keep producing.

How about you? Do you have a daily routine? What does your routine look like? How do you feel when you get off routine?