Creative Work Rhythms: What’s Working for Us Right Now (and What Flopped)
This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 95. You can listen in here!
Every six months or so, we pull back the curtain and give you a real, unfiltered look at how we’re actually working — not the aspirational version, but the one that includes the failed experiments, the happy accidents, and the things we’re still figuring out. We did this back in Episode 84, and so much has shifted since then that it felt like time to do it again.
The thesis is simple: life changes, and so do our rhythms. If you’ve been feeling guilty that your “system” doesn’t look the same as it did last year, this one’s for you.
Our Current Schedules (Summer Edition)
Sandy’s Rhythm
Sandy is officially on her summer schedule as of June 1 — which means the whole day runs in reverse compared to cooler months. Florida heat indices pushing past 100 degrees and afternoon thunderstorms mean she has to get outside early, so exercise comes first, then creative work. It’s not her preference, but it works.
After prayer time and a morning workout, she settles into a two-to-three hour creative block — what she calls her Morning Creative Block — while her brain is still fresh. Mondays through Wednesdays, those hours go toward bigger writing projects and Substack essays. Afternoons shift into admin mode: editing the podcast, responding to messages, and handling coaching. Thursdays and Fridays are camera days — all the podcast recordings, coaching calls, and guest interviews happen then. Wednesdays sometimes turn into full deep work days, often at the library, away from the pull of home distractions.
Mary K.’s Rhythm
Mary K.’s summer looks a little different. She’s up at 5:30, spends time with Jesus, and dives straight into editing for at least two hours before the day really begins. After that, she’s present with her kids — breakfast, dog walks, adventures — with a second work window showing up late in the afternoon while everyone winds down from the heat.
That schedule means she’s had to cap the client work she takes on, which has pushed her editing bookings out into August and September. She’s lost a few potential clients over it. But the alternative — packing in more work and spending all summer stressed — isn’t the trade-off she’s willing to make.
The Best Decision We Made This Year: Voxer Office Hours
If we were handing out awards for the single change that made the biggest difference in spring 2026, updating our Voxer Office Hours policy would win by a landslide.
We do a lot of coaching on Voxer — with students in The Course, our Coaching Club participants, our intern, our podcasting mastermind, and each other. It’s also how Sandy stays connected with her husband (who travels extensively for work) and her daughter at college. Somewhere along the way, Voxer began to consume everything.
The breaking point came for Sandy in February while she was working remotely from Oregon. On Pacific Time, she’d open her phone mid-morning to find thirty to fifty unlistened messages, many of them ten to fifteen minutes long.
For Mary K., the realization was slower — and, honestly, she might not have identified Voxer as the problem on her own. What she knew was that she’d been living right at the edge of her capacity for too many months, and something had to give. The conversation that finally cracked it open was a planning discussion about the fall. We’d set some ambitious goals at our annual workcation the summer before, and as they drew closer, they felt less like a fun challenge and more like instanity. When Mary K. simply said she thought we shouldn’t offer a fall course cohort, Sandy’s response was immediate: she did not see that coming.
But that honest moment opened the door to a real conversation about where the pressure was actually coming from — and Voxer kept coming up.
The fix was surprisingly simple: establish office hours. Rather than being available all day, we each take a dedicated one-hour window per day for coaching responses. Students know exactly when we’ll be there. We show up, answer everything, and then we step away.
What we didn’t expect was how much our students loved it too. They’d apparently also been feeling buried under the constant stream of messages. The structure gave everyone permission to breathe. And as a bonus, the messages they send us now are more focused and concise — which makes the whole system work better for all of us.
Creating a boundary turned out to be a gift, not just to ourselves, but to the people we serve. It’s a pattern we keep seeing in this work: the limits we set for ourselves tend to give others permission to do the same.
The Planner Saga
We bought the same gorgeous planner at the same time, on impulse, and we were absolutely giddy about it. Color-coded blocks, beautiful markers, space for dreams and goals — it felt like the planning system we’d been waiting for.
Until we started to use it.
Sandy’s trouble was structural. After more than two decades of early alarms and school-schedule mornings, she no longer wakes up at the same time every day. Some mornings it’s six, some it’s eight. When you’ve pre-colored your time blocks starting at 7 a.m. and your day starts at 8:15 instead, your planner is already wrong — and you can’t erase permanent marker. After 11 weeks, she finally gave herself permission to let it go. She went back to her Google Docs, her wall calendar, and the custom planner pages she designed herself in Canva, now printed and living in a beautiful new three-ring binder.
Mary K.’s story has a different ending. Her breakthrough came from one small discovery: erasable colored pencils in exactly the right shades. Once she could change her blocks without the permanence problem, the system clicked. Every Sunday she maps out the week — every to-do gets a slot, even small ones, with a 30-minute minimum. What she’s found is that the visual layout reveals something important: most weeks, there’s more room than she feared. The panic of a full to-do list softens when she can see it spread across actual time.
The planner debate also surfaced something worth naming. We’ve talked for years about the difference between a Maker’s Schedule — long uninterrupted blocks for deep creative work — and a Manager’s Schedule, built on shorter intervals and frequent task-switching. Sandy is a Maker through and through; the 30-minute block structure of this planner fought against how her brain works. Mary K., meanwhile, realized she’s been resisting the Manager label for years because she’s a writer, and writers are supposed to be creative. But her work is also deeply editorial, and the more she leans into that, the more she finds that a manager’s rhythm actually fits. Two different people. Two different planners. Both finally working.
The Small Changes Worth Mentioning
Sandy has started using a beautiful matchbook to light a candle at the start of her writing blocks — a small ritual she wrote about in a recent newsletter. Several of you wrote back to say you’d started doing the same. There’s something about the act of striking a match that marks the moment, signals the shift. Simple, lovely, and apparently contagious.
Mary K. is navigating a different kind of small-but-not-really-small change: her longtime house cleaner retired, and after some deliberation, she and her husband decided not to replace her. Instead, she broke the house into sections that each take ten to fifteen minutes to clean and created a two-week rotation, with Saturdays reserved for the bigger tasks — and the whole family pitching in. Was there wailing and gnashing of teeth at first? Yes. Is everyone (mostly) on board after four months? Also yes.
What We’re Taking Into the Next Season
The through-line in all of this is that rhythms are living things. They need to be revisited, questioned, and sometimes scrapped entirely. What felt dreamy at a beachside workcation might look like chaos six months later — and that’s okay. It’s information, not failure.
We’ll do this again in another season, because by then something will have shifted again. So goes the creative life!
This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.
