Don’t feel like working today?

Today, I didn’t want to write.

My morning pages — the three pages I write every day in my journal, first thing — are a chorus of complaint. I didn’t sleep well. I have a cold coming on. I have an early Pilates class, and a to-do list much longer than the day. “I just don’t feel like working today,” I write, wrapping myself in the cold, damp cloak of the victim.

Yet even as I’m sipping my coffee and scribbling this all down, my mood starts to lift. I’m being absurd, I realise. Nothing on the to-list is really urgent. I always feel good after the class. And while I’m town, I can pick up zinc supplements and grapefruit to help fight off the cold. Life is not so bad.

This is the point of morning pages, and why it’s worth doing them every day. It’s a 20-minute warm up, to get the complaints, the to-dos, the hopes and dreams out of your head and onto a page, to clear space for your creative work.

Still, after the exercise class I go do some chores, finding things to do that feel more important than sitting down to work. And suddenly, the morning has gone.

After lunch, I still don’t feel like working.

But I go to my desk anyway. Choosing a playlist that I know will make me smile, I dance round the room to T Rex and Bowie while I clear up piles of paperwork, light a candle, quickly check for urgent emails, then quit both my email and my browser.

I change to a quieter, calmer playlist, open a document and begin.

It would be neat to be able to say the writing went well. But it was a hard slog, and I never really got into my rhythm. Very little of what I produced today will end up being used.

Yet I did manage to finally stumble on the solution to something that I’d been snagging on for days. The map has become clear, and I know I’ll be able to pick up and finish what I’m writing relatively easily in the morning, when I come back to the page.

There are no urgent deadlines, so after 90 minutes of concentrated work, I stop. I do some admin, loe down and catch up on some reading, then go for a walk before starting on dinner. It wasn’t the most exciting day.

Yet I still did some writing.

Showing up in this way — even when you really don’t want to — is how you progress in any creative endeavour. It’s how your novel gets written. How a line of melody turns into a song, and then an album. And how you progress from stiff little fingers woodenly picking out a simple tune on piano or guitar to being able to play what you want, fluidly and with feeling. It’s how you paint or sculpt, write scripts or learn lines, become a brilliant cook, a skilled designer, or write code that changes the world.

If you want to know the secret to a life that is creative, full and satisfying, it’s pretty much this. Turn up, every day. And do the work.

So, a checklist for days when you really don’t feel like working:

• Even if you don’t do morning pages as a regular thing, take some time to write down everything that’s cluttering your mind. Have a break, then go over your list, marking anything that is really important, and make a plan for getting it done/solving the problem. Once you trust that you have a system for paying those bills, picking up the shopping items you need, reminding yourself to do the everyday jobs, it frees up bandwidth for the creative work you really want to do.
• Get outside. Move a little. Get some of those niggling jobs done, to give yourself a sense of forward motion. But set a time to start work after that, and stick to it, whether or not your mood has changed, or your inspiration has arrived.
• Play some music if it helps lift your energy, then turn off any distractions, and begin. No more excuses.
• Use a timer. Decide what your minimum commitment will be. And just write. What you produce might be great. But it might also be awful. Don’t judge. The point is to do it, anyway.
• Then stop. Rest. Read. Relax. Get some of those jobs on your list done, if you want to. You’ve kept faith with yourself, you did the work despite that constant force that the writer Steven Pressfield calls resistance. (His book The War of Art is well worth reading if you often end up getting in your own way and struggle to write.)
• Be kind to yourself. Connect with friends or family, have a laugh, do something you really enjoy — and go to bed earlier, if you can. We put off writing for all kinds of reasons. Fear. Perfectionism. Distraction. But simply catching up on your sleep can often turn a bad today into an inspired tomorrow.
• But if you do miss a day or two, no one dies. You haven’t failed. You don’t need to give up. You simply pick up again and begin, gently. This is how a substantial body of work is made: one bit at a time.