We humans are creatures of habit.
There is much we can do without conscious thought. Mundane tasks like making tea, opening doors, brushing our teeth, switching on lights. Once we’ve practiced and developed the skill, we can also do more complex tasks like driving a car or playing a musical instrument without thinking through every action.
Our brains are constantly filtering out small choices, to leave room for bigger decisions. And building brain pathways to enable us to act without using up too much bandwidth.
But when our usual routines are interrupted, it can be hard to get back into flow, that state of mind when we’re at our most productive and creative.
If your days lack structure or you’re about to start a new creative project that will disrupt your usual routines, it’s worth looking at the role ritual can play.
Everyday rituals
If you go out to work every day, you already have rituals around this, even if you aren’t aware of them.
You get up, and probably have some sort of routine to get you and your family out on time. You have the journey to work. Perhaps this also involves little rituals like picking up a coffee, lunch or a newspaper from the same shop en route.
Once at work, you might have rituals like making tea, or going to the water cooler to move you from one task to the next. You almost certainly have a lunchtime routine of some sort. Even if it’s an unhealthy one like eating a sandwich at your desk while working.
After work you have the journey home to decompress, and shift gears. And perhaps a little ritual of hanging your coat and kicking off your shoes at the front door, to help you switch from your work self back to parent, partner, friend or flat-mate.
Your job is to recognise these, see if they still serve you well – and see if you can introduce a little more magic, fun or nurturing into your daily rituals.
Ritual for creative flow
If you’re self-employed and your days don’t have a defined shape, ritual can help create structure. When you work from home, it’s easy for the days to blur into one. If you don’t work set hours, you never really stop, and relax.
This is where ritual comes in. Habits and routines tend to get ingrained without too much deliberate thought. Rituals can be a way of sprinkling a little fairy dust. They make the mundane more magical.
We can consciously invent new ones, when we need them: to give our working day structure, to get into flow, to get what we need when our normal routines are disrupted by a creative project.
Here are some ideas to get started.
Rituals for beginning the day
Get up at the same time when possible. Get dressed, even if no one can see you. You might even make a packed lunch in the morning, to avoid having to make decisions about it later.
Instead of the commute, you could take a brisk walk to prepare your mind and body to get down to work.

I find the tech bros tedious and slightly comical, boasting on social media about getting up at 3am for cold showers, gym workouts, meditation and improving reading of Stoic philosophy. But you do you. If that kind of morning routine works for you, go for it.
For the rest of us, a wake-up/get to work routine might be gentler. Perhaps it’s 10 minutes of meditation or reading before work. A few yoga stretches. Or a daily dance around the kitchen with your kids. Whatever feels energising, fun, and gets you into the mood.
Then create rituals around actually starting work.
For me, this means putting on the same playlist while I tidy up my study, and wipe down my desk with a few drops of grapefruit oil. I take a few minutes to check my calendar, and choose the three tasks I want to prioritise that day.
I have a quick stretch before turning my computer on and my email off. Then I take five long, deep breaths and I begin to write. The first hour of my working day is almost always about writing; the rest of my day goes better if I pay myself first, and done the thing that makes me more.. me.
Taking the decision-making out of it and having that short ritual primes me to just start typing, even on days when I’m not feeling it, or I’m not sure what to write.
A shutdown ritual when work is done
This is crucial, especially if you work from home. Unless you set boundaries, it’s easy for the working day continue into evening, while you check your email and messages, and do just one more thing. And then perhaps another. With a bit of scrolling social media in between, or watching clips on YouTube.
You’re not really working – but you’re not fully present or relaxing, either. It’s not fair on you, your family or your friends. It’s not even very productive. We see what needs to be done much more clearly when we take a break.

So choose what time you are going to finish work, and stick to that as much as you can. When you’re done, have a simple shut-down ritual to help you make that emotional shift.
I have an upbeat playlist I put on loud while I clear my desk. That’s a signal to my family that it’s OK to come in now, if they need me. If there’s anything I need to remember for tomorrow, I add it to my task list. I might also quickly jot down some bullet points, thoughts on whatever I want to write the following morning.
Then I do some quick stretches, and perhaps have a dance round my study to shake off the day. I shut down my computer, to make it slightly harder to pop back later to do one quick thing that turns into a couple of hours more.
If I can, I often go for a quick walk to clear my head, before joining my family. Sometimes we go together, to catch up on our day.
Rituals for creative projects
As a coach, I often help clients to create rituals to support them through a new project. This could be a book, an album, a tour, an art show or a film. It might be a play or some other kind of live performance, or a gruelling promotional push.
Performers often have rituals before they go onstage, from vocal/physical warmups to mantras and prayers. Yet they can forget to create do the same afterwards, when the applause has died down.
Alcohol, drugs, and casual sex can recreate the buzz of being onstage, in front of an appreciative audience. And that can be fun for a while. But it’s not healthy or sustainable, long-term.
So if you perform regularly, you probably want some sort of grounding ritual to let go of the adrenalin, the person you need to be onstage, and come back to yourself. Try hugging yourself tightly, or literally shaking off your stage persona (many animals do this to let go of stress). Perhaps take some deep breaths, do some cool-down exercises: whatever works for you.
Even if you don’t perform regularly, there are meetings, presentations and pitches, times when we have to be ‘on’, to command attention, hold the space and expand into a bigger version of ourselves. Ritual can help with this.
Routine and ritual help get us into flow.
Flow is that state where time flies, because we’re utterly absorbed in our work and at our most productive. If we can get into this state quickly, we get more done, more enjoyably, in less time.
These rituals don’t have to be long, or complicated. It can be as simple as putting on a specific playlist. Taking some deep breaths. Wearing headphones so your house-mates know you’re now ‘at work’. Moving to the other side of the kitchen table from where you eat, to tell your brain it’s now time to begin work.
I once worked with an artist who chose to create a ‘commute’ to and from his art studio, to help him separate work from the rest of his life. Which was challenging, as he works in a shed, just a few steps from his kitchen window.
He walks slowly round his tiny back yard at least ten times in a clockwise direction at the start of the day. Then ten times anti-clockwise “to unwind” when work is done.
He says this simple routine helps him focus more intensely on his painting while he’s working. And then to let it go, and not have it on his mind during family time.
As examples of how ritual can get you into flow, let’s consider how two successful music artists each recorded their albums.
Florence + The Machine
For two of Florence Welch’s albums as Florence + The Machine, I’ve written the artist biography that goes out to the press. As she’s usually just finished the album at that point, we tend to talk a lot about her process.

For her 2018 album, High As Hope, many of the songs were started in New York, at the end of a long tour. They were eventually finished in Los Angeles, where most of the session musicians were added and the final mixes completed. In between, Welch went home to Camberwell, in South London.
After a long period on the road, she says structure and routine were important while she worked on the new songs. She exercised by cycling between home and studio, following the same route each trip. She kept the same work hours, and had a set routine at home, too.
“I went into a small room every day, on my own with just a very patient engineer. And I spent six months banging on a piano, hitting on the walls. I found the joy in it again, the joy of just making a sound – even if it’s just one note. And the excitement of that.
“I work in fast bursts, so I’d work in the studio from 2-6pm, with no break. Then I’d have to get out of there. So I’d cycle home, where I had a really structured life. It was all about the pleasure I was getting from making stuff, working on my own and being able to totally consolidate a vision.”
Her cycle route to and from the studio took her past the hospital where she was born. The student pub where all the parties happened at her art school. The museum where she and her friends once climbed onto the roof. And other landmarks she’d known her entire life.
Unsurprisingly, songs she’d begun in New York evolved to become more about this part of London, about re-examining her teenage years, seeing the mistakes but also the joys. So the routines and rituals she created to support her also shaped the music she made.
Bat For Lashes
Natasha Khan, aka Bat for Lashes, prefers to break recording into intense chunks. For each new album, she tends to create a world around herself and her collaborators.
“It’s a gradual layering process. So over a year, you might have four or five different recording sessions and it builds up,” she told me in an interview for The Gentlewoman in 2016. “That feels manageable. Trying to do it all in six weeks would overwhelm me.”

She recorded the central part of her 2016 album The Bride in Woodstock, in upstate New York. She and her co-producer Simon Felice found an isolated house in the woods, where Felice created a makeshift studio. “It was perfect,” Khan says of the setting, “with Twin Peaks windy roads and pine forests, fog and the blue Catskill mountains. And old wooden houses with porches and swing chairs.
“We had a big roaring fire with all the beautiful wood we collected that smelt like pine resin. There were deer in the woodland around the house. And people just came up the mountain and performed.
“We created this sacred-feeling space, and we were living and eating and breathing it. We’d have dinner together, we’d make music and talk, and do yoga in the morning. It was a bit of an idyllic existence.”
Felice later told me how inspiring he found it to work this way. “Natasha would stand by her sacred pine tree, walk in the woods and listen to the whispers of Mother Nature, and the muses.
“For me it was just a joy to be there together, up in the woods. All the elements: from waking up as the sun came up to yoga and meditation, then a walk along the creek; to the evening, drinking a little tequila and listening to Peter Gabriel. It all led up to this intense two or three hours of recording.
“Natasha burns really brightly, and strongly. A lot of artists want to work say from noon to nine in the evening. But with her it was more about all the rituals that she would do to lead up to these really powerful, special moments of incandescent brightness and creativity. That was really special.”
These are examples, from two successful and talented artists who chose to do their creative work in their own way, respecting their own rhythms. And they had the resources to make it so. But there’s a lot we can learn from it.
My creative rituals
I choose to block my day into chunks of different tasks – writing, coaching, admin, planning, for instance – each with their own playlists, and very simple, short rituals to move me from one to another.
Structuring my days in this way gives me focus, and saves me constantly wasting energy by switching from task to task. It’s not rigid, or restricting: if something comes up, it’s easy to move a block to another part of the week.
These little rituals get me quickly into the mood. Lighting a candle. Cleaning my desk. Getting a glass of water as I switch from one block to another. Playing banging techno (this makes filing and emails a joy for me), or an ambient soundtrack from mynoise.net for writing.
Your rituals and routines will be different, of course. But that’s the magic. We all get to decide what works best for us, to do our best work.
What do you think?