If you’ve made it to the Year of Our Lord 2025 and haven’t yet read Atomic Habits, I’m not sure whether to congratulate you or chastise you. I’m aware of the current Cool Girl Trend to lightly make fun those of us who dabble in the self-help genre, so I’m reticent to admit that after reading Atomic Habits in 2022, I told my Instagram followers that it may have changed my life. But I have to be honest: James Clear’s 320-page guide encouraged me to prioritize my creative life right alongside my professional one.1 And that’s exactly what I needed.
Not insignficant for why Atomic Habits tangibly affected my personal, creative, and—fine—professional life is that it introduced me to the concept of “habit stacking.” Habit stacking, which Clear did not invent but did help to popularize, is grounded in the theory that we are more likely to engage in activities or habits that we want to implement in our lives if we attach them to activities that we have to do, or that we already do. Clear spends a long time fleshing this out, but if it’s new to you, hopefully my example will make it make intutive sense: I journal every night before bed. When I wanted to start reading daily Stoic meditations, rather than invent a random time to meditate everyday, I placed my meditation book on top of my journal so that I’d build the habit of meditating every night on top of my established habit of journaling every night. Simple enough.
At this point you’re saying, yes, Zoë, we get it—literally everyone knows what habit stacking is now. Well, alright then. Let’s talk about creativity, expanding our creative lives, and hobby stacking.
But for the sake of transparency, let me tell you what I’m working with: I’ve always had a creative outlet. In youth, I sang in choirs and wrote short stories. In high school, I was a musical theater kid and started dabbling in poetry. In college, I began my vlogging career. And in law school, I wrote a full collection of poetry and an album. Now that I’m a full-time working woman, I find it harder to quench my creative desires (my call towards creativity has grown while my energy for it has receded). But even still, at work I might as well be known as Side Quest Sally. “I can’t go to happy hour because it conflicts with my acting class,” I’ve groaned. “I spent this weekend writing a chapter of my novel,” I’ve admitted. “How do you have the time!?” I’ve been asked, again, and again, and again.
Well, when you’re really called to creativity, you have no choice but to make the time. It vibrates in your bones, it keeps you up at night, it swirls around your brain while you’re trying to reformat an excel spreadsheet. And if you try to ignore it when it’s really meant for you, it will turn hard and cold and heavy within you, weighing you down as punishment for not letting it run free. “If we can’t have fun, you can’t either!” it humphs. My ideas depressed me before I learned how to maximize my creative potential whilst remaining employed. Before I learned hobby stacking.
I spent a few months trying to carve out random minutes in my days to dedicate to my increasingly irritated creative energy. A few chords on the piano here, a few dialogue exchanges in old English there, and rising dissatisfaction everywhere.
When I got a slight break from work over the holidays, I knew that something had to change. I wasn’t in a position to quit my job, but I also was going insane without a consistent creative strategy. It was especially hard for me to even know what to do in my few minutes of free time because I was—and am—drawn to so many different creative expressions. Writing is (and will always be) my first love. I dated around with this and that, sure, but she was the first relationship that I really took seriously. That I started making sacrifices for. For whom I declined late nights out with friends because I had to get back to her. Who I made sure to say “i love you” to at the end of every long day, even when she pissed me off.
But this love, too, is multifaceted. There are poems living inside of me just as there are books just as there are essays just as there are scripts and songs. And what if I want to see if I’m any good at acting? But what if I also want to learn guitar and take photographs? It was all so overwhelming, but the way that it nagged at me made it also feel necessary. I had to figure out a way to answer all of the calls that were ringing in my ears (and quite frankly, giving me tinnitus) while maintaining my tangible responsibilities.
Thus, hobby stacking was born.
I have to give myself some credit because, in actuality, I started hobby stacking by happenstance before I started hobby stacking with intention. When I was near the beginning of my publishing process for my debut book of poetry (the light was yours), inspiration stuck me while watching the 66th Annual Grammys. A new category. Near the bottom of whatever news article I was mindlessly scrolling. Only in its second year of existence: Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Hmmm.
I listened to a few of the nominations. Five albums of singing, rapping, and/or speaking poetry.
I called my musically trained sister. “Do you want to write an album with me?”
I spent the next six months fully committed to turning my poems (from the book that was soon to be published) into songs. I had never written a song before, but the whole feat was less intimidating to me because I had written several poems, and a poem is half of a song. I was in the habit of sitting at my desk to write every night. I regularly fiddled around on my instruments. I just had to stack a new hobby on top of some old ones.
Less than a year later, I released a 33 minute album that set my poetry to music.
Was it any good? I don’t know. If you ask my dad, it was amazing. If you ask me, at least a few of the tracks are certified bangers. But truly and honestly, whether it’s good or not isn’t the point. The practice is the point. The practice of forging a new relationship with my first craft—poetry—gave me new inclinations when I consider rhythm and rhyme. The practice of learning a completly new craft—songwriting—gave me increased confidence to expand my creativity through experimentation (and also assured me of my own discipline and dedication). And, yes, the practice of releasing my art into the world and letting people decide if they like it or not is necessary, I think, if one wants to pursue a creative career in spite of (not because of) what consumers do or don’t say. (Please, if creation is your calling, enough with “the fear of being seen.”)
And practical benefits aside, hobby stacking is fun. I dream about my books becoming movies and I’ve always admired actors, so I enrolled in an acting class (somewhere I have to actually go at a specific time every week!). I trained piano on contemporary music but I love what’s classic and what’s popular, so I learned Clair de Lune. And though I rarely even go near visible, tangible art (we all have our limits), I love the way a simple drawing can elevate a page of poetry, so I illustrated my poetry book with doodles. Each hobby was born from another hobby. It is harder to quit at them because they don’t exist in a vaccuum. I can always tell myself that my new creative endeavors are linked to, and elevate, my first love of writing. All while making new friends and learning new skills in the process.
Hobby stacking has expanded my capacity for creativity, both in terms of energy and of skill. But don’t get me wrong—I still have to prioritize. I still have to organize (I’m still working on that part.). I still only have 24 hours in a day. I have to balance—and try to overlap as much as possible—the time I spend cultivating skills and the time I spend working towards finishing an actual project. If I did not find this balance, I could decide to view my non-writing creative hobbies as unserious, frivolous, or distracting. I could say that those hobbies are not what I’m meant to do in my limited time. And subconsciously, for a while, that is how I viewed those hobbies. That’s why it took me so long to even try to write music or act (and because I assumed I was not gifted in those areas or thought they would be too “hard.” But we don’t have to perform at Beyoncé’s level for our art to be worth performing! We don’t have to act at Timotheé’s level for our scenes to be worth acting!)
For me, acting and music production were interests, but they were not hobbies. They were my “in another life” fantasies. But how do you know when you should test your fantasy in the real world? When does an interest have enough legs to become a hobby? I don’t know. It took me years of Actors on Actors interviews and 1,000 close listenings of folklore for me to realize—hey, I think I actually value and enjoy this stuff enough to try it out on my own. I was literally yearning for these experiences while sitting on my ass because I decided, at some point, that these hobbies were for somebody else. I didn’t think of them as something that I should try because I hadn’t yet found my thru line. The line that links all of my hobbies together.
To be clear, you don’t need a thru line, but I sure did take my interests more seriously when I discovered mine: to expand human consciousness through storytelling. To experience and to share experiences. That’s what I want to do. That’s what all of my hobbies have in common.
On my Tuesday evening 40 minute metro to voice class (I have to transfer lines, god help me), I’ll read Sanford Meisner’s On Acting. When I return home buzzed and dreamy, I’ll see what my fingers feel like pressing on the piano. And as I wind down with my nightly journaling, maybe I’ll jot down a few rhymes. And then, honestly, I might not touch these practices until next week’s voice class. But I don’t beat myself up over it because I know that there will be class next week, so there will be a metro ride, so there will be reading, and my post-class buzz, and—you get the point.
But if you actually don’t get the point, it’s this: the more we build creativity into our existing habits, the more room our creativity has to grow, and the easier it comes to us. And isn’t that what we’re all after?
Atomic Habits is not necessarily targeted at creatives; it’s targeted at anyone with ambitions. And my ambitions just so happen to be creative.
i justtt got Atomic Habits! my creativity is in need of a boost 😅