Pay yourself first

When you earn money, pay yourself first no matter how little. You do this before you pay everything else as otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the other bills. You are also less likely to spend your savings if you do it first.

Jessica Alba applies this concept not to money but to time, to ensure you prioritise creative work:

If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week, there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time. – Jessica Alba

Oliver-Burkeman develops this in Four-Thousand-Weeks:

So if a certain activity really matters to you – a creative project, say, though it could just as easily be nurturing a relationship, or activism in the service of some cause – the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other genuinely big rocks may be begging for your attention.

I’ve tried to claim back the first half hour of the day to write and edit poems.