How to Make Time for Writing for Busy People

Over the past week, several writer friends have complained about how they struggle to make time to write.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“I don’t have time,” Tom whined. “I am so busy!” Grabbing handfuls of his hair in each fist, he asked, “How will I ever finish my literary novel about an illiterate librarian with imposter syndrome?”

“Well, what do you do with your time?” I asked.

“What?” Tom stared at me with a sober expression.

“We all have twenty-four hours per day,” I said. “What do you do with those twenty-four hours?”

Tom sputtered and began to count off a litany of excuses for why he had to binge watch every season of the X Files on Netflix.

Track Your Time

Often when someone decides to lose weight, she begins to keep a food diary where she records every bit of food she eats and drinks. The point is to document how often she eats and what she eats. We often snack without even thinking about it or realizing how many calories per day we consume.

Begin recording in a small notebook or the notes app on your smartphone everything you do and how long you do it. More than likely, a good chunk of your twenty-four hours will go toward your job, sleeping, commuting, personal hygiene, meals, etc.; however, you should also identify some golden opportunities for writing time that were spent on social media, watching television, and talking to or texting friends.

Schedule Writing Time into Your Day

Now that you’ve identified some time during your day that can be used for writing go ahead and schedule it into your paper or electronic calendar. Set the alarm to remind you when it’s time to turn your attention to writing. If anyone tries to intrude on your writing time, tell them you’re not available. It’s a choice: Do you write? Or do go to Taco Tuesdays at Sombrero Loco with your old roommate to hear about her dating app horror stories? Choose wisely, grasshopper!

Salvage Unexpected Downtime During the Day

If you’re on hold as you wait for others to dial in for a conference call, jot down a few sentences or a paragraph. If you’re on hold with the cable company, reread what you wrote previously and revise your work. If you’re commuting home on the train, review the outline for your story and add to it. You don’t need your laptop; use a pen and paper. (They’re coming back like vinyl and cassettes!) If you have to swing by the grocery store, think of one of your characters you’re still trying to flesh out and imagine what he would be like buying groceries as you turn down each aisle.

Identify Your Objective, Metrics for Success, and Constraints

Whenever I begin work on a new project with one of my tech clients, I always ask them to share the objective of the project. Is it to make a process faster or more efficient? Is it to save money? Define success. How will my clients and I measure if we achieved their objective? Identify constraints. Do the budget or timeline limit the project?

From a writing perspective, what is your objective? Are you filing in an outline for a new story? Fleshing out a character sketch? Or are you writing that tense scene between the cattle rancher and the vegan activist stuck in an elevator? What does success look like for you? Is it a word count or a specific number of pages? What is your constraint? Do you only have a half hour to write? Are you limited to writing by hand because your laptop battery ran out of juice?

Let Go of Perfectionism

Maximize the writing time you have by writing as fast as you can and don’t worry about how good it is. In her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott reminds readers not to be intimidated by writing the great American novel in an evening and just get what’s in their heads onto the page. Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, writes about a tool called Morning Pages, where one writes three pages of stream-of-conscious writing without stopping. She encourages her readers to let their higher power worry about the quality of the writing, and they need to focus on the quantity of their writing. You’ll revise later, much like a painter has to get all of his different colors of paint on the canvas and begin mixing them together and see how it looks before finishing the painting.

What other life hacks or tools do you use to find time to write?