Do you have as much time as you'd like for your writing?
I'm not sure I've ever met a writer who would answer "yes" to that!
One reader wrote to me to say, "Since time is my biggest crunch right now, I'm interested
in tricks to make the most of little bit available."
You might well feel the same way. I certainly do!
While I'm in a particularly manic stage of life right now – my husband is studying full-time for a PhD; we have two small children (age 3 and 1) and limited childcare – for much of my writing career, I've struggled to find enough time to write everything I want to write.
For most of us, the reality of the
writing life is that writing gets squeezed in around other things: a day job, young children, family life, spending time with friends, housework ... most writers aren't in the position to have all day, every day, to write.
Here, I'm not going to cover ways to create more time (e.g. cutting down your hours at a day job; getting your spouse to take the kids every Sunday afternoon), but instead focus on making the most of what you've currently got ... however little that
might be.
Four Tricks to Make More of What You've Got
#1: Set a Timer When You're Writing
This helps you stay focused, especially if you only have a little chunk of time in which to write. There's something about setting a timer that helps you commit: youare going to write for ten minutes. Even if you have more time available, you might want to set timers for short-ish
sessions (around 20 - 45 minutes is a good length to try) – it can help you stay on track and avoid procrastinating.
#2: Listen to Podcasts While Doing Housework, Commuting, Exercising...
If you don't have much time to write, you probably don't have much time to learn about writing either. Perhaps you have a shelf of unread books on writing, or a lot of emails from various blogs piling up in your inbox.
A
good way round this is to listen to a few podcasts on writing. My favourite right now is Joanna Penn's The Creative Penn podcast, which comes out weekly – Joanna gives a quick overview of writing-related news, as well as having a guest speaker on to talk about a particular aspect of writing, publishing or marketing.
#3: Work on One Project at a Time, Until It's Complete
When you've got very little time available to write, you
don't want to spread your attention across several projects. Pick ONE project that you're going to finish before you work on anything else. That might be the one that's already closest to completion – or the one that would, if finished, have the biggest impact.
For instance, I have 30 minutes per day (most days) to write fiction. I've chosen to focus that time solely on my novel-in-progress: I'm not writing short stories, flash fiction, or anything
else.
#4: Split Your Writing into Different Tasks
If appropriate, try to divide your writing into different sets of tasks. For instance, if you're a blogger, you could:
- Come up with 20 ideas for blog posts.
- Pick your 10 strongest ideas and write a quick plan for each.
- Draft 5 blog posts.
- Edit 5 blog posts.
For me, this is a lot more efficient than coming up with ONE idea, writing
ONE plan, drafting ONE post and so on. By batching together tasks, I can get into flow on idea-generation (or on post-planning or post-drafting). It also means I can easily draw links between posts, or figure out at an early planning stage if something isn't quite going to work.
Having limited writing time can be really frustrating, but if you can at least make the most of the time you do have, you will see progress. Good
luck!
