02 Aug Making Time To Write

Running a business or writing a book and no time to actually write? Here’s five great tips to get your words written without the stress!

1. Be honest with yourself. Spend one week monitoring what you do with your time by the hour and day-by-day. Create a file on your phone where you can quickly access and note in throughout the day what you did. You’ll be surprised with how much time you wasted and where you can carve out some writing time.
2. Make time. Put writing time into your weekly/monthly schedule – writing this down with either flexible hours or a specific day/time means you are more likely to commit to it. Otherwise, you’ll keep putting it off to next week or next month and before you know it, it’s the end of the year and you haven’t updated your blog.
3. Work in bursts. Set aside anything from ten to ninety minute intervals. There is an author called Anthony Trollope who did this and managed to write 47 novels, 18 non-fiction works, 12 short stories, 2 plays, and many, many articles and letters in his lifetime.
4. Create a writing bank. Set up a folder in Google Drive or Dropbox that you can access anytime, anywhere, and offline in case you don’t have internet access. Whenever you get an idea for even the smallest thing and then when you do have time later to write you’re not staring at a blank page or struggling for inspiration. Plus, if you have some business or author friends ask them what they’d want to read and write down all the ideas. If you build up a bank of 12 ideas for blog posts you’ll have one ready for every month of the year and you can do the same for social media posts and other digital content.
5. Give yourself a treat to look forward to once you’re done. This way you’re more likely to work productively because you know you have a deadline and something nice afterwards.

Share this post with anyone you know needs a little help with finding time to write.

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash