Challenges to Daily Writing and How to Beat Them: Time Challenge

For the next five weeks, I will be blogging about Five Challenges to a Daily Writing Habit and How to Beat Them. I hope you’ll let me know your thoughts, experiences and questions as we go along.

Challenge One: Time

No one has enough time to write. I’ve mentored a range of folks from working parents with young children to retired folks with enough money, and everyone struggles with making and keeping our appointments with our own creativity.

The struggles are different in key ways—how to squeeze in a moment for yourself v. how to value yourself enough to begin engaging with your creativity—but they are also similar in key ways. It is hard to value our own creativity. It is hard to let it count more than the dishes, the errands, the promises to other people, the ringing telephone, the world demanding help, the sense that anything and everything is more important that this.

So the first step is actually to value the writing. A great way to do this is to make a commitment—not just to yourself, but in front of your family, your writing community and publicly, to the world. It’s amazing how the world can wait if you are willing to ask it to do so. If you say, “I have to finish my writing before I can [fill in the blank],” often the world will stand by. But how can you bring yourself to make this declaration? Three keys:

Consistency—you do it every day at this time.

Clarity—you have a specific goal and know what it is and when it is done.

Commitment—you are flexible in other areas but not with this.

Let’s dig into these three keys a little deeper.

Consistency: How can you find a regular time? Or any time? Make a list of everything on your plate. Now take a look. What can you say no to now? What would happen if you didn’t do that? How about that? What can you get help with? You can’t do a hundred different goals this year. But you can do a few.

Focus in. Trade out some things and put writing in instead. Yes, give something up.

Go small. Make your goal something you always have time to do, even when everyone is asleep at last and you yourself are about to collapse. A sentence. A paragraph. Ten minutes. Make it do-able, including picking a time you can always make use of, without changing your life circumstance dramatically.

Clarity: Go small here, too. Get really specific. Learn about what small achievements feel good to you. You notch your belt and go on with your day, motivated to come back and do it again tomorrow.

Quantify it, in number of words, in time, or some other way. If it’s too subjective and ephemeral, you will float away from yourself. Be concrete. It’s perfectly fine to pick a random goal. It will evolve as you attend to what works for you. It will become yours and become sacred if you do it over and over again.

Commitment: Remind yourself of why you are doing this. What great, wonderful, life-changing things will happen if you can not only say, I am a writer but, I have written today! What does writing mean to you? Why does it matter? How will it feel to know that you are keeping a daily commitment to your creativity? How will it feel to take this out of resolution territory and right into your habitual reality? Fabulous, right? Dig into that feeling.

Now spend a few minutes thinking about what will happen if you don’t make and live up to this commitment to yourself. How sad will you be to turn away from your own desire to write? How depressing will it be if you fail yourself on this? Yuck, right?

Go back to the joy of the first vision: you are doing it. You are making your dreams come true. Small, consistent steps that build a writing life that you love.

What are your time challenges? Any solutions you’ve come up with? Anything you need help to achieve? Post below and let’s talk.