I’m a morning person. If I can get 8 (elusive) hours of sleep or some reasonable facsimile, I can shut everything out and sit right down at my keyboard writing, until I come up for air circa midday after 3-4 productive hours, and maybe more (counting editing as the flame dies down).
I’m not getting my writing done at the moment, and for a very simple reason: I’ve lost that time slot to something stupid and unproductive, and I’m having a hard time claiming it back. It’s hard to pin down just why, so let me explain.
I’m retired, so it’s not competing remunerative work. And it’s not family (there’s just the two of us). What happened is illness: non-severe cancer plus chemo ate a couple of years (breaking my writing habit). I am of course grateful to be healthy again (and very grateful that this kicked off my only successful massive weight loss ever (BMI 25 – woohoo!) – this alone has probably extended my life beyond what the cancer might have threatened).
But, while I was low-energy ill, I couldn’t write. I could outline, take notes (tons of them), plan out current & future entries, and so forth (all useful), but I couldn’t concentrate in the way I needed to churn out text. As my health came back, I started a morning routine of checking the news, articles, email, etc., because it was less intellectually demanding, and I could at least get something useful done.
And that’s the routine I’m having trouble putting aside, or at least deferring to later in the day or skipping like I used to do, so that I can free up my mornings again.
I’ve spent some considerable time digging around in my own head as to why this is so difficult for me. This has generated some psychological insights.
* I monitor my email to check on my responsibilities to other people.
* My outage coincided with the election bruhaha and the great Covid silliness (I had worse health things to focus on and didn’t care) and it left me with a certain FOMO (fear of missing out)
* I look at the news so that I can post items of interest to my Facebook feed and engage with comments on them.
* I write posts like these.
And what do they all have in common? Loneliness. Human interaction.
I’ve had a brush with mortality, and it’s changed my hidden priorities. I’m on alert far too much, seeking that next recognition-of-existence, chatting with shopkeepers, as though clutching at such things will somehow lessen the inevitable fate we all face when we finally run out of time.
This has to change.
I’m not the only one who has difficulty carrying out a daily writing routine. I know what it is, and I’m jazzed by it, so I have to take a bludgeon to this wastage and rearrange my days. After all, unlike the image above, no one’s making any more time for any of us. So here’s my plan…
Step number one: No reading news (email links, internet) before the writing task is done for the day (after lunch), and defer responses to non-essential email.
Step number two: Don’t give up on the drips of human contact (those Barbershop Quartets don’t run themselves, alas), but banish the work involved to after the writing task is done for the day.
Step number three: Don’t panic about emergencies/urgencies occasionally derailing the plan.
How do you handle the difficulty of carving out time for your writing? Has the frustration sparked any personal insight as to why it’s hard for you in ways that aren’t obvious?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Making Time to Write”
I figured out a few years ago that as I aged, I get about four hours of useful time a day. Tasks that need thinking have to be done early. I saw this in my mother many years ago; time rationing is incredibly important as one approaches the category of ‘old’. But calling your need for human interaction “stupid and unproductive” might not help. Just my 2 cents.
Only when I’m trying to re-establish writing time. The rest of the time, I do crave it. 🙂
My Day Job thus far has been morning-heavy, so afternoons and weekends are for writing. The other residents of RedQuarters respect this, since they get evenings. (Aside from Jase T. Cat, who respects no one, since he’s a cat.)
is typing one-handed because toddler took other arm
I think my challenges are not generally useful. 😅
I both crave routine and rebel against it, so really, my main challenge to forming a writing routine is just personality. And “Doan Wanna” syndrome.
short answer: i don’t. I end up not writing…
I think I need to banish the news trawling myself. Personally, work and life have been rather raining from the sky as well so I haven’t had time or mental energy to write. I think part of that is my day job and writing sort of draw from the same pool, so I mostly need to write when day job is in a lull of paperwork and meetings, which hasn’t particularly been the case the last year or so. Part of it is I feel like I’m writing about the lesser dramas before the Flood sweeps all else aside. It just feels out of place.
It was different when I was writing a funny travel story during the lock downs; it sort of felt like I was writing in an era that had just been lost and would never be seen again, but you can do that with a mostly light-hearted piece.
The struggle is real. I’ve decided to unsubscribe and clean up all of the news posts that come into my inbox. They draw attention away from what I want to focus on. By the time I finish clearing spam, I’m too tired to do anything else, so best to eliminate them from the start. I just found out Apple mail keeps returning everything if I use IMAP, so I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird to give me better control.
Once I settle in on my writing, I’m pretty good with staying in the zone. It’s getting there that has me dragging my feet with all the “chores” and taking care of “business” that get in the way. However, if I ignore the business, I find out my ad cost went though the roof or my inbox is flooded, so perhaps the answer is to do the mail clearing and ad checking after the writing session.