How is your writing year going?
This story probably isn’t for you.
Then again, who knows? Maybe it is. Maybe it would help to see that while you are out there exceeding your every expectation for writing in 2023, most writers are not.
Me? I’m not even close.
I don’t even know what my goals were!
I’m sure they were appropriately ambitious, befitting of New Year’s goals (dare I say resolutions?) across time, space, and memory.
They were probably way too ambitious.
Most likely I was going to write two-dozen full length novels, a short story a day, a poem every hour, and three-a-day blog posts to recap, all while keeping my day job and making enough time for my wife and dogs, a handful of close friends, and every “optional” after-work function that came up.
Sound familiar?
Probably not, unless you’re a lunatic.
Or a writer who’s trying to make up for lost time. Like me.
The truth is, I have no idea what my goals were at the beginning of the year. I’m sure I wrote them down, but if they were in a notebook, that notebook has been lost to the chaos of life. If they were in a Word doc or Google sheet, I can’t figure out where on my laptop they might be hiding.
It’s entirely possible I ripped the pages out of the notebook or deleted the doc in frustration sometime in March or April, despondent and hoping to erase the evidence of my failure. I really don’t know.
But perhaps that’s a good thing.
You see, my year has been wild and wooly. I started 2023 doing the best I could to support my wife as she recovered from a major back injury. Once she was back to work and things started to calm down, I took a breath and set about reprioritizing my time and goals. This was how I spent April — struggling to get back on some sort of track that accommodated work, writing, hitting the gym, and maintaining the semblance of a social life.
Then, on May 2nd, while sitting at my desk at work, I had some chest pain that lasted about five minutes.
I very much wanted to blow it off as an anxiety attack, but I’m fifty now, gifted with the accumulated wisdom of middle age and the almost certain knowledge that I have less time ahead of me than behind. So, I did the sensible thing and went to the emergency room.
Three months and one triple bypass later, I sit here this morning trying to get a handle on the rest of the year. My health is good, likely better than it’s been in a long time. My wife is healthy, and our relationship is thriving. I’ve found more time for friends and family, partly because I had more time while recovering from surgery, but mostly because there’s nothing like a mild heart attack followed by a triple bypass to make you understand how valuable your time really is.
I’m also back to work, which is a good thing. But also a difficult thing, because I was just starting to feel well enough to enjoy the bit of freedom that not going into the office for 40+ hours a week offered.
That leaves writing.
Hopefully your year has been smoother than mine. Or maybe it’s been tougher by far. We’re not here to compare. Life is almost never smooth, and there are always challenges, interruptions, and distractions around the next turn of the calendar to disrupt even the best laid plans and the most disciplined people.
Okay, maybe not the most disciplined people. But those people are outliers, true freaks of nature who get it done day in, day out. They probably would have been writing as soon as they were out of the ICU, and putting in extra words to make up the lost time.
For the rest of us, there are a couple of choices.
- Let life be our excuse. Scrap the whole writing thing, enjoy the rest of 2023, get our Halloween costumes ready, start our holiday shopping, run up our credit card bills, take up a new hobby that takes more time than we have, and prepare to lament the whole thing and set brand new, overly ambitious writing goals for January 1st, 2024 so that we can start the whole cycle of failure over again.
- Use today as a restart day. Set reasonable goals based on your available time for the rest of the year. Build some positive momentum leading into 2024 so that you don’t have to restart all over again on the most pressure packed day of the year, January 1st, when hope springs eternal and optimism couples with regret to make setting any sort of reasonable goals for the next twelve months almost impossible.
As appealing as option #1 sounds, I’ve been there and done that.
I’m going with option #2,
Which begs the question…
What does a reasonable goal look like?
Well, that depends on what your life looks like. Really, setting a reasonable goal is all about figuring out what available time you have and deciding how much of it you want to allocate to a given activity. In this case, writing.
“But Joe, I don’t have any time!”
I know. It definitely feels that way sometimes. A lot of the time, actually. Life is very busy, and the days get away from us before they even get started.
But you do have time. Trust me.
It’s just that you spend it doing other things.
For example, last week my phone told me I spend an average of 4 hours and 17 minutes of screen time every day. And that was down 29 minutes from the previous week.
Well, yeah, I went back to work. Those eight hour days sure cut into my social media browsing.
Seriously, though, 4+ hours a day of screen time, just on my phone. What the heck am I doing on there?!
I thought some of that time could be attributed to listening to audio books and podcasts, which is what I do when I’m driving, showering, and working out. A quick Google search informed me that, no, my phone does not count that time as screen time.
Wow. So I spend 4+ hours a day looking at my phone? I mean, I’m curious and Google a lot of things — everything from who an actor I recognize is when I’m watching a movie, to wine ratings when we are looking at the restaurant selection, to how many galaxies there are within 50 million light years of the Milky Way. (I’m a writer. It’s research…)
But I can’t possibly be spending more than a half hour a day looking up stuff. Forty-five minutes tops, right?
I also read on my phone, probably a half hour to an hour a day on average. But that still leaves three hours of screen time!
I’m spending an eighth of my day on my phone and I couldn’t even tell you why!
So, yeah, that’s got to get cut down significantly. And if I can take away half that time and turn it into writing time, imagine how much writing I’d get done?
I write about 1000 words an hour on average, assuming I write as clean as possible. Some things, like train of thought blogs, are a little faster, and some things, like fiction, are little slower. But 1000 words and hour is an easy number to work with, so let’s use that.
If I do nothing else but cut my screen time by 90 minutes a day and use that time to write, that works out to 1500 words a day. Simple math says 1500 words a day times 365 days equals 547,500 words a year.
If a typical full-length novel is 90,000 words, that means repurposing that ninety minutes a day gives me time to write six novels. Or five novels and about one-hundred eighty 500 words blogs.
That’s damn good productivity, and all I’m giving up for it is scrolling on Instagram and avoiding political posts on Facebook? I’m in!
What’s Important?
You might have other things you spend your time on, and maybe they’re important. But chances are, some of them are not.
So step one is figuring out what’s important. I mean, really important.
Obviously, if you have bills to pay and aren’t independently wealthy, work is important. So start there and block out those hours as necessary. However, if you are lingering at work or letting your work take over your whole day because you work from home and stretch your eight hour day into twelve, that’s probably worth looking at. Truth is, you could probably get your eight hours of work done in five or six hours, which would free up some time.
Unless your company is monitoring your screen time and activity, in which case I hope you really love your job, because your company sucks.
But let’s assume work is important for most of us. Same thing with sleep. So there’s 14–16 hours a day gone right off the bat in all likelihood, at least five days a week.
Hopefully, you work out and stay active, so let’s assume another two hours a day are gone because you take good care of yourself in order to live a long and healthy life.
And I assume you have friends and family that you want to spend time with. If not, get some. Socialization is as important to your health as exercise, maybe more so. But either way, let’s be generous and give up another two hours a day to maintain our relationships and enjoy the people we care about.
16 hours work/sleep + 2 hours active/exercise + 2 hours friends and family = 20 hours.
Bonus time with friends and family if you can be active and exercise together! That’s a really good idea, by the way.
That still leaves four hours a day for us to spend.
Apparently, I was spending my four hours looking at my phone.
Still, there are little things that take up time. Let’s call it another two hours of dining, using the bathroom, showering, shaving, getting dressed, and who knows how many little miscellaneous moments that occur throughout the day. Individually, they take only a minute or three, but they add up.
And honestly, we don’t want to spend our days rushing around any more than we already do. So that two hours is a little generous, perhaps. Especially if we include at least one meal, maybe two, as part of the time we share with friends and family. But we’ll start there to illustrate the point.
That leaves us two hours in the day. Two hours to do whatever we want.
Even if we go ahead and spend one hour on something random, like video games, television, reading, or whatever floats your particular boat, we still have an hour left over.
An that’s an hour to write.
Disclaimer: I don’t have children, just a couple of dogs. As needy as they are, they take no where near as much time and energy as children.
Now, I know your life may be different than what I laid out here. It probably is, but the point of this isn’t to try and fit your life into the layout I’ve given as an example.
The point is to look at your days and weeks and make an honest assessment of what you are choosing to do with your time.
Start small, especially if the thought of discipline is overwhelming or frightening. I’m sure you probably feel busy, but that feeling may not be the truth, and it may be what’s holding you back from following your writing dreams and achieving your goals.
Even if all you can find is fifteen minutes a day, and you have to create it by waking up a little earlier, staying up a little later, or barricading yourself in the bathroom and writing on your phone (ack, more screen time!), you can make a start on your commitment to writing today!
And when it comes to all the other things that you do with your time, some of which you may feel very attached to, you might have to make some choices.
Do you want to be a writer?
Well, you may have to sacrifice some of the other things you enjoy doing to achieve your goals and make your dream a reality.
It may not be easy, but if you are like me, if the writing bug has been with you for as long as you can remember, if it keeps coming back no matter how little time you give it, making you feel guilty for not writing more, for not committing, for not following your passion and giving it the time it deserves, the sacrifices will be worthwhile.
Start small. Fifteen minutes. A half hour. An hour.
Maybe all you have is an hour on Sunday morning before the kids roll out of bed.
That’s okay. It’s a start.
Commit to beginning, mark that time out in bold on your calendar, and make sure everyone who might interrupt it knows how important it is to you.
All it takes is that first word.
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