How to Make Writing the Most Important Part of Your Day

There is plenty of advice available on how to write, but if you are juggling family and job responsibilities, how can you find the time? No matter how busy you are, it is possible to carve an hour or more out of the day for writing. The trick is to focus on your writing goal and rearrange the rest of your life around it. And to write every day. Here are seven suggestions for how to make writing the most important part of your day:

1. Construct an urgency to your writing project. If you are writing without an immediate prospect of selling, it’s easy to take forever to finish. Join an Internet writing challenge, vow to enter a contest that has an entry deadline, or simply create an arbitrary deadline. Then write as much as you can as fast as you can to meet your deadline. If you tell family and friends about the deadline, you’ll have less trouble getting them to honor your temporary change of focus from them to yourself.  
2. Decide on an arbitrary daily word count. This is a favorite of Internet challenges, and it works. Figure out the total word count of your project, divide by the number of days until the deadline, and you’ll get a daily word goal to reach. Just keep it sensible. If you don’t know how fast you can write, start with a goal of under 1,000 words a day. The idea is to make the daily goal possible to attain. Then each day that you reach your word goal will motivate you for the next.         



3. Plan to write at a certain hour each day. Make an appointment with yourself and stick to it. Get up an hour earlier or stay up an hour later. Or rearrange your daily schedule to add writing to it. And plan to write in relatively short spurts of an hour or two. Your writing will be the fresher for it, plus it’s easier to take an hour here or there out of a day than to take a big chunk of time.
4. Guard yourself against sabotage. Decide that your writing time will not be ambushed by others. Apply the only-if-there-is-blood rule: meaning do not interrupt me unless someone is injured. Pleas to come watch television to keep someone else company should be ignored. Your writing should be your priority for that hour. If you must use a shared computer, save your work often and use a password, create backup media, and remove them to a safe place after each session.

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