I don’t have time to write.
That’s the main excuse I hear all the time when I tell people that I’m a writer and they respond with, “I wish I could do that,” and I say “Why not?”
I don’t have time to write. That, to me, sounds crazy. I know some people who write at midnight to 2AM after working and being around their family all day. Others write on their break times at work. If you want to write something and if you have a story you really want to tell, then you will make time to write.
For me, I’m lucky because I’m working from home, so I plan and schedule my time to write during the day. When I’m not working on my freelance project, I’m writing my own work. I’m getting my novella prepared for publication or I’m writing the shorts that I post on here. I had a brief window of time where I was only working on blog posts and shorts because I was waiting on feedback from my client, but now that I have that feedback, I’m back to managing my time between everything.
Of course, my freelance work comes first because I’m getting paid for working on it, but I still make time to write on my personal work.
The whole planning and scheduling out my day is still a work in progress. I’ve had times where I find myself in a hole so deep on social media that I’m left wondering where the time went. Today I’m starting off my actual planned day (with minimal social media). I’m already a little behind on schedule, but that’s because I didn’t take in count of potential distractions in the morning… aka my dog. I think I’ll be able to make up the time towards the end of the day. I gave myself the option for “Free writing” in the afternoon which means I’m allowed to work on whatever I want.
This kind of scheduling reminds me of school. For some reason, I’ve had a hard time working without schedule as of late, and I think it’s because I miss that school structure. I always had to be somewhere at a certain time of the day and I had to focus on one subject at that time. So, over the weekend, I wrote out today and tomorrow’s schedule in the mindset of only working on one thing at a time.
Before I was doing several things (including keeping my social media open) and was feeling overwhelmed. I think this will work out for me.
Time management has always been an issue for me outside of college. It’s no surprise to me that I spent 16 years of my life living a structured and scheduled life and then I came out to the real world flailing. I think my issues come from not being able to plan out my days myself. Everything was scheduled for me. The one time I got close to planning out my school schedule was in college — and I was just in charge of making sure my classes that I chose didn’t overlap each other in time.
I think it’s important to be able to have a say in your schedule and have a little control over it. Otherwise, you’re stuck living a life someone else made for you. That’s not really a life worth living, don’t you think?
I really hope this planning thing works out for me in the end. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Thanks for reading!
-Emi