Running out of Time

When I started my blog, I wanted to post every Monday. I worried that I might not have enough good ideas to post every week, but that turned out to be the wrong worry. As the weeks went by, my ideas list of articles to write, just like the books on my nightstand, kept growing.

My worry about not having enough ideas disappeared, but in its place appeared a new problem. Not having enough time to write. I was juggling classes, friends, research, and writing a blog. Somehow, I was always just finishing up the blog post the day or two before I was scheduled to post. As the weeks went on, the time between finishing my post, and my scheduled posting time just got smaller and smaller. I was now waking up at 4am to finish my posts the day of posting. The worst part was that finals week was about to begin, and life was about to get a lot more hectic. I barely got through finals week while still maintaining my post schedule and I decided something had to change. It’s at that point I picked up How to Write a Lot by Dr. Silvia.

How to Write a Lot

How to Write a Lot is a rather short and easy book to read. I went through it in one night. The main takeaway of the book comes in chapter 2; in order to write more, you need to set aside a regularly scheduled and dedicated period of time just to write. This means no more writing just when you feel like it. During that scheduled period of time, you write. No phones, no twitter, no distractions just write.

My Writing Schedule

I’m a morning person so I decided that the two hours after I wake up will be my designated writing time. I’d brew myself a cup of coffee, fill up my water bottle, start a two-hour countdown on my phone and then toss it onto my bed so that it’s out of reach.

A side note about music and writing. I find I can’t write well with music on in the background, so I make a conscious effort to keep my headphones off. If you can write with music, have some music playing, but I’d suggest trying to write without any music a few times. It may feel more boring and tedious, but I found I’m more conscious about what I write when I don’t have music.

Now, two hours is a long time, and that can make it hard to fill the entire time with writing. Usually, about 10 minutes in I’ve drunk all the coffee, and an hour in my mind begins to wander. I force myself to continue writing even if I can’t think of anything. Sometimes this means just sitting down at a table staring at a computer. Now this doesn’t mean I don’t take small breaks to go to the bathroom or get more water. It just means I don’t let myself take mental breaks like checking twitter. The longer I’ve kept up this schedule, the easier filling the two hours has become.

Writing is More than Just Writing

You may ask, “what if something else needs to be completed so that I can continue writing?”. Maybe you can’t write about 12th-century architecture without reading a certain book chapter. I’d respond with, then read that book chapter. Writing is more than just writing, there’s a lot of support activities that go into it. Research, editing, corrections, and reviews are all part of the writing process. If there’s something you need to do to support your writing, do it as part of this time, just don’t get carried away. Don’t let your other tasks push out all of your writing time. One thing that I like about forcing myself to write for two hours, is that I always get some writing done. Even if there’s a lot of other work, I still have time to write.

One thing that I try to avoid in my writing time is email. They are necessary, and technically fall into the category of writing, but I find email to be distracting. I limit myself to only responding to the most important emails that I know I need to get to from the day before. If there aren’t any email’s from the day before, I won’t even open my email to check it. When I’m done with writing, the business day is just starting, and most sane people will be fine with you responding at the start of the business day to an urgent email that came in overnight.

Rewards

When I finish my two hour wiring period I like to give myself a little reward. I’ll brew a second cup of coffee, eat breakfast, and goof off watching videos or reading something fun for a half hour. By doing something fun and enjoyable at the end, I look forward to my daily wiring schedule a little more.

Results

The above sounds all well and good, maybe a bit harsh and rigid, but does it work?

Yes.

I now generally go from start to finish on a post for this site in two writing sessions. The first is to write down most of the content, the second is to finish writing, edit, and add in/ create any media. Generally, I write 2 posts a week, and sometimes I even knock out a third. It’s been so productive, I’ve started to build up a backlog of posts. This has helped allow me to not worry about writing when I was on trips with friends and family this summer. If this backlog continues to grow I may experiment with posting twice a week

An Unexpected Side Effect

When I started this regiment, I was expecting my ideas list to begin to shrink. It hasn’t. On the contrary, it has been growing faster than ever. Because I have been writing more, I’ve been trying out new ideas and formats. These new formats mutate and give me even more ideas to try out. For example, now that I had some time to work on posts a little farther away from my traditional content, I gave book reviews a try. I found that they make a nice post and then decided to do a review for How to Write a Lot. This post was supposed to be a book review but took a rather introspective turn into my process and habits for writing. That got me thinking about starting a series on how I do certain small things like reading a scientific paper, self-teach from a textbook, search for an internship, etc…

The more you write, the more ideas you will come up with to write about. It’s a feedback loop of the best kind.

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