How can you justify the time to write?

Sometimes we find it hard to justify spending time on our writing, whether it’s a creative outlet for us or a new career path, but should we let that stop us? Definitely not! Here are my top 3 solutions to avoid constantly having to justify your writing time.

1.      Trade your time for another activity. If part of your worry is being short of time, see what else you can trade the time for. In 23 Anti-Procrastination Habits S. J. Scott says “don’t add, substitute” to avoid becoming overwhelmed by time consuming tasks. Scott suggests the simpler solution is to substitute your new task for something that is “not generating results”, a “low-value activity” such as watching TV or doing anything that is not your strong point and could be delegated. I recommend looking at your week and seeing where your time goes, be aware and see what time you can take back for your writing. The easiest ones to identify and switch are the time wasters such as cruising social media, gameplay and watching television. (Yes, I do all of those too!) You can easily trade some of that time on a regular basis, particularly if you watch a few TV shows regularly, is there a least favourite program that you could do without? Other time to look out for could be grocery shopping – would it be quicker if you did it online and cut out the travelling, walking around the shop and checkout? Could another family member walk the dog two or three days a week and you could have that time to write? What about family chores that could be shared? Could you take the train instead of driving and do some writing en route to work? What about other tasks and hobbies that may not be as high a priority as writing for you? Everyone’s week is different, but we all have hidden time that can be recouped if we truly want to prioritise our writing.

2.      Develop your skill by aiming to improve one aspect of your writing each time you sit down to write. If you feel you are making progress, you will feel much more justified in spending the time. Personal development not only gives great personal satisfaction and a sense of achievement, gaining a mastery of new skills also opens up your career path, whatever job you do. With writing in particular, nearly every job can benefit from or be advanced by the skill of writing, for instance by taking on writing the company literature, reports, course material, newsletters, leaflets, emails, website content, marketing content etc. Effective written communication is a great skill for any workplace. Whether you are writing fiction or non-fiction, you are still practising with the written word and developing your mastery. Think of your writing time as personal or professional development for your future and that of your family too. 

3.      Stop worrying about what other people think and maybe take a look at your internal doubting Thomas while you’re at it. As in suggestion 2. it’s all about perspective, so if you are judging yourself for spending time on writing, or worrying about what other people think, take a moment to write down all the reasons not to write. Then counter each of them with a positive (and often more realistic) belief that opposes them, e.g. ‘writing isn’t a real job’ can be countered with ‘there are many career paths that are based solely on writing, like journalism, and even more that have an element of writing’. Use your creativity and see what you can come up with. Once you are more at peace with spending your time on writing, the less you will feel the need to justify it.

Do you feel you have to justify your writing time, to others or for yourself? What do you use to put your mind at rest? Let us know in the comments, I'd love to hear your solutions!

On that note, I’m signing off to go and write my upcoming book. Happy Writing!

Heather

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Learning your craft: The 20 Minute Master Plan for improving your writing

There is nothing more important than continuing to learn and APPLY your learning.

It takes a while for the things you learn to sink in, for them to connect to what else you’ve learnt & experienced and for it all to make any sense, so doing it in dribs and drabs is unlikely to give you the feeling that you are reaping any benefit from the time and effort you are putting in.

Equally, doing any kind of intensive learning or course often takes you away from your core activity of writing your own project and requires a much larger investment of both time and often money. 

While intensive courses can be and feel fantastic, if you aren’t continuing to learn in your regular routine as well, you aren’t likely to continue improving and the inspiration gained from those courses can quickly wane. 

For these reasons, I deeply encourage you to try learning regularly for an extended period of time. With this approach you will find you start to feel a difference, your mind processes the information, makes connections and hears the same ideas presented in a variety of ways. These different contexts give us a much better understanding of those ideas, much like when you hear a new word for the first time – it’s possible to grasp the wrong meaning from the context, but if you hear it used in another context, all of a sudden it makes sense. The same happens with learning a skill or concept – how the information is presented to you will affect how you understand it and subsequently use it. 

The more information you have, the better picture you will build of the subject and the better grasp you will have. So learning in different contexts, from different sources, is much better than a single source or context, so get out there and learn from as many sources as you can (those with a flighty nature will be doing cartwheels right now). Try blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, seminars, webinars, ongoing courses or evening classes, coaching, radio and TV programmes, interviews… any source you can think of. The beauty of it is in this day and age, a lot of these sources are free or available for very little. 

The added benefit of learning regularly is that having something new to apply inspires you to write just as regularly. You want to try these new ideas out, sometimes immediately! Or simply the act of working on improving yourself will drive the intention of writing in your subconscious mind and you will suddenly have a flash of inspiration about what to write. Sometimes this isn’t even related to what you were learning at the time, it’s just that your mind was in the right space to work on your own writing.

Another benefit is that you will be improving by practising with intent – in other words you will be proactively making progress on your skill set rather than attempting to improve purely through repetition of the act of writing (which has been proved not to work – Practice is not just repeating the same action).

This all sounds great, you may say, but how do I go about it? How do I motivate myself to do all this learning or fit it in? Surely I’ll get bored or forget?

My answer to that is: Get organised, decide which skills you want to work on then brainstorm all the different sources you can learn from. Research who the experts are and find out what they have to offer: books, interviews, videos etc. Pick the offerings that best suit your time & budget and write them down in the order you would like to do them in. Effectively you are creating your own curriculum. You will be tailoring your own learning time perfectly and by mixing up the media – an audiobook one day and a workbook the next – you will stay fresh and excited about what you are doing as well as having the flexibility to fit it in with your own life and activities. Schedule your curriculum in advance, so you can do things like put an audiobook in the schedule for a day you know you’re doing a long drive.

Researching what you can do and planning it is great fun, and once you’ve got it written in your diary along with where to find your source, it will be easy to follow and stick to. Look at it another way, if you spend just 20 minutes a day reading, watching or listening to something that will help you improve, in one year you will have done 121 hours of study! Time wise that equates to a 3 week intensive, full time course… but this way it’s tailored entirely to you and with the time built in to properly absorb & apply it.

If this sounds like a course you want to do, put a date in your diary right now to create your own 20 Minute Master Plan for learning your craft. Because if you do, the sky’s the limit!

Heather Zanetti