Your Un-Ideal Routine: Getting Your Writing Done When Your Perfect Writing Routine is Impossible

Once again, you’ve planned out your perfect writing routine. Maybe it’s a detailed spreadsheet, a list of writing appointments on your Google Calendar, or maybe you kept it old-school with a paper planner and colored boxes.

Once again, you’re excited to get started. Surely, this time, you’re going to hit your self-imposed novel deadline or finally write consistently for your blog.

But, once again, your routine falls apart. 

Maybe you didn’t even get past day one. Even the thought of rescheduling your writing into your week makes you feel disheartened—because there’s no way you can fit in as much writing as you want and no way you can write at your best time of day.

All the advice in the world on constructing your perfect writing routine can fall flat when your life is packed full of other commitments, and prioritizing your writing feels like an impossible task. Before learning to use your un-ideal routine as a strength, you must first learn to let go of the ideal, as I’ll show you in this post.

Seven Ways to Organize Your Writing Life (And Become More Creative)

How organized are you?

For a lot of writers, the honest answer is … not organized enough. They can’t find vital notes, they struggle to make the time to write, and they miss deadlines. Their lack of organization harms their writing life.

Some writers worry that getting organized means the death of creativity. They picture color-coded spreadsheets, rigid schedules, or a dismayingly bland desk. 

But the truth is, getting organized could be the best thing you do for your creativity and writing in general. I’ll show you why, and I’ll also share seven ways to organize your writing life.

Why Doing Nothing Is More Productive Than You Might Think

Do you track your word counts, log your hours spent writing, or keep a long to-do list of writing-related tasks?

All of these things can be helpful … but as writers, we sometimes get a bit too caught up in measuring how “productive” we are, at the expense of nurturing our creativity.

Sometimes, doing nothing—or wasting time—can be more productive than you’d expect.

Is It Possible to Write at Your Worst Time of Day? Yes (and Here’s How)

If you’ve ever read any writing advice, you’ve probably heard that you should “write at your best time of day.”

On the face of it, this makes sense: Obviously, you’ll want to write at a time when you can easily focus, and produce scores of words almost effortlessly.

Most of the advice then focuses on how to figure out your best time of day, perhaps through energy mapping or some other means.

This is helpful up to a point, but …

… it doesn’t address the huge question of what to do when you can’t use your best time of day to write.