What Are You Willing to Sacrifice to Write?

The writing dream is easy, but executing it is another story. We all have busy lives, whether we work outside the home or we work from home freelancing or taking care of our children. There are so many responsibilities, errands, and other tasks that deserve our attention. So, in our busy lives, how in the hell can we find time to write?

1—Sacrifice your empty time.

Obviously, you’re going to have to sacrifice your time if you want to find more room in your life to write, but that’s not the kind of time I’m talking about. I’m talking about those spaces of time where we sit around the house waiting to leave for work—or we sit in our cars at lunch playing games on our phone until it’s time to return. Instead of doing that, why not leave 5 or 10 minutes early for work and use that time to write? Before I became a full-time freelancer, this is exactly how I got things done. I used Google Docs or Word Online to continue writing on whatever my current project was. While it may not give you a huge daily word count, any amount of work you do on your writing pushes you forward to the end.

2—Personal Facebook time, sports, and TV are not as important as we think they are.

I am a pretty prolific blogger because I’m very focused on my end goal, and I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of those empty activities to keep improving on my strategy and on my writing skills. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t take the time to relax and enjoy the things I love every once in a while. If I’m spending three hours watching TV or scrolling through Facebook every day, I don’t personally feel it’s asking too much of myself to cut that down to one or two hours per day. Start by cutting out 30 minutes a day, then eventually cut out an hour per day. You can be pretty productive if you can dedicate at least one hour per day to your writing schedule.

3—You don’t really need to go out with your friends EVERY night.

I know I’m going to hurt somebody here, but it’s true. If both writing and your friendships are important to you, you’re going to need to sacrifice something. If you opt to stay in one weekend night to write, your friends will not abandon…