Finding Time To Write
One of the biggest issues facing many of the writers I work with is a lack of time for creative work. When we are juggling lots of commitments and responsibilities, it’s easy for creative work to fall way down the list of priorities.
I’m always looking for tips on how to tackle this in a REALISTIC way. Recently I read an excellent piece by writer and editor Aigner Loren Wilson, who talks about the difficulty in making time for art when you have “the exact opposite of time.”
Wilson introduces the idea of “cutting and stacking”, which I absolutely love and am definitely trying out myself. To do this, we need to take a quick audit of the way we spend our time in an average day or week, and identify any parts of our daily lives that we can consider “time wasters”: activities that we don’t really need to do, and that don’t really serve us in a positive way. To be clear: this doesn’t include important obligations we might not enjoy doing! We’re talking about things you end up doing that you don’t even enjoy that much, like mindlessly doom-scrolling (I lose a LOT of time on this one, I’ll admit) or zoning out in front of mediocre TV you’re not really paying attention to. These are activities you can potentially cut to make time for creative work.
Cutting activities, Wilson admits, isn’t necessarily realistic for everyone. What if you’re already pretty maxed out, time-wise, and you don’t have much wiggle room? This is where STACKING comes in. Stacking is exactly what it sounds like: stacking activities or tasks together. Now, obviously, there are some activities that you can’t really stack (ideally, at least one of the activities needs to require less “thinking” so that you don’t end up in a muddle, and then there’s the issue of hands-free tasks). I can’t, for example, write on my laptop while doing the dishes. BUT: I could listen to a writing craft podcast while I do necessary chores, which will benefit my writing. Or I could use dictation features on my phone to “make notes” as I am busy emptying the dishwasher.
If you struggle to find time for your creative work, take a quick look at your schedule over the coming week and see if you can identify any tasks you could cut and/or stack. You might be surprised by what you can get done as a result!
