Today was the first day of a new plan for my day. I’ve been fighting for a while with my daily schedule. I like to read blogs and other interesting things about the publishing industry. I have a day job to do, and kids to watch, well, by the end of the day when I was trying to write, I’d be tired and worn out. It had to struggle each day to get to the writing desk. I’ve managed it, but sometimes with only an hour or so to write. It also made my wife a bit unhappy because she often wouldn’t see me in the evening. She went along with it because the plan is for the writing to replace the day job at some point, but it’s not something she really embraced.
So, the new plan is that I go to bed at 10pm (instead of midnight) and I wake up at 5am to write before switching over to the day job stuff. This gives me at least two solid hours of writing time without the distractions of the day getting in the way. It also leaves the evenings free for whatever we want to do.
And it worked wonderfully today. I wrote 2000 words in about two and a half hours. Now the rest of the day is free to use as I need to without the worry of whether I’m going to get to the tasks of highest importance, at least as far as my career is concerned. My wife and kids would argue that they’re more important, and I’d have a hard time disputing that. But now, I get to spend time with them, too, without the writing hanging over my head.
Mark, I feel your pain. I struggled with this issue for years until that fateful night I woke up at three and couldn’t go back to sleep. I tossed and turned for a while, but eventually gave up, got up, and decided to write on my book. It was the most productive writing I’d done in my life. It took a while, but it happened again: another sleepless night filled with great writing. Eventually, I figured it out. It wasn’t insomnia that inspired me. Rather, it was the absolute quiet.
I couldn’t turn anything on, for fear of waking the wife and kids. In fact, I couldn’t even walk around, because my office is upstairs and the bedrooms are below me! So, I was stuck in the chair, staring at the screen. It wasn’t long before I adjusted my schedule to accommodate the three o’ clock quite.
Like you, I go to bed earlier (which means I now cater to my wife’s needs earlier in the evening, as well) and get my writing done before everyone gets up. Sometimes I play the “How much can I get done before the first person wakes up” game, and those tend to be my most productive nights.
The best part is, I am fully awake for the wife and kids in the morning, I am supercharged during work (because of all the writing I accomplished), and I have a blast all evening cuz I can’t wait to get to sleep again… cuz I gotta smokin’ hot date with the three o’ clock muse!
That is so awesome. I’m four days in now, and I feel great when the writing is done before everything else. I don’t feel like I’m short changing anything anymore, except late night TV. It’ll survive without me, I suspect.
Awesome that you’ve found a schedule which works for you. I know how blogs and articles can sap the will to write. Life and writing definitely is a balancing act.