20-Minute Chunks

No one can tell you how long you should write for. You need to decide that for yourself. But what I suggest is, if you want to write consistently, try breaking your writing time down into chunks. 

I tend to work in 20 to 30-minute chunks in my workshops, at least some of the time. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s remarkable how much you can write in a focussed 20 minutes. Participants are consistently amazed by how much they get done in just the first hour of a daylong retreat.

The key is to have a defined start and end to each period of writing. (Yes, you will need a timer for this, but it doesn’t need to be the boss of you; see #11 on this list.) If you just sit and go until you get hungry, have to pee, get an urgent email, feel like checking the news, get a knock on your office door, or have to run to a meeting, you don’t have a clear sense of starting and stopping. Writing bleeds into the rest of your day, and it often feels more like treading water than swimming laps.

Some people resist this suggestion to work in short bursts. Often, it is because they are convinced that the way they currently work is fine, it’s just their schedule that gets in the way. They have to deal with other commitments first, before they can really sit down a write. Others say it takes them 20 minutes just to get into their writing; they’d barely have started when it would be time to stop.

In response, I invite you to be honest with yourself. Will you always have other commitments that compete with your writing for your attention? Would you like to find a way to make regular progress on your writing projects in spite of them? Do you think it might be possible that if you checked in with your writing projects regularly for short periods, it would become easier to quickly pick up where you left off?

If you tell yourself you can’t possibly get started until you’ve cleared several uninterrupted hours of your day, you will be constantly searching for pearls in oysters, hoping that next week, next month, next summer you’ll finally find one.

If, instead, you commit to making short writing bursts a defined part of your routine, your projects can start to feel less like wild beasts needing to be tamed and more like friendly pets eager to greet you. You step in, make some progress, and move on. Day after day, this adds up. Momentum develops, motivation increases, time is found, and projects are completed.