A Simple ‘Trick’ I learned To Find More Time To Write

By Ruth Barringham

“I don’t have time to write!”

This is a lament I come across regularly from would-be writers, and my answer to this is always the same, it’s, “you liar.”

Those who say they have no time to write always seem to have plenty of time for everything else. Even if you work full-time and have a family you still have a lunch hour, or you could get up earlier or stay up later, and use a bit of your weekend time too.

J K Rowling wrote her second Harry Potter novel during her lunch break when she was a full-time working single parent. She turned down all lunch invitations so that she could get her writing done.

I used to work full-time and write part-time until I could earn enough money from my writing so that I could work part-time instead.

I learned an easy ‘trick’ to manage my time better from a thing that my husband and I do to manage our spending.

Every month we go over our receipts for everything we bought the previous month and we add up all the things that we didn’t need to buy so that we can see how much money we wasted. We even go through the grocery receipts and add up all the junk food or processed crap we really could have done without.

These days our list is small because it taught us quickly where we were going wrong. We’re both pretty frugal so cutting back on unnecessary spending wasn’t hard.

And then recently I realised that I could do the same thing with my time. I could write down everything I do in a day and how long it took me.

This is all new to me because I’ve never been this pedantic about how I spend my time. But one thing I have noticed is that if I have to write down what I do and for how long, I’m more reluctant to waste time if I have to admit to it on paper. So straight away this system works.

It’s also quite confronting to have to admit that I waste more than an hour every day checking emails and social media. These two things alone could give me an extra 60 hours a month for writing or doing other necessary things. In fact, if I can write 1,000 words an hour (and most of us can), that extra 60 hours could be 60,000 words written.

And that’s just looking at two areas where I waste time every day.

So I’m going to keep it up and see how much more time I can reclaim if I stop wasting it.

Keeping track of what I waste my time and money on helps me to have more of both.

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