It has been a rare thing for me to have time to work on my own writing projects, in which category I include articles, academic papers, and, yes, novels. That said, recent changes to my work routine and to my children’s routines have worked wonders to free up a lot of my time.
The system is far from perfect yet but I am trying to have at least an hour every day that I can at least think about the novel that I am working on. Since it’s a novel based on the life of a real person, I can actually productively work on the thing simply by setting aside to read through a couple of biographies, making notes, working out a timeline. After all, it’s stuff that I need to do…at some point. It makes just as much sense, most of the time, that some point is right now or today rather than some indefinite point in time, the ominous ‘someday’ option that some of my planners offer as a deadline.
Adding my novel writing to my work to-do list, though, has proved to be a really useful, and I am also using a timer to record how much time I actually spend writing, etc. I’m also tracking how much time spent each day on another application to keep a record, forcing myself to be honest I suppose.
