Have no time to write? Me too. Somehow, I doubled/tripled my output in July.
We all strive to have it all, live a rich, meaningful life, but in the process, certain obligations can take hold and become high priorities, as such we usually end up putting our dreams aside, leaving ourselves with no time to do those things that are equally fulfilling and rewarding. Funnily enough, we even consider them as a guilty pleasure.
When can time be finally on our side?
Lots of us have a full-time work commitment and/or a family commitment or a study commitment. Everyone is time-poor these days, who’s got a whole big block of time that can be set aside for writing or anything else?
Perhaps it’s a question of over commitment or maybe a lack of time management in our ability? But all I know for sure is if at the end of day, I haven’t done at least one thing I enjoy doing, it’d mean that day has been wasted. Of course, it may sound a bit exaggeration. After all, from a physics’ point of view, energy is created and transformed (but not “wasted”) to somewhere. It’s true even when we’re stationary. The challenge is where do we put energy to good use to, so it’ll serve us?
For me, it’s writing.
Having written 9 posts in a month is my new record. From the very beginning, I didn’t set out to achieve anything, nor did I have a number in mind, I just wanted to write as often as possible, whenever and wherever I could. Then just let the results speak for themselves.
So there I was in July. I wrote when I was standing, I wrote when I was sitting, while on the bus, during my lunch break, after work hours, at home between house chores. Even at times when I didn’t have a smart phone with me (like when I was in the bathroom), I still stayed relatively active in writing in my head. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, little did I know, a post was then born out of a blank page. It was a great feeling.
Much has been said about work life balance. For me, it’s all about compromising and sacrificing. To inject writing into my already busy schedules requires a bit learning – how to make the most of my free time. Got only 5 or 10 minutes in between? Not a problem! It’s a matter of setting up smaller blocks of time here and there, then allocating writing to each time slot as you go along – So useful and practical, it’s set a good precedent for my writing ritual to continue this way going forward.
Enough said. Just crunch the numbers!
Amazingly, on any given day, on average I’ll have spare 2 to 3 hours to do just that – something I wouldn’t have thought possible. It’s quite astonishing to watch how little things can add up quickly to become a giant if done consistently and systematically, which has led me to think that if I could do it with writing, what else on the horizon can I also achieve?
Watch this blank space…
Ted Tsai 