The first day should be exciting. Embarking on something new should have you filled with excitement for what’s to come. The roads you’ll travel. Places you’ll see and people you’ll meet.
Today is a day one. A small one, as far as these things go, yes. But one I’m excited about nevertheless.
For some time I’ve been thinking about how to structure my life to better make space for a writing habit. It was one pursuit I wanted to prioritise when I freed up extra time and energy by no longer pursuing personal bests in running.
Since then I’ve been thinking. Decompressing. Readjusting to a new reality after shedding a layer of myself. But now I feel ready to embark on a new journey in earnest.
But, I’ve discovered that it will require some adjustments to how I structure my day.
With my current daily structure, the only obvious time of day with space to write is in the evening. After putting the kids to bed. Depending on what the rest of the day has looked like, I might need to get in my daily workout first as well. This leaves me with between an hour and perhaps two and a half two write.
Ample time to get in a block of focused writing.
Only I’ve discovered two problems with this approach:
It’s difficult for me to write in the evenings
This one has taken a while to discover. But, as I’ve now become aware, I find it terribly hard to focus on writing in the evenings. It’s not that strange, when you look at it. After a long day spending energy on kids, work, working out, tidying around the house et cetera et cetera, I’m just all out of focus energy.
What made it not entirely obvious, however, was that at this time of day, I’m very much in the right space for explorative and unstructured work. Stuff that, on the surface, looks not entirely unlike «creative work».
Like messing around with this website or one of the many others I’ve made through the years. (All of which have been mostly put together in the evenings or during the pitch black of the night.)
Or exploring some cool new tech service, or new-to-me open web protocols.
Whenever I sit down to write at night, I usually end up doing something like this. Following my curiosity instead of focusing on the task at hand. For a long time, my takeaway from this has been that I’m just not suited to more structured creative work.
It’s why I could never become a proficient guitarist. If inspired by listening to, and being captivated by a specific song, I could dedicate hours to trying to learn how to play it.
Whenever I tried to commit to more structured practice, though, I just couldn’t follow through.
My forays into writing have all followed a similar pattern. Whenever hit by bursts of inspiration, I could churn out thousands of words into the dark of the night. But trying to do it regularly?
Forget about it.
For a long time, I’ve put this down to lacking the ability to engage in structured creative work. I’m forever bound to be at the whims of some unseen muse.
It wasn’t before I, over the past year, started engaging in something that looks an awful lot like creative work (light software development like script coding and the like) at my day job, that I had an epiphany.
I would block out full days for working on a script to automate some task. But what I found was that almost all of my output came in the early hours of the workday. By midday, no matter how much I tried, I would find it hard to be productive with tasks requiring intense focus. I’d instead slip into familiar old patterns, defaulting to doing the easy work. Answering emails, fending off low hanging fruit on my to do list.
At some point, a light bulb eventually went off.
«Hey, wait! Maybe I actually have the ability to focus, and I’ve just spent almost all of my focus hours in a classroom or an office over the past 38 and a bit years.»
Maybe.
But all of that wasn’t enough for me to connect the dots. It was, instead, as I embarked on yet another effort to establish a regular writing habit just before bedtime that I discovered the second problem with trying to write in the evenings:
Evening screen time destroys my sleep quality
When you’re doing what you can to optimise physical performance, sleep is essential. (Cute, right? Trying to do something that hinges on sleep at the same time as you’re raising small kids.) As a result, I’ve become quite attuned to what affect my sleep quality over the past few years.
Intensive workouts in the evenings? The most certain way of ensuring a fitful night.
Big, late night meal? Yeah, no.
An evening in front of the blue light screen? Good luck with that.
As a result, I’ve — mostly by trial and error — settled on reading as my evening activity. I read on a kindle, and, in my experience, it has none of the negative effects that come with a phone, laptop or TV screen. On the plus side, it has all of the added benefits of regular reading.
Exchanging some of my reading time for writing time over the last few weeks has been a stark reminder of why I settled on reading in the evenings in the first place. Quality of sleep instantly degraded. And, for this reason alone, I knew that writing in the evenings was not an option. Whatever you want to do, sacrificing sleep to do it is a sure fire way of ensuring that it’s not sustainable.
So, what to do?
By now you’ve probably realised that I’m not the among the sharpest tools in the shed. I was aware of both of the things that I’ve outlined above. They existed as separate entities of knowledge in my consciousness. Still, I found myself pondering.
«Is there anything at all I can do to increase my chances of establishing a writing habit?»
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«Surely there must be a time of day that I can set aside for writing that could work?»
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The first day
I didn’t connect the dots until, one evening (of course) I was randomly browsing through r/AdvancedRunning. Old habits die hard. In a thread about how to structure your running training when you have small kids, one guy talked about how he got up early in the morning and got in his first run of the day before his family even woke up.
I think my brain was literally creaking as it struggled to make the connection.
So here we are. Day one.
I set the alarm for 5AM. Got up at 4:30 because I was excited to get started.
What you’re reading is the unedited result of my first day of another attempt — this time with a different approach — of establishing a daily writing habit.
Will it stick? I don’t know. But I have a good feeling about this one.