Pay yourself first - in writing time
Prioritize your writing - even if it's just a few minutes a day.
Productivity advice often feels unrealistic to me. Just get up at 5am and write for a couple of hours before starting work, every day, until you have a completed book! Take a month off and go on a writing retreat to bash out your first draft!
Well, great, if those things work with your schedule, finances, energy levels, and work and family commitments. Not to mention your day-to-day struggles and crises. For most of us mere mortals, life is more complicated than that. And those über-productive morning routines shared by ‘LinkedInfluencers’ are rightly parodied.
The very concept of productivity can be toxic. It can provoke feelings of anxiety, guilt and failure. So give yourself a break. You’re only human. You have a lot going on.
But you do still want to write that book, so… I want to share with you a simple mindset shift that has worked for me lately. I call it ‘Pay yourself first’.
Pay yourself first
‘Pay yourself first’ is a piece of personal finance advice you may already be familiar with. It means automatically saving a percentage of any income you receive, before you pay your bills. It’s a strategy — and a mindset — designed to control spending and increase your savings towards a future goal.
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to save money like this, of course — especially during a cost of living crisis. But we can all pay ourselves first in time. And I’ve been starting my days like this lately.
In my day job I write a lot of stuff for clients. Things like corporate web pages, blog posts, PDF guides and social media content. My own writing often gets pushed to the bottom of the pile. This is something many writers can relate to. We’re not (yet!) getting paid for our own writing, so we have to focus on our work for clients or employers to pay the bills. It’s the old story of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot (a very old saying — first recorded in a book of proverbs in 1546).
It’s easy to put off writing, because you feel you have to prioritize activities that will generate a real income now rather than a theoretical one in the future. Practical, often essential — but you won’t get your book written that way. It robs you of writing time — and your future.
How to find writing time
Time may be money. But you can find five minutes a day. Maybe 10 or 20 minutes. Start small and build up gradually, if you find that you can. I have an hourglass on my desk filled with bright green sand that lasts about 20 minutes (a 20-minuteglass?) — and this works well for me.
Your paid work won’t suffer from a 20-minute absence. Especially if you find those extra minutes by getting up a bit earlier (or writing in bed, before you get up!), taking a shorter lunch break, skipping that TV show, limiting your social media scrolling, or finding something else to cut from your schedule. Something small, and something that you value less than writing.
Use that time to write — and do it first, before you start your paid work.
You don’t even have to write much. This advice, from bestselling author Kate Mosse, is excellent:
“Everybody who wants to write has got time to write. You haven't got time to write that novel if you’re doing a million other things and you’re working and travelling and caring and whatever it is — but you do have time to write a description of what steam looks like coming out of the kettle. And if you do a tiny bit of writing every day, so your muscles are ready for it, it means that you take away the fear of the page, the blank screen. So that when you do have time to sit down and write that novel or that biography or that history, you’re ready to go.”
— Kate Mosse, Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 25 June 2023
Four benefits of prioritizing your writing time
This isn’t simply about finding time to write. It’s about the order in which you do things. It’s about prioritizing yourself. Paying yourself first, in writing time, has emotional as well as practical benefits.
A published book! Just as the personal finance ‘pay yourself first’ can help you control your spending of money for future benefit, this one can help you control your spending of time – and achieve the future goal of a published book.
A sense of achievement. You’ll start the day feeling that you’ve achieved something. You got some words down, and you moved a bit closer to your goal of becoming an author!
Less resentment. You won’t resent having to spend all your time on non-writing work. Because you won’t be.
Greater self-esteem. Paying yourself first is an act of self-care, which is essential for good mental health. You’re investing in yourself, spending time doing something you enjoy, and taking control of your future.
Just as you can start a savings account with a pound or a dollar, you can start paying yourself in time with just five minutes. It will accrue over time, and you’ll get your book written. Future you will be grateful. So start now!