“How do I balance writing with [everything else]?”

Sometimes people ask, “How do I balance writing with X?”, where X is your coaching business or your full time job or your family responsibilities or all of the above. A valid question!

I think there are two sides to the question.

The first is prioritization, as in “How do I make writing a priority among all the other priorities in my life?”

The second is scheduling, as in “How do I create a writing schedule that works with my life?”

I’ll attempt to address both here using my process as an example. First, though, I think an underlying issue is that a person intends to write at some point in a day. Maybe a person even has a time blocked off for writing, but when something more urgent or personal or ROI-related or attention-worthy comes up, the writing time gets pushed to the side. I know; it used to happen to me!

This means we haven’t made writing time a priority. 

I know it’s hard to prioritize writing among all the other things. But this is the trick! The trick is to prioritize the time and space for the creative work, even though we are conditioned to sacrifice it for paid work/family responsibilities/everything else. 

This is how I do it.

First ask yourself “What if?” What if you took the first hour of the day for your writing time? What if you claimed one weekend day as your writing day? What if you were able to trade some duties with your partner in order to get the ideal spot reserved for your writing on your calendar?

I already knew that I preferred working on my writing for the first hour or two every day. It took me some trial and error to figure it out, but it started by asking “What if I blocked the first couple of hours on weekdays for my writing time?”

The next big insight came from realizing that I really didn’t want to be “dressed and ready” to face the world until after my writing time. I figured out that I wanted to limit my “on camera” time to certain hours of the day – and even though it sounded unreasonable at first, I asked myself “What if I only was available to be “on camera” from 11-4?”

The question “What if?” allows us to play with an idea before committing to it. It allows us to see what’s possible, to try it on for size, and see how it feels.

I sketched out an ideal weekly work plan to see how it felt. 

I Googled “free weekly calendar” and got this downloadable so I could try out my ideal plan before messing up my Google calendar. 

I put sticky notes on the calendar: yellow for my “on camera” time and salmon for my writing time and my gym time. These were the non-negotiables. These were the priorities.

This actually felt doable! It seemed scary to put my priorities on paper. It felt like I was asking a lot, maybe too much, to make my preferences known. But once it was on paper, it seemed reasonable to attempt to fit my client work and calls within my “on camera” time every week.

Since it felt reasonable, the next step was to create it in Google Calendar so that each week I’d know where my priorities were and where I needed to fit in the specific tasks that belonged to each priority. 

This may look like time blocking, and maybe you’ve tried it and either 1) hated it or 2) it didn’t work or 3) both. Bear with me – think about it as “templating” instead. You’re creating the boundaries of your priorities, which gives you the ability to honor them. And if you need to move things around, which we all do, we can do it with intention so that we control when we move our boundaries. More on this in a minute.

In Google Calendar, you can create custom calendars like this (here are the instructions) to make your ideal week template. Set the calendar events to be weekly recurring events, and color code as you like. In my case, turquoise is admin, orange is “my time,” yellow is “client calls/work time”, red is my workout time, and blue is a calendar I share with my husband for our events or things that the other needs to be aware of. 

These calendars are containers, if you will. They are the guardrails for the tasks which now can be layered on. 

The purple calendar events are specific tasks. Client work and client calls go in the “client calls/work” container, such as “review client A’s work.” Writing tasks go in the “my time” container, which could be “revise essay” or “draft a blog post.” Other things go on the calendar as needed, and I do work after my workout time, just not on camera! The purple calendar is connected to my Calendly, so calls or events can only be scheduled within the yellow buckets. Of course, I am flexible with clients about moving meeting times when necessary, and if someone can’t meet during my preferred times I can manually schedule around it. As you can see below, there are overlaps and compromises. For example, every other Thursday afternoon I’m joining a writing group, which takes up most of my client time that day, so I have to do some client work during “my time” to make up for it. But I get to choose, which means I don’t feel resentful if I have to swap some of “my time” for some client time. I've gotten better at maintaining my boundaries by templating this way.

Yes, I have the privilege of ordering my life this way. (I don’t have kids, I’m not taking care of a parent, I don’t have a side hustle or an office job.) But even if you have constraints on your free time, you can use the same process to organize your time so that you can 1) prioritize your creative work and 2) also get other stuff done, with what you have available!

Templating works whether you want to develop and maintain “writing-only” days or block off bits of time. If you don’t know which works for you yet, experiment for a week or two with one and then the other. See which works best with your tendencies and lifestyle.

By templating, you’re pre-committing to the schedule you want. By pre-committing, you’re removing the decision-making from the moment. This way, you don’t decide if you feel like writing right now; you just do it. My workouts are pre-committed, so I never have to decide on Tuesday afternoons if I feel like going to the gym (I never feel like going to the gym, but I go and I work out and I feel good about doing it).

The takeaway here is that creating an ideal schedule isn’t “all or nothing.” Like a painter sketches before painting, or like an architect builds a smaller than scale lightweight model before building the actual building, or like a writer might outline before writing, we can experiment and gather data to see what works. (Side note: scheduling an admin task for late afternoon Friday is not a good idea.) I know it feels like “I gotta get it right on the first try” but that is just our brain trying to keep us safe (or stuck) in the same old situation. If you’re stuck because you feel like you’re not “balancing your writing” with everything else in your life, give this a try.