What Is the Best Time to Write?

I've recently bumped into an article by +Tanya Golash-Boza in her blog Get a Life, PhD. Her article deals with productivity and shares some tips on when it is better to write and how often you should engage in this activity. From her personal experience, she says that she gets up before everybody's awake and devotes this time to writing because that's the time when she's the most productive. Moreover, she mentions a study that looked into 3 groups of writers. One of them was called “the forced writers” who were to write five days a week. The findings have shown that other writers, who had to produce texts only when they had inspiration to, wrote much less than the forced writers and had few creative ideas. So, the conclusion here is that daily writing is a really fruitful activity especially when you have a lot of deadlines.

I decided to try this method and scheduled to write for two hours from 7 a.m. till 9 a.m. five days a week. I have been following this plan for 4 weeks so far and I have to admit that the results are amazing and you’ll understand why. The timing was perfect because my husband was already at work and my kids were still sleeping (school holidays could not have come at a better time). I was able to arrange my writing space in an ultimate order, turn on my favorite music and plunge into words without being bothered.

As it appeared, I’m really much more productive in the morning because my previous experience of being awake at 2 a.m. and doing what is called “writing” ended up in multiple revisions and editions. But my morning endeavors have brought about lots of original texts with minimum changes afterwards. Isn’t that great?

But let’s move to the actual numbers. So, before my experiment, I wrote approximately 1-1.5 page a day (together with drafting, revising, editing, etc.). But at present, when I follow the schedule I produce 2-3 pages and sometimes even more! Apart from my planned writing sessions, from time to time, I return to my texts several times a day, just because I have inspiration.

Well, you can see it for yourself that the results are incredible, at least for me! It’s totally worth trying, even just because you must always try something new.

So, write and enjoy, my dear friends.

Thank you, +Tanya Golash-Boza for such valuable tips!