time to write

Finding the time to write or working out how to be most productive at my writing tasks has always been a tricky aspect for me. My general sense, gathered from the fellow players I've encountered in the academic writing game, is that the more time and effort devoted to the task the better the result. Specifically the more time devoted to the task in a single day / sitting the better. So you can't have a productive writing day without being dent over your desk or your laptop from 6am to 6pm. It's almost the equivalent of the 'no pain, no gain' mantra used by gym fanatics and the like. That approach never really worked for me and I remember that at the height of my PhD writing only being able to manage, at best, maybe 4-5 hours of sustained and hard intellectual graft on any give day. And now given all the other things competing for my time and draining my energy (especially intellectually) the idea of sitting down for a full five hours on any given day simply to write feels both a luxury and an impossibility. So I'm rather excited and encouraged by the advice offered by Tanya Golash-Boza. Maybe her approach just fits into my yoga-induced philosophy of ahimsa which I've tried to apply to all aspects of my life, with varying degrees of success (as much of my blog writing suggests). But I also appreciate the importance of building in and acknowledging the thinking time so vital to writing. For some all of this mumbo-jumbo might just be a cop-out for laziness or signal a poor work ethic. And this kind of moralistically-infused argument always leads to second-guessing and worse still, self-doubt. But, if I've learnt anything from my four decades on this planet, it's to carve out your own path, to be confident in the choice you've made and also the manner in which you choose to navigate that path.