When you write primarily from home, it can be difficult to prioritize your writing amid the hustle and bustle of everything else that happens there — laundry, dishes, noisy roommates, noisy spouses, high-maintenance pets, high-maintenance kiddos, and maybe even your day job. If these distractions — or any others — make it difficult for you to write from home effectively, try these five strategies to ramp up your productivity.
Make Your Space Special
Virginia Woolf was onto something when she advocated for “a room of one’s own.” If you can, set aside a space in your home — whether it’s a whole room, a converted closet, or just a desk in the corner — for your writing. In an ideal world, this is a space where nothing else happens. When you enter the room or sit down at the desk, it’ll be easy to fall into a writing mindset.
Of course, dedicating an entire space to just writing isn’t feasible for many of us — especially now that so many things happened elsewhere pre-COVID are now happening at home. The good news is, if your writing can’t have a room of its own, all is not lost. Instead, pick a writing space that you can share with another activity (the desk where you do your day job, the kitchen counter, or even your kids’ homework table), and give it a quick makeover before each writing session. This doesn’t have to be complicated and time-consuming. Just clear away the other responsibilities — put your work materials into a box under your desk or stow away the clutter that’s accumulated on the table, even if just temporarily — and swap it out with whatever makes the space belong to the serious writer you are. Light a candle, lay out your favorite notebook and pens, set up your framed motivational quotes…you get the idea.
Don’t give sound design short shrift here, either. If you relish the low buzz of a coffee shop where none of the sounds require your attention, search “coffee shop ambience” on YouTube and let the soft music, conversation, and clinking dishes play through your earbuds. If you focus best with total silence — and if closing a door isn’t an option — try noise-cancelling headphones.
Even if all you have is a corner, there’s a lot you can do to make your space feel like the perfect writing sanctuary.
(There is one exception: if your pets are anything like mine, they will not respect your time. Sometimes, you just have to write with a cat on your desk.)
Protect Your Time
The more you train yourself and others to hold your writing time sacred, the less likely it will be to disappear into the mountain of other responsibilities in the home. So, whether you write in daily sprints or long, leisurely blocks twice a week, you can protect your time by scheduling it in your calendar. That way, writing is as critical a part of your schedule as taking your kids to soccer practice or meeting that deadline at work.
Equally important: put your writing time in your housemates’ calendars. If your spouse works at home, too, give him or her a reminder that you’re not to be disturbed for anything less than emergency. Same goes for roommates, and even kiddos who are old enough to be self-sufficient for a little while.
Hold Yourself Accountable
Getting your writing sessions on your calendar is a huge help, but it’s just the first step to taking your writing as seriously as you’ve been wanting to. Hold yourself accountable by setting achievable goals, and then by finding some kind of writing community to help you stick to them.
Let’s talk goal setting first. I’ve written in more detail about setting writing goals before, but here are the three basics that I think are most important:
Make them measurable. Instead of “Writing the next great American novel,” try, “finish a first draft.” Instead of “practice my craft,” try “take three writing classes. When you a goal is measurable — meaning you can see yourself making progress and you’ll know without a doubt when you’ve achieved it — you’ll likely be much more inspired to keep working on it.
Make them achievable. Part of making goals achievable is making sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew (see “next great American novel,” above). But a bigger part, at least as I see it, is framing them with criteria that work for you. If “write for an hour every morning” is impossible because your schedule is too varied or you’ve never been a morning person, then try something different. Maybe it’s “write 1500 words per week” or “write for four hours a week.” That way, you can hold yourself to regular writing sessions, but you can give yourself the grace (and the power) to fit your writing into your life instead of the other way around.
Make them flexible. When I say this, I don’t mean feel free to give up on them whenever it gets hard. Rather, I mean you should feel free to revise your goals when life gets in the way. If you find that a goal you’ve set for yourself isn’t as achievable as you might’ve initially thought, don’t just get discouraged and quit. Instead, reevaluate your goal. If you have a big life change (new job, new baby, new house, sickness, etc.) that upends your schedule, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed in your writing goals. It simply means they need to be adjusted. Somehow, we fall into this trap of making New Year’s resolutions that are full of energy and promise, then disregarding our goals altogether when we realize our eyes were bigger than our proverbial stomachs. But if we remember that we can make goals or reset our patterns any time we want, then we can give ourselves permission to be flexible, working toward the same outcomes in new ways.
Next, I encourage every author to find other authors to cheer each other on and get down in the trenches together. This can look a lot of different ways, too, and I’ve done a deep dive here. You may enjoy the simple camaraderie of in-person or virtual writing sessions, where just the knowledge that each of you is working individually, side by side, on your creative projects keeps you motivated to keep pushing through blocks (and stop clicking over to Instagram). You may want a more formal arrangement where you get feedback from critique partners, fellow group members, or even a writing coach. Whatever structure works best for you, find that teammate or group that will remind you that, even though writing is a solitary activity, it doesn’t have to be a lonely one.
Set Up Tomorrow’s Session at the End of Today’s
Sometimes, the biggest deterrent to following through on a scheduled writing session is the blank page. If you find getting started is the hardest part — and sometimes even intimidating enough to steer you toward cleaning the house or mowing the lawn instead — try ending each writing session by getting a head start on the next one. This may sound a little nutty, but hear me out:
When you come to the end of the scene or chapter or paragraph that closes out your writing session, I bet that, more often than not, you’re still feeling a little momentum, and you’ve got a clear picture of what comes next in your story. But once you get up from your computer, as you go about your day, that momentum and that picture fade. Next time you sit down to write, that energy is gone.
But, if you leverage that momentum at the end of the writing session to write just the first few sentences of your next scene, you’ll find the fear of the blank page goes away, and you can approach your next session as a chance to pick up where you left off rather than feeling like you’re starting something new. I find this strategy works extra well if I write those first few sentences by hand. Then, when I start my next writing session, going into my Word Document and typing that prewritten snippet gets me back into the world of the story and makes it easier to build that momentum back up.
Be Flexible
Finally, and maybe most importantly, be flexible. Just like you don’t want your writing goals to become obstacles, you don’t want your routines to become obstacles, either. If your usual time to write is 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. but you have to go to a neighborhood meeting one night, that doesn’t mean you can’t write that day — and it certainly doesn’t mean you can’t pick back up tomorrow. If your special writing candle has burned down to the end, remember that you can write without it. If your cat chewed through your headphones (Is it just my cat that does that?), you can write without them.
I wrote a blog post last month about how, although our writing routines can be incredibly powerful, they can also be our biggest obstacles. So even as you work to structure your writing practice in order to give it the weight it deserves in your life, remember that writing at a cluttered table at a less-than-ideal time or with your third-favorite pen is better than not writing at all.
Want more writing productivity strategies? 10 Practical Tips to Build Up Your Writing Practice
What tips, tricks, or hacks do you use to keep your writing life productive, whether you’re writing in a busy home, a private office, or anywhere in between?