As you scroll through your favourite newsletters, a creeping doubt settles in. How do they do it? How do they publish consistently, week after week, while you can barely manage to jot down ideas between meetings?
Often, I write about productivity and time management because these topics fascinate me. I dive in, experiment, and report back to you, my dear readers, on what works and what spectacularly doesn't. But here's the truth: writing about time management doesn't make me any good at it. Far from it.
You'd think someone who geeks out on productivity would have a bulletproof content calendar, right? That publishing a weekly newsletter would feel less like sprinting in front of a freight train and more like a leisurely stroll through a zen garden.
It doesn't.
I have a plan, sure. A beautiful, color-coded spreadsheet of ideas and deadlines that I ignore with impressive consistency about 99% of the time. Why? For the same reason as you, I have busy life on the side.
The Myth of the Perfect Writing Time
Here's a piece of productivity wisdom I clung to for far too long: we have a finite cognitive bandwidth each day, and we're at our sharpest right after waking up. Some expert somewhere declared,
“Typically, we have a window of about three hours where we’re really, really focused. We’re able to have some strong contributions in terms of planning, in terms of thinking, in terms of speaking well. And if we end up squandering those first three hours reacting to other people’s priorities for us, which is ultimately what voice mail, or email is, is a list of other people’s requests for our time, that ends up using up our best hours and we’re not quite as effective as we could be.”1
I took it as a gospel and rolled with it.
A study from the National Library of Medicine stirs this theory:
"Result indicates better attention and alertness during evening hours in evening chronotypes and vice versa in morning chronotypes." In other words, your ideal writing time is as unique as your coffee order.
This brings us to the concept of chronotypes – your body's natural preference for sleep and wake cycles. Are you a "bear," most alert mid-morning? A "wolf," hitting your stride in the evening? A "lion," ready to conquer the world at dawn? Or a "dolphin," existing in a perpetual state of sleep-deprived anxiety?
We have a finite amount of mental energy when we wake up in the morning. As we engage in different activities throughout the day, such as working, browsing news or social media, exercising, reading, and conversing with others, we expend some of our attention on each. This means we must be mindful of allocating our mental resources to avoid becoming mentally exhausted or overwhelmed.
The muse comes around the clock
Remember all those brilliant ideas you had in the shower, only to forget them by the time you toweled off?
, in her book “Big Magic”, has some thoughts on that:“When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention.”2
But here's the catch:
“This is the other side of the contract with creativity: If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.”3
In other words, your meticulously planned content calendar might need to go out the window when inspiration strikes at 2 AM on a Tuesday. The corporate world teaches us to schedule creativity like we schedule meetings. The writing world? It laughs at our cute little attempts at control.
The Overachiever's Dilemma
The problem with being an overachiever in the writing world is that there's always another hill to climb. Finish a post? Great, now engage on Notes. Hit your subscriber goal? Fantastic, time to launch a podcast. The goalposts are constantly moving, and that little voice in your head – the one that got you those gold stars in school and promotions at work – never shuts up.
But here's the radical idea I'm trying to embrace: what if we just... didn't? What if, instead of chasing the next milestone, we actually sat with our accomplishments for a moment?
The Honesty of the Struggle
There's a part of me that dreams of having a backlog of posts, ready to go at a moment's notice. It would certainly make Tuesday evenings less stressful. But there's also something to be said for the raw honesty of writing in real-time, of letting your readers see the struggle and the growth.
So, What Now?
If you take anything from this rambling, let it be this: the systems that worked for you in the corporate world probably won't translate directly to your writing life. And that's okay.
Your job now is to experiment, to try new approaches, and to be gentle with yourself when they inevitably fail. Maybe you'll discover you're a night owl who does your best work at 11 PM. Perhaps you'll find that dictating ideas while on walks leads to your most compelling content. The only way to know is to try.
And when you find yourself staring at a blank page, deadline looming, remember this: we're all making it up as we go along.
This is the third post out of 24 essays I plan to write as part of the Sparkle on Substack Essay Club to keep myself accountable and post regularly.
If life often gets in the way of your regular writing and you are a fellow Substacker (which many of you are), I'd recommend you joinClaire Venus and
Essay Club.
Lots of great points here that are resonating, Jana - very thought-provoking! I’m curious now to check out the chronotypes. :)
I loved The Big Magic andd found it very inspirational. I loved the concept of ideas coming and knocking on the door of our minds. It helped realise I better invite them in when the come, even if it' 3 am ;)
I do write posts in advance as it's less stressfull for me. I draft, come back, rewite, improve. It just takes longer.