Real Words

I have found through conversations with other people who write for a living that most of us have the same problem when it comes to our personal writing projects. That problem is that we don’t take them seriously enough as “real work” to make time for them in our work days. We make sure that we take care of our other writing first because “that’s what pays the bills” and often end up having no time left for those writing projects that really excite us.

I’m working on a few different projects right now that I do for myself and not for money. A couple of my blogs are this way, the poetry project I mentioned earlier this week in the post on collaboration is this way and it is this way with the book that I’m working on which is based on my blog San Francisco is Sexy. I am excited to have these projects going on because they are writing that comes from my heart instead of from a job application that I made at one point or another.

However I do easily fall into that trap of putting off this writing while working on my paid writing gigs. It’s not so much a problem with the blogs. I’ve gotten into the habit of writing my blogs during my normally scheduled workday due in part to the fact that these blogs link to my other work and promote it so it feels kind of like “real work”. But I’ve definitely had to learn to make time in my work day for the poetry and book projects.

It’s easier said than done. At the start of each week, I commit to spending a certain amount of time on this work. Then things get busy, plans get changed, deadlines creep up on me and I find myself struggling to get everything done. At the end of the week, I haven’t worked on these projects much and I find that I either have the choice of not working on them at all or of taking my free time on my weekend to work on them. Neither is really preferable to me.

Slowly, but surely, I am learning how to set aside a chunk of time during each work day to devote to these projects. Right now it’s just half an hour per day but that adds up to about ten hours per month and that adds up to something tangible in front of me on the computer. I do this because I want to take my own projects as seriously as I take those projects that I’m being paid to complete.

What do you do to make sure that you have time for personal writing projects even though you work on writing for a living?