Stop Saying I Don't Have the Time To Write

Do this instead

Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash

Last Sunday, I knew I was in trouble when my friend asked me if I could help him finish his paper by Tuesday.

I like to call him Bulldozer.

You see, bulldozers are pretty ineffective if you need to get some work done in your flower garden. But they’re killing it if you have to move your front yard into your back yard.

Bulldozers are not about nitpicking or fine-tuning.

They’re all about the rough edges.

So my friend cranked out a scientific work that’s way above what people expected, but to add page numbering in Microsoft Word? Excuse me? What I am Clippy — came the question.

So this week went by for me without publishing anything long-form related.

What this has to do with anything?

You make the choices

This week

I choose not to write.

Me. I did it. Not the stars, the wrong alignment of Jupiter, or client work. And certainly not my friend.

Naval Ravikant talks a lot about making choices in  The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness  (affiliate link), a fantastic book.

Every given moment, you’re offered a choice. There isn’t a future or past. It’s just the now where you choose between two things you cannot do simultaneously.

Then, you make some more choices

My morning routine was almost non-existent for the past 5 days.

I was worried about missing the deadline, and we just worked hard to finish the paper. As you can imagine, by today, I have dozens of ideas about what I could do.

But this morning

I choose to write

I did it. I’m not lucky to have time for this or earned it in any way. I picked writing from the hundred things I could do this morning and just wrote this.

So what do I suggest?

Own your decisions

You make the choices, so own them. Sometimes you pick something you don’t want to do right now, but you know it’ll play out great in the long run, so you pick it anyway.

As Naval says in his Almanack,

Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

It’s like when your boss asks you to stay a bit late today, and you’d just really like to go home, but you also know that telling him you’ll go home because you couldn’t care less would hurt your salary the next month.

Whatever you pick, just own it.

Is it a priority for You?

The internet is full of all this great stuff you can do right now, but you can’t miss your favorite TV show because you need “Me time”, recharging, whatever, that’s fine. It’s your choice.

If this keeps going and it looks like you can’t fit something into your day, again, it’s not the universe. You simply prioritize other stuff, and that’s fine until you’re aware of this.

Conclusion

I hope this will save you from the army of self-help books that try to tell you a bunch of mumbo-jumbo about why simple things like finding time need a new mental model with 13 steps, 4 interconnected apps, and a premium subscription of $15.

Only to hide that you must choose writing over not writing, and you have to choose it Now.

Eckhart Tolle’s book  The Power of Now  (affiliate link) is practically about this mindset. The coolest thing about living in the present is realizing you constantly make choices, and it’s not something like, I didn’t write yesterday, therefore, I suck.

Next time, simply choose writing. And then do it again.

And again, and again.