August was an experiment. I’ve been wanting to create a habit to spend more time writing and I’m having difficulty actually fitting it into my day. Each week I jot in a loose schedule in my calendar (I don’t do well with too much structure) of what I want to complete for the week, yet week after week the thing that was left undone was my writing practice.
I got my ordinary writing done, blog posts, this newsletter, and social media posts but my bigger projects never got any time. I checked in internally to see if it simply wasn’t time to create that practice, sometimes it’s hard for me to accept a fallow season, but it didn’t have that energy.
New Habits
My solution was during the month of August, I experimented with my daily routine. I like experiments. There’s a fun curious energy to them. Each week I tested a different method. Here are the results:
Week 1 – Habit stacking where you add a new habit to an existing one is usually successful for me. I got up an hour earlier – that would be 5:30 am instead of my natural 6:30 sunshine wake-up in case you’re curious, and wrote after my morning meditation. While I did write 3 days out of 5 it made me cranky and it didn’t feel sustainable.
Week 2 – Habit pre-stacking adding the new habit before something you always do. I chose to write for an hour before lunch ( also a bit of a reward lol). I did write 5 out of 5 days it wasn’t particularly good or productive writing partly because I was hungry and partly because that’s not a great time of day for me.
Week 3 – Heat mapping, taking a look at when I do my best work, and scheduling my writing then. I tend to be strong in the mornings and late afternoons. I wrote 1 of 5 days this week in large part because I naturally schedule my client work during these times. It was definitely not sustainable.
I did add a lovely practice to my morning routine. I sip my coffee for the first 10 minutes of the day without any distractions, looking out over the horizon, appreciating the birds and flowers in the backyard a bit of white space to just be before I begin my morning practice of meditation and journaling. This is a habit I will keep, it feels great to start the day with this little slice of peace.
Week 4 – Block scheduling, creating blocks of time for specific tasks. This theoretically boosts productivity by decreasing task switching. I worked with two 2.5 hour blocks for writing. I did write during both time blocks. I like the flexibility of moving the blocks around. This is the one I’ll keep with for the time being. It also had the added benefit of streamlining my other tasks and feels very sustainable.
Disrupting the Status Quo
Disrupting the status quo was the sleeper skill here. Looking at how I was moving through my day was eye-opening. What I was actually doing and what I thought I was doing were different.
I had created some bad habits and time-sucks. Instagram rabbit hole anyone?!? Framing this as an experiment bypassed my inner critic allowing me to play with different frameworks, techniques, and even question what was important given I am committed to a shorter workweek. I asked others how they managed scheduling time for their goals and got some great ideas. Thanks Olivia for the time block suggestion!
The inertia of moving past the status quo….just because it’s what’s comfortable is a game-changer. Where are you stuck in the status quo? What do you do to move past it?
Comment below and let me know
Be Well,
Cathy