How to Prioritize Your Life for Writing

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 25. In today's episode, we tackle one of the biggest obstacles to writing, finding the time. We're talking priorities today and how to organize your life as a writer. Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly podcast for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction.

My name is Brad Reed, and I want to thank you for being a listener. I hope you'll consider subscribing to the show so that you never miss an episode and that you'll recommend it to your writer friends, as well as leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcasting app. As usual, a great big thank you to the members of the Patreon team who keep me motivated and always striving to bring you great content, both here on the podcast as well as in the Patreon team member rewards. If you're interested in being part of that Patreon team, check out the show website at www. bradreedwrites. com for more info about that.

The Challenge of Prioritising Time

Today's topic is about a challenge that affects every single writer that I know. How do you prioritize your life so that you can be a writer? And we're going to go deeper than the you don't find the time, you make the time advice that we usually hear when we're struggling with this issue.

Now, while there's truth to that advice, for sure, it's not very helpful in real life. Okay, so let's face it, we're busy. We all are. No matter who you are, no matter what you do for a living, or how you prioritize your time, there's just not enough of it. That's just a truth about our modern culture. We have jobs, we have commutes, we have families, hobbies, responsibilities, friends, and there are only 24 hours in the day, and they click by at the exact same rate, whether we're binge watching Westworld, which I'm doing right now, or pounding out words on our keyboards.

No wonder a massive industry has grown up centered around teaching us how to manage our time. According to an informal search done by businesspundit. com, the time management industry is actually bigger than the weight loss industry, at least in the number of books, DVDs, and products that are pitched as solutions to time management. Over the years, I've bought and even self-created dozens of different time management systems, trying to get my own life in order, and especially to try to make time for the writing life that I wanted to build for myself. We've all heard the same kind of tried and true advice. Organize, right?

Organize your life. Cut back on things that are less important. Get up earlier. Learn to multitask. Create a schedule, and boy, have I gone through so many variations of different schedules over the years. Or nowadays, buy an app, right?

A Revolutionary Time Management Insight

And all of these things can actually help, at least to an extent, but I think they miss the larger point of what's going on when we're talking about prioritizing our time, because most of them are about squeezing more into a limited amount of time so that you somehow free up space to do all the things that you love. About a year ago, I came across a piece of advice that revolutionized the way I think about and the way that I use my time, and it's something I'd never really considered before. Since then, I've actually searched and searched for the source of that advice. I'm so frustrated that I didn't write it down somewhere, because I haven't been able to find that source again. I know that it was from somebody incredibly, incredibly successful, and they called it one of the secrets to their success.

So I'm unfortunately unable to give credit to the person that I got this advice from or point you to additional information from that source. By the way, as you listen to today's episode, if you know where this came from, please shoot me an email, bradreed at bradreedwrites. com, so I can come back and update this episode and let people know and give credit to where this piece of advice came from.

So anyway, this piece of advice uncovered a fallacy or a falsehood that I had bought into for most of my life. A fallacy that goes something like this. If you're good at something or if you enjoy doing something, it means that you were meant to do that thing, right? Somehow fated to do or designed to do that thing. My guess is that this is probably something that you've bought into as well over your life. If you're good at writing, that means you were meant to be a writer, right?

Or if you enjoy writing, that means you were meant to be a writer. If you're good at teaching, then you were meant to be a teacher. If you're good at fixing cars, then somehow you were meant to be or designed to be a mechanic. This thinking has a kind of feeling of fate behind it, as if there is some ultimate calling or career that we were each designed specifically for, and until we find it, we just won't or we can't be truly happy. Like our lives won't fall into place like they should until we find that thing. And even though this worldview is kind of a bit romantic, right, and hopeful, it's not very realistic, and it's definitely not helpful.

In fact, it might even be and probably is undermining the happiness and contentment that we could have access to right now. So let's explore why that is, and then we'll connect it to how to prioritize your life to be a writer. Or maybe you will find through this process that you want to prioritize it in a different way to focus on a different aspect of your life.

So here's the simple truth. We can all be good at a huge amount of things, and we can all enjoy doing a huge amount of things. For example, we use my life a little bit here. I've always been fascinated by stop-motion animation, but I've literally never tried to even sculpt a clay figure. I've never even shot the shortest scene of stop-motion. In fact, I've never shot a single image of stop-motion.

But if I really wanted to, if I really dedicated my time and my effort to learning how to do it, and if it turns out if I enjoyed it, I might pursue it with even more focus and get really, really good at it, maybe even great at it. It might become something that I believed I was actually meant to do because I got so good at it and I enjoyed at it. After all, that's how the things I used to believe I was meant to do came to be that way, or to feel that way. Like I learned guitar over time. I started writing a few kind of clunky little songs. I started a band or two, got better at all of that, and I started to really love it and started to be pretty good at it.

And then I began to feel like I was meant to be a musician. I started recording those songs then. I started buying sound equipment and learning studio recording skills. And before long, I felt like I was meant to be a studio engineer. And I read a lot as a kid. I rediscovered that love of reading as an adult.

And I started writing a few stories and studying how to write better. I improved over time and learned to really love the process of writing, which means, of course, by this old kind of paradigm, that I was meant somehow to be a writer. So if we subscribe to the belief that we are meant to do something, that we are kind of fated to do something, because we enjoy it and are good at it, what we end up doing is flooding our lives with all of these things that we were meant somehow to do, so much so that there's no way they can all get done, and certainly no way that they can all get done with quality.

Steps to Prioritise Your Passions

Here's where the radical shift came in my thinking about prioritizing our lives. Time management isn't about getting rid of the things you don't like doing. It's about purposefully deciding which things you enjoy and maybe even love that you will never do again.

Now, that probably feels a little extreme to say you're going to take something that you enjoy and are good at and never do that thing again. But it helps us to get into the right brain space if you think about it as being that dramatic. So this is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, honestly. The process I'm going to describe to you will break your heart. It'll make you sad. It could even make you feel guilty for all the time and money that you've spent in other efforts.

Your emotions will kick against you and you'll begin to try to justify why you don't have to give up these things. I went through all of these emotions, too. But I can tell you that life is remarkably better on the other side if you're willing to make these sacrifices to go through these steps and take them seriously.

So here we go. It's really just a few deceptively simple steps, but each one requires some real thought and real introspection. So here's step one. How you start is that you make a list of everything you feel like you enjoy doing and that you're pretty good at doing. My list started out really writing heavy because that was on my mind, but it quickly expanded to a myriad of things.

So my list looks something like this. You can see the full list in the show notes at the website if you're interested. My list initially looked something like this.

So write novels, write songs, write poems, write short stories, create book folding art, which is something I found online and really enjoy doing. Create book sculpting art, which is something I saw an artist do and was fascinated by that and began to get into that. Podcasting, teaching, marketing. I have a marketing background, so I'm pretty good at that and enjoy that. Sales, I've also been in sales. Web design, working on cars.

I took up a lot of my time that I enjoyed, so I listed that. Public speaking is another thing on my list. Music recording, right, recording bands, musical acts, my own music, and performing music. I used to spend a lot of time in bands actually organizing and putting on shows, and on and on and on, right? That list could get much larger, but as it is, even with that, I've probably got a good 20 things on there, all of which at one time or another I felt kind of called to do or meant to do those things because I enjoyed them and because I got fairly good at them.

So there's step one, right? You're just making an exhaustive list of all the things that you like to do and the things that you are pretty good at doing. As I look over my list, I realize that I could convince myself that I'm meant to do any one of these things or actually all of these things. And that's how I was living my life with this massive list of things that I felt were always pulling at my time. Whatever mood I was in, I could find one of those callings or one of those things that I was meant to do to fit that mood. And I realized now that it was kind of what I think of as a delightful delusion, right?

I could convince myself that I was getting a lot of good, productive stuff done while really I wasn't doing much at all because it was so sporadic. My time was spent so sporadically on all of these callings or all of these things that I was meant to do. So that's step one, simply listing all of those things and spend some time with this. Dig a little deep and see what you uncover.

So now on to step two. And this is the really hard one, honestly. Step two is you're going to pare your list down to just two or maybe three things. You're going to start lining through things. You're going to start crossing out things that don't make that list of two to three until you get down to those two or three things that are the most important to you, the things that you really, really love. Not that you just kind of like, but the things that you love.

The few things that you want to excel at and spend your life doing. There will be a few easy entries to strike through. Like on my list, for example, I could line through working on cars pretty easily because although I think I'm pretty good at it, I really don't enjoy doing it that much, right? It's not something that I could confuse with being a life calling that, hey, I'm meant to be a mechanic.

So I could line through that pretty easily. Or something like web design. I realized as I was thinking through my list that, yeah, it's something I'm pretty good at because I've had to do that for different businesses and careers over my life.

But it's definitely not something that I would want to throw myself into wholeheartedly. It's just something that I'm capable of. So there's going to be some of those things on your list that you can get rid of pretty quickly. They're more of a means to an end than a passion. Others, though, will be really, really hard to cross through.

So paring the list down to two or three could even be kind of traumatic, especially considering what we're going to have to do with those things in step three. So I'm assuming now, maybe you've even paused this podcast unless you're driving, obviously, or something like that. But I hope that maybe this is one of those podcasts that you pause and actually walk through these steps. If not on the first listen, that you'll come back through and do these steps either listening to the podcast again or following along with the show notes. In the show notes, I've actually put up what amounts to basically a transcript of the show so that you have the details to walk through these steps on your own.

So there's step one. You've made a list of all these things. Step two, you've done the really hard work of paring that list down to just two or maybe three things that you're truly passionate about, that you truly feel like you could dedicate your life to excelling at.

The Hardest Step: Letting Go

Now, step three. I said step two was the hardest. This might actually be the hardest to live out in your life. Step three is to never do any of the things you crossed out again.

Now, that may feel a little shocking and you're probably having kind of an emotional reaction because many of these things you love, right? Many of these things you enjoy spending time on. In fact, these things that you've crossed out become the things that you absolutely must not do if you are going to succeed at the two or three things that survived the culling of that list. Because here's the truth about time management. It is not the things that we have to do that rob us of the energy and creative focus that we need to excel at something creative. Instead, it's having too many things that we want to do or love to do.

It's a bit like that old adage, being a jack of all trades, master of none. That's kind of a flippant saying, but the heart of that is actually true. The heart of that is how you become truly great at something.

Now, I realize that what I'm asking you to do is hard. It's really, really hard. I spent years and years of my life believing that I would be a songwriter. I learned to play the piano. I learned guitar. I bought thousands and thousands of dollars of recording equipment.

I started bands. I played shows. I recorded CDs. And I absolutely loved it. Playing live music in a band is a magical experience, comparable really to nothing else. There's this kind of synergistic energy and bond that is unique to that kind of experience.

To be able to move someone with a song is a really powerful high. But songwriting and performing didn't make my list. I couldn't bring myself to crowd out my two or three other things to make room for songwriting or performing.

So music for me now is something I must actively not do. And that kind of breaks my heart, especially after seeing a film like I did this weekend. It's called Hearts Beat Loud, a little independent film. Go see that movie, by the way, if you haven't had a chance to see it, catch that one.

But I see music now for what it actually is. It's a distraction from what I truly want to excel in. Now, it doesn't mean that I don't love it. And it doesn't mean that I don't sometimes pick up my guitar every now and again and strum through some songs.

But what it does mean is that I've kind of divorced myself from the thought that somehow I'm meant to do that, right? It means I've made a deliberate choice about what I want to get really, really good at, uh, what I love the very most. And putting your life in that kind of perspective is an incredibly powerful thing, incredibly difficult, but incredibly powerful.

Now, writing for me obviously ended up at the top of my list, as was the teaching of creative writing through this podcast and in other ways. So those are the two things at the top of my list. Now, now when I'm writing, I'm not distracted by the nagging feeling that I really should be writing a song or maybe creating a piece of book folding art or researching a piece of sound recording equipment. I know when I'm writing that I am purposefully investing in the activity I've prioritized above everything else. It even helps when I'm totally not in the mood to write, which happens to writers a lot, I know. Before, when that mood would hit and I really didn't want to write, it was really easy to convince myself that working on a song was of equal importance and it made it really easy to avoid writing time without any guilt, right?

Because I was working on these other things that I was quote unquote meant to do. Now, this new prioritization gets me in front of the keyboard where I know I need to be regardless of the mood that I'm in because I've prioritized it so highly. Now, I can feel some of you, maybe even many of you bristling at this advice. Even now as I'm recording this, I can almost feel it coming in through my headphone wires.

Now, we don't like to be told to stop doing the things that we love. And I'm not saying you have to, right? I'm being a little bit extreme here, but not that extreme. All I'm really saying is to be intentional about your choices. I mean, if you're doing one thing, you can't by definition be improving or excelling at some other thing. As soon as you make a choice, you've automatically chosen not to do all of the other things.

Simply being aware of that fact can help us make better choices about our time. Now, when I think about how relaxing it would be to sit down and work on an art project, I know it's coming at the cost of working on what I've decided is my priority. Now I can still decide to do the art project. I could even still enjoy it, but I'd no longer get caught up in the feeling that it's something I'm quote unquote meant to do. In fact, some things I actually enjoy more now because I no longer feel that burden of having to be great at it, of having to excel at it. I mean, I could sit down and write a little song now if I wanted to without the pressure of it needing to be great or marketable or even something that would ever be heard by another human being.

So as painful as this process was, if you've done it or is going to be, we're not quite done with it yet. I'm going to make an assumption now since you are dedicated enough to writing that you're listening to this podcast and working on your craft and investing your time in that, that writing is one of the things that made the top of your list or it will make your list if you do this after listening to Now, all those are all related, but they're not the same kind of writing. Each one of them requires different skills, different approaches, different techniques.

Focusing on Writing Genres

In other words, we have the same problem of having too many options that we had before we narrowed it down to just writing. So it's time to repeat those three steps, and maybe this will be painful again for a lot of you. It certainly was for me. And go through all of those styles of writing.

So step one, to repeat that again, now you're going to list all of the kinds of writing you enjoy doing and are capable or could be capable of doing well. And that could be a long list with many of the things that I just kind of shared with you on my list. So step two is the same that we did before.

Now we're going to narrow that long list of all the different styles and genres of writing that we could do. We're going to narrow that down to just two or three. And then step three, as you know, never again write the kinds of things that you took out of your list.

Now that can be hard for writers. Am I saying never again write a poem if you're not focused on poetry? Maybe. That is kind of what I'm saying. I'm going to give that a little caveat here in a little bit, so don't bail on me just yet.

But I want you at least for this moment to think of it as that extreme, that never again will you focus on that kind of writing. I mean, sure, we can point to a few examples of successful writers who cross genres and styles with ease and expertise. But most of them, if you go back and look at their history, not all of them, but the vast majority of them, got there by first excelling at one or maybe two forms of writing. And once they excelled at those and the doors opened, they were able to branch out into these other forms with success.

So we need to do the same kind of prioritizing of the type of writing we're doing as we did with our huge list of general things that we'd like to do. And we need to do that for the same reasons, right? So that we are focused on, that we're prioritizing only those things that are truly valuable and that we're looking at those other forms of writing as distractions.

So now for that caveat that I mentioned. As I'm sure you well know, certain genres of writing can support other genres. And I'm not using genres here, that word genres, in the sense of, you know, science fiction or fantasy or historical fiction. I'm actually using it more in an academic sense.

So when I say genre here, I mean in the sense of different modes or categories of writing. Like poetry would be a genre or screenplay would be a genre or creative nonfiction could be a genre. So for example, I'm a firm believer that a study of how to write poetry translates into writing better fiction. Because of poetry's focus on detail, on brevity and concision, we can learn things about writing fiction through writing poetry. And I think a writer can learn a lot about story structure in novels by reading, studying and writing something like a screenplay. The point here is not that you never, literally never write anything but a single genre.

The point really is that your primary genre is always foremost in your mind. And that any writing that you do in other genres is a specific way to support, intentional, that was the word I was looking for, is an intentional way to support and build up your primary genre. In other words, I don't believe that I am meant to be a screenwriter, at least not at this point in my career. It is an interest, but I still write the occasional screenplay, even though that didn't make the top couple of genres that I want to write in.

So now why isn't it a distraction when I'm working on a screenplay, when I'm trying to be focused on writing novels? Well, it's not a distraction because I'm learning valuable lessons about how to write a novel as I write the screenplay. Things like subtext in dialogue or succinct but powerful scene descriptions or compelling story structure and the beats of a scene.

But now when I'm writing a screenplay, I don't have this delusion that I'm also going to be this successful, amazing screenplay writer. Now, if that comes down the road, sure, right? I'll take it as any of us would.

But I understand when I'm writing that screenplay that I know I'm writing it because I'm trying to take those skills and translate them into being a better writer of the one or two genres that I have focused on. So another example, when I sit down now to write a poem, which I still occasionally do, I don't get distracted thinking that I'm meant to be a poet. Instead, I'm conscious of what I can learn and translate from the poem writing experience into my novel writing priority.

But here's the thing. If there's not a legitimate connection to my primary writing focus, I have to have that discipline to not spend time writing that thing, even if I want to, even if I'm excited about it and it's very appealing for me to go write that thing. If I cannot connect it to those one or two things that I'm trying to focus on and excel at, I have to have that discipline to say, no, that's a distraction.

The Importance of Intention

So what this all really boils down to is intention. What are you intent on truly excelling at? Once you know what that is, don't let anything else get in the way of it, especially other things that you may even love, but that distract you from your priority. Our wise word for this week comes from Deepak Chopra, and it aligns with our topic this week.

Here's what Deepak says. He says, you and I are essentially infinite choice makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices. Again, that was Deepak Chopra. Our lives are shaped day by day by the choices we make from this myriad of possibilities, and they add up over time to become the person that we are today, right? The person that you are today is the ultimate end of all the tiny little choices that you've made day by day through your life.

And by changing the small choices that we're making today and making them consistently, we can't help but change the person and define the person that we'll be in the future. You can excel at the two or three things that survived on your list if you make the choices every day that prioritize them in your life. It's not even a question of luck at that point. Put in the time, put in the effort, put in the focus, and the results will follow. And it's time for our weekly challenge, and this week's episode is essentially kind of one big weekly challenge. In addition to actually working through the three steps to prioritize your life, I'd encourage you to do the same thing with the main character in your current work in progress.

Take them through this same three-step process. To make our characters feel well-rounded and feel like real living, breathing human beings, we need to give them the characteristics of actual human beings. And what is more human than trying to do too many things at once? I mean, what human do you know that isn't trying to do too many things at once?

So take your character through the prioritization process that you just went through. What kinds of things does your character like doing and they're pretty good at doing? Then pair that list down to just a handful that are really important to them. Understanding this about your character can be a great source of tension and conflict in your story as your character, just like you and I, struggle to make the right choices about where to invest their time to achieve the kinds of things that they want to achieve.

So that's going to wrap it up for this week. A reminder, you can support the show by subscribing, by leaving a review, checking out the Patreon team, and most of all, recommending the show to a writer friend or two. It's exciting. Our listenership is beginning to build back up again after our long hiatus, and we have you, the listeners, to thank for that.

So thank you so, so much. Until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do, and I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week, and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing Podcast. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.