Our summer days are getting shorter, but they’re still hot and busy, and during the week, I wake up at five AM. I have to run my miles, ride my horse, and sometimes get some writing done before I have to be at work, and often a five AM wakeup call is the only way I’m going to get everything done. Later in the day, it’ll be too hot, too dark, or I’ll be too tired after long hours in the sun for work, and I can’t risk days on end of exhaustion-fogged work and workouts.
During the winter, it flip-flops. There’s no sunshine in the morning/it’s deathly cold, so I shift my daytime activities into mid-morning, go to work, and then stay up later cozy in a blanket to get writing tasks done. My treadmill sees a lot of miles in the winter, too – usually in the evenings.
Whether you’re an early bird or a night owl, I cannot recommend strongly enough embracing your personal reality to mold your writing schedule. If you are not a morning person by nature, and you have thus far in your life failed to prove you’re capable of becoming one, don’t schedule 4 AM writing sessions for yourself. You will be tired, cranky, and most likely uncreative and unproductive.
If you love waking up with or before the sun, don’t try to cram your writing into the end of the day right before you go to sleep, for the exact same reasons listed above.
It’s important to know your strengths as a person, but it’s equally important to know your weaknesses and learn how to leverage them.
For me, as long as the sun is up, I can get up, so crack-of-dawn mornings all summer works just fine for me. But I know that will have to change in the winter, because I can’t convince myself of the merit of getting out of bed three hours before the sun makes an appearance. As my work schedule, my priorities, and my level of energy shifts, I keep shifting my writing schedule to make sure I’m turning up to my desk with the best, brightest, and most ambitious version of myself to crank out my chapters.
It’s not always a perfect plan. Sometimes unexpected things throw the day’s rhythm out of whack and leave you topsy-turvy, but as I’ve learned from each one of my training blocks as a runner, no one day makes or breaks the end result – it’s the accumulation of day after day, plugging away at the goal, that decides what the final product will be.
Start paying attention to the rhythms of your day, noting when you’re freshest, when you’re in the best mood, and when you find yourself to be the most productive. Adjust the priorities in your life to match that rhythm and see what a little harmony can do!
