One hour and a half at a time

On asking a more experienced writer for advice, quality vs quantity, and sacred time.

Hey there!

At the beginning of the year, I was wondering how to tackle the humongous task of rewriting the first draft of my fantasy novel. Where do I find the time and energy to do all the learning, studying, researching, thinking, and eventually writing needed? (You can find some more of my thoughts on that topic in Having something you want to do¹).

After reflecting for a while, I decided to do the sensible thing: ask someone better than me at what I do.

Daniel Badosa² is a Spanish author whose contact I stumbled upon a while ago. He has self-published a couple of books and is about to traditionally publish his third one, all while having kids and working. I discovered him by talking about my writing to an acquaintance—it was a bit of a vulnerable and scary thing to do.

It was absolutely worth it. It’s a joy to find other fellow writers to connect with and nerd out about this weird thing we do—creating fictive people in a fictive world and making them do fictive things that make us feel something.

The call I had with Daniel was extremely insightful. We talked about a lot of things, but, for this entry, I want to focus on his daily schedule.

He wakes up at 5:40 am and starts writing at 6:00 am. He writes for an hour/an hour and a half, and then he is mostly done. In the past he used to do hours of writing marathons—but, even though it was fun then, he’s not into it anymore. He realized that a smaller but more focused time spent on writing is more efficient than a longer span of unfocused time.

That made me think.

I had just heard the same concept in Mark Manson’s video, How to Enjoy Doing Hard Things³. At minute 8:48, Mark doubles down: according to his experience, writing for too long can even be detrimental.

I noticed it started to backfire. Essentially I would get four really, really good, high quality hours out of myself and then every hour past that would be low quality, or it would be a really mediocre output. And then I realized that, when you’re writing a book, mediocre output is actually worse than no output, because you have to go back and either heavily edit and revise it, which is just adding work for yourself, or you have to make a bunch of very difficult decisions of whether to cut it, delete it, and so on. So, I had this weird realization […] that at least in the context of book writing four really effective hours was actually more productive than 10 moderately effective hours.

I wish I could write for 2 hours 🤣

And maybe you’re telling yourself, “I wish I could do this thing I want to do for [enter amount of minutes here]”. And maybe the amount of time you’re thinking about is 40, or 20, or 10 minutes. I for sure was thinking in those terms just a couple of years ago.

Now I know that, if can manage to sit down at my desk, turn my phone into airplane mode, and steer my mind every once in a while not to worry about the thousands of things it wants to worry about, then I can get in an hour and a half of work for a creative project (I don’t say “write” because indeed I haven’t always been writing, especially in 2023 😬). I can do even more if I’m really into it. I know it’s possible, because I worked my way up there.

And I worked my way up here by starting with 10 or 20 minutes at first.

What Daniel Badosa and Mark Manson made me think is that sometimes we may have a distorted idea of what “productive” is. We may think that if we really want to do something we should want to do it all day every day.

But even some professionals can get “only” four efficient hours. Working more can even be inefficient.

It’s nothing new, and, at the same time, it’s a good reminder. Get a regular amount of focused work—up it up when you’re at the level where you can manage it.

I’m pretty sure that some people work differently from others. Some swear by the “write every day” mantra—I tried and it was useful until it wasn’t anymore, so now I follow a different schedule. I (try) to work on my creative projects for a decent amount of time regularly, but the thought of “creative marathons”, like a whole day of writing, makes me queasy. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that for other people marathons are the way to go.

What I’m trying to get to is: it’s relatively simple. Put aside some “focused time” for the thing you want to do. It doesn’t have to be 10 hours, it can be 4. It doesn’t have to be 4 hours, it can be one and a half. It doesn’t have to be one and a half, it can be 20 minutes. You need to find what’s efficient for you.

But that’s the thing: putting aside that focused time is the most difficult thing.

That brings me to something else Daniel said in passing—he mentioned that his writing time is sacred time.

I like the way he named it. I don’t know that I’m always treating my writing time as such. It’s not easy, and I think the thing I struggle with the most is acknowledging that writing is important to me. That’s after all what defines something as “sacred”: it’s something so important that it deserves veneration. Putting time aside for it is not just a want, it’s a must.

I struggle to remind myself how much writing is sacred to me: sometimes all sorts of other things seem more important.

Well, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. I still haven’t quite answered the question I posed at the beginning, though: how will I go about juggling between all the learning, studying, researching, thinking, and writing?

The kinda lame but very true answer, that deep down I knew already, is that it won’t look like a lot like juggling, but more like throwing up in the air one of the balls and catching it, before throwing the other. It’ll take time. A long time. An hour and a half at a time 😆

There’s probably more to uncover there, but it’ll be for another entry.

If you have any thoughts on what I shared, let me know by simply replying to this email!

Take care,

Rye Youbs

1. “Having something you want to do” — an entry of mine, in which I complain about all the things I want to do and how little time I have to do them because I’m a very busy person lol.

2. Daniel Badosa — Spanish writer and author of Nuestro Silencio and El Abandono. His next book, Así Fue la Muerte del Cazador, is coming out in March 2024! As of now all of his books are in Spanish, but I’ll give you a heads up as soon as there’s a translation.

3. How to Enjoy Doing Hard Things — Mark Manson interviews Ali Abdaal on his new book, “Feel Good Productivity”. I just love the topic of productivity, and I am so hyped by anything that explains to me how to bring myself to do something. I watched this video because I’ve been following Ali Abdaal for a while now. After watching it I started binging Mark Manson’s videos 😆