How to Fool Yourself into Writing More

I'm certainly not publishing a blog every day, but I AM managing to do some writing every single day, even if it's just for five minutes.  Five minutes times seven days equals 35 minutes a week.  Let's face it, though: once you get started, it usually ends up being at least 10 minutes.  And that's with a minimum of stress.  So let's round up and say seven days times ten minutes equals seventy minutes a week of writing.  That comes to 280 minutes a month worth of words on the page.  With my bad math, that comes in somewhere around five hours a month of writing.  If you multiply five hours times 12 months, you have the equivalent of 60 hours.  (I think.)

The whole idea is that I'm not trying to be accurate here; I'm trying to fool myself.  "Just five minutes a day, Leah, and you can stop," I tell myself.  What do I have to show for my so-called five minutes?  Actually, an awful lot.  Much of it, I haven't published yet.

Why?  Because I need to commit to another five minutes a day of revising, editing and then perhaps yet another five minutes to publishing.  Honestly, that seems pretty do-able to me: so much so that I'm going to slap a picture on this, do a quick edit, and send it out to the world.

I'm not going for perfection here.  I want to write.  I want to share my writing.

I want to inspire you to do what you love.  If you love to write, write for five minutes a day.  Simple as that.  If there is something else you love to do, set your sights at five minutes and see where it takes you.

Let's surprise and delight ourselves with how easy things possibly might be!