How I Split My Time Between Professional and Personal Writing
I need to allocate my energy between different writing projects.
Many writers feel like they’re caught in a game of tug-of-war.
You have professional writing commitments that pay the bills. Maybe you’re a journalist, content marketer, or freelancer. In any case, you have a paying client and deadlines to meet.
And you have your passion projects — the writing that you love and enjoy but doesn’t pay (yet!) for the time you’re putting in. There’s no specific end date in sight, but you’re driven by the desire to get your story out into the world.
Unfortunately, as writers, we know that there’s a limit to the number of words that come out of our brains in one day (at least, a limit to the number of good words). You may finish writing for a client or your job and find that you have nothing left to devote to your personal writing.
So how can you make sure that you have enough creative juice for everything you need to write and everything you want to write?
I’m in that boat. Professionally, I am a contributing editor at a magazine and have freelance clients. Personally, I have a novel that is still in the “research” phase. I also write on Medium and Substack.
If my personal writing project always took a backseat to professional writing, my novel would never get done. I have to make time for what’s important.
I’ve learned to split my time so that I can meet client needs and my own needs, without sacrificing writing quality.
Plan out your writing calendar for the month
To start, you need to zoom out and understand what your writing commitments look like — on a calendar, with their deadlines.
I like to do this with a paper calendar to get a clear overview of the month. I’ll use a pencil so I can quickly make changes. I start with writing in client and magazine deadlines, then I’ll add Substack since I publish regularly. For this exercise, I’m only adding deadlines — I’m not yet detailing the amount of time it will take to write.
I’ll also add any non-writing commitments that I think will reduce my writing time, such as a family vacation.
Once I’ve done that, I’ll add in my personal writing project and writing for Medium. Neither of these has fixed deadlines, but I pretend they are immovable to plan my month. I’ll set a personal writing goal or identify the number of articles I want to publish on Medium, and give them deadlines.
At that point, changes to my calendar become a trade-off. I move everything into my project management tool (I use Trello). If I take on a new freelance project that adds a deadline within a month, something has to give. And more than likely, I’ll need to reduce the personal writing goal I’ve set for myself… or give up sleep.
Block off time for your writing
Once you know your writing deadlines, it’s time to work backwards.
You’ll need to estimate how much writing time you’ll need for each piece. Be realistic. You may know exactly how much time you need to write 1,500 words for a client, but maybe your personal writing goal is less tangible, like “outline Chapter 2.”
But once you have your estimates, you’ll want to add these to your calendar. At this point, since I’ve moved my writing deadlines into Trello, I do my estimation work within the product, but you could also continue to use your paper calendar for this.
You’ll want to add blocks of writing time to your calendar to meet your deadline. For example, let’s say a client article will take you five hours to research and write, and you dedicate four hours per day to writing. You’ll need to plan that this will take at least two days (maybe in smaller writing blocks of two hours and three hours for that article).
For example, I only write for 2 hours per day because I also have a non-writing 9–5 job. I have to “fit” my writing deadlines — including my personal projects — into my 2-hour writing blocks.
Make sure to give yourself some breathing room in case things don’t go as planned. If a client piece takes longer than expected, you don’t want it to derail your entire writing calendar. Maybe you plan for 4 hours of writing per day, but you could go longer if needed. Or maybe you leave some chunks of writing time “unassigned” to allow for a catch-up. You’ll also want to leave some time for editing, either your own rewrites or at a client’s request.
Structure your day around personal writing
I know from experience that if I leave my personal writing as the lowest thing on my priority list (behind client work, my 9–5 job, and my family), I will never have time.
If I don’t leave myself some catch-up time, inevitably, my personal writing will be the first thing to suffer when other projects don’t go as planned.
And I’ve done marathon sessions before, spending an entire day writing. If my personal writing is saved for last, I have no energy left.
One of the best tips I’ve ever seen for maintaining a personal writing habit is to do that writing first. A friend of mine is a novelist and also a full-time content marketer. He works on his novel first thing in the morning, before starting his day job. That way, the best part of his writing brain is dedicated to his personal work.
That approach reminds me of any creative who has a day job (like actors in New York who are also waiters). The day job pays the bills, but their creativity is preserved for the work they’re passionate about.
Or maybe you identify chunks of time in your day amid household tasks, like writing while you’re doing laundry. You set aside that time, and make sure that every time a load of laundry goes in, you commit to personal writing.
The goal is to find the time of day when you write best, and schedule your most important writing work in that block of time.
Anna Burgess Yang
Guard your writing time
Once you’ve planned out your writing calendar, you need to minimize your interruptions — including anything that threatens your writing time. I have clients depending on me and personal writing goals I want to meet.
The only way to get it all done is to treat my professional and personal writing with the same level of commitment. That means vigorously protecting my writing time. It’s no different than a professional athlete who knows they cannot skip a workout.
Every Sunday, I block off time to work on personal writing projects from 8:00–9:30 a.m. If something comes up, like a family activity, I hesitate. I know that if I give up that time, I don’t have a good way of giving it back.
I usually start professional writing around 4:00 a.m. That means I’m careful about personal commitments that might keep me out late at night — because I know that it will impact my ability to wake up early the next day and write.
Writing is not only about the final product — it’s about all of the time and preparation required to get there. After all, writing is my work. It’s work that I love but it’s still work.
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