Once you’ve found your weird, mastered some writing formulas, and learned how to edit your own work, will you suddenly be on Easy Writing Street for the rest of your life?
 
Maybe...but probably not. It’s a lot more likely that you’ll feel great about the writing when it’s happening (woohoo!), but will still wonder HOW to fit it into your already bursting-at-the-seams schedule.
 
And we get it. You’re running a business, or trying to, and now we’re telling you to squeeze an extra few thousand words into your weeks? It’s not gonna happen without conscious effort, so here are our top tips to help you start and stick to a writing schedule:

1. Batch it up!

Instead of trying to find an extra hour every day to write, how about blocking off one half-day, or one full day, per month, to do all your writing at once? I (Chantel) do this for clients all the time—the first Tuesday of each month is reserved for writing X, the first Thursday is for Y, and so on. I know in advance that those days are booked for writing, so I don’t let them get swallowed by meetings, appointments, and miscellaneous tweeting.
 
Couple benefits here: one, you’ll obviously get all your writing out of the way at once, which will allow you to spend the rest of your month running and growing your business without worrying that your content marketing is falling behind. Second, you’ll actually become a better writer. Why? Because diving deep into a task for an extended period of time helps you get into a rhythm, and even though that rhythm will still be work, you’ll get to a place where that work feels doable, your voice emerges more effortlessly, and your writing gets clearer.
 
Batching works great for all your business tasks, by the way—it’s not just for writing. For more about batching like a boss, check out Chris Ducker’s free training on using the power of batching to boost your daily productivity.

2. Give yourself less time than you think you need.

If you think it’ll take you until Friday at 5pm to finish that blog post, commit publicly (on FB, Twitter, whatever) to posting it by Friday at noon. Why? Because we writers are, more often than not, our own biggest obstacles when it comes to sharing our work. Setting some arbitrary deadline, like Friday at 5pm, rarely means we need that long to get it done, but it does mean we’ll procrastinate for longer until we finally drag ourselves to the starting line. The whole act of putting it off just makes the task of writing feel worse, so by committing in public to finishing before you think is possible, you’ll tap into wells of get-it-doneness that you didn’t know you had.
 

3. Break it up!

Writing may be a single word, but it’s a multi-step process. Between generating ideas, drafting them, writing them, editing them, and publishing them, we do ourselves a disservice when we expect that we—or anyone—should be doing it all in one sitting.

Instead, take a cue from some of the internet’s favorite writers, and break up your writing process into distinct chunks. Maybe you brainstorm ideas on Monday, expand your list into some brief notes in an Evernote file on Tuesday, and pick one from the list to turn into a rough draft on Wednesday. Thursday can be your editing day, and Friday can be reserved for publishing. This way, the writing process is only a small part of each day, and it becomes integrated into your business schedule without taking over.
 
For more on this, check out Jeff Goins’ three-bucket writing system, which is the process he’s used to write five books and over 1,000 blog posts.

4. Use Jason's simple content calendar

Did we mention this was simple? It's a basic spreadsheet with dates and when/where you content will be written. Jason has used a version of this spreadsheet since 2014 and it's been instrumental in helping him keep a consistent writing schedule. 

You can click here to view Jason's example Google Sheet. If you want to make your own version: Go to File > Make a copy > Create and save! (You can also go File > Download as... > Choose your own adventure there)