How to build a writing routine that lasts

1 The bottom line

Protect fixed hours, set a small daily minimum, and use a ritual to start and a rule to stop. A routine you can repeat beats waiting for a muse, because showing up is the one thing you control.

2 Key takeaways

• Treat writing as a job, not a mood. Waiting to feel inspired means waiting a long time.
  • Ten years of weekly deadlines at a magazine taught Gillian Flynn44:00 to write whether or not she was in the mood.
  • Amor Towles26:45 says most accomplished writers he knows work at a consistent morning time, and inspiration comes to them at the desk.
• Block hours that match when you actually draft well. Drafting energy is personal, and it runs out.
  • Taylor Tomlinson31:11 found her book drafting died by 4:30, so she moved it earlier than her joke writing.
  • Tucker Max1:13:41 says one to two hours is right, and beyond three it is almost impossible to be productively creative.
• Set a daily minimum small enough to hit every day. A fixed target turns a vague dread into a task.
  • Susan Orlean53:31 writes about a thousand words, five days a week.
  • Tim Ferriss2:48 committed to two crappy pages a day on The 4-Hour Workweek and let the book accumulate.
• Start with a short ritual that pulls you back into the work. The blank page is scariest when you arrive cold.
  • Dana Gioia1:53:35 recopied last night's paragraph, and in about twenty minutes he was back in the argument.
  • Jimmy Soni31:26 reads for 10 to 15 minutes, runs a 30 minute research timer, then writes to a word count.
• Stop on purpose, with a known next step. A planned stop makes tomorrow's start easy instead of dreaded.
  • Mitch Albom29:50 leaves the desk in the middle of a sentence he wants to finish.
  • Jerry Seinfeld8:05 sets a fixed end time of 60, 30 or even 15 minutes.

there's no muse that's going to come and save you

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

2.1 Protect your hours

Pick fixed hours, put them where your best drafting happens, and keep everything else out of them.

• Find the hours when drafting works, then block them. Taylor Tomlinson31:11 and Tucker Max1:13:41
  • expected book writing to match her joke writing, which starts around 3:00 and runs into the evening. It did not. She was fried by 4:30 and had to start earlier, though editing could go into the evening.
  • has writers pick specific days and times, and he recommends mornings if possible.
  • Max says that even when he wrote full time he blocked four hours and got about two and a half.
• Keep the block free of meetings and messages. Johnny Harris38:20 and Neil Strauss33:08
  • writes from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., three or sometimes four days a week, with no meetings, Slack or email. He thinks about the block the night before.
  • says willpower does not work, so he builds systems. He deleted every messaging app except texts, and his assistant sends the rest in Notion every other day. He answers them all in 20 minutes.
  • Harris makes about 30 videos a year, each with a scripting week of three to four dedicated days. He admits an afternoon block would not work for him.
• If your life is small, protect a small, fixed slice. Paul Millerd37:28, Peter Attia44:15 and Jodi Picoult6:30
  • After having a daughter, aims for three hours of writing on each of three days a week. He says that is enough.
  • kept one day a week, at least three weeks out of four, with no patients, outside calls or podcast work. He stayed at his own desk, because going away would add stress.
  • With a colicky newborn, learned to write in 15-minute bursts, later in the car at nursery school pickup. She wrote a book a year for years.
• Do not wait for a better time or a perfect setup. Anne Lamott7:40, Robert Macfarlane32:02 and Sam Altman41:07
  • says writers who plan to start when the last child leaves or when they retire will not write then either.
  • warns against the fetish of the desk. A ritual of the perfect desk and sharp pencil can become devotion to preparing to write.
  • used to think he needed the right coffee shop and a set time. Now he takes any uninterrupted 11 minutes, even in the back of a car.

2.2 Set a daily minimum

A small, fixed target turns an overwhelming project into a task you can finish.

• Pick a number you can hit every day, and do nothing else until you hit it. Susan Orlean53:31 and Daniel Pink2:14
  • writes about a thousand words, five days a week, six if she is behind. Her editor gave her the idea, and she says it never removed the poetry.
  • sits down at the same time each day and sets 500, 700 or 800 words, because he is a slow writer. Hitting the number brings a moment of liberation.
  • Tim Ferriss2:48, as David Perell tells it, advises doing less than you think you can. He wrote two crappy pages a day on The 4-Hour Workweek and has since published five books.
• Turn the book into arithmetic. Atul Gawande45:35
  • He treats a 90 to 100,000 word book as a math problem: about 2,000 words a week.
  • He chunks the day into 30 minute increments, aims for two by 9:00 and at least eight a day, and keeps going on the days he misses.
• Let the first pass be bad. Rob Henderson1:11:07 and Scott Galloway1:23
  • wrote a rough, vomit draft first, then went back to check citations and language.
  • commits to a block of time, writes badly, and saves the real work for editing. He says almost 90% of writing is just starting.
  • Henderson wrote 50 weekly newsletter posts and thinks maybe 10 stand the test of time.
• Judge yourself only by showing up. Brandon Stanton44:47
  • He rooted his identity in the amount of work he did, because effort is the one thing everyone can control.
  • He started with 100 pages of reading a day, then 30 to 40 photographs a day, then four interviews a day for years without missing one.

2.3 Start the session

A short, repeatable warm-up gets you into the work before the blank page can scare you.

• Re-enter yesterday's work by editing it first. Michael Pollan17:20, Dana Gioia1:53:35 and Jonathan Franzen56:09
  • prints the previous day's pages, marks them up by hand, enters the changes, then goes forward a few more pages. The edit primes the pump.
  • , working nights after a ten-hour job, recopied the paragraph or poem from the night before and revised small words as he went. He had only about 90 minutes of writing time.
  • spends about four hours rewriting 200 words from the day before, then writes a new page in the last twenty minutes. The finished pages stick out like girders from an iron bridge, and he builds on them.
• Or warm up by reading the style you want. Jimmy Soni31:26, Nat Eliason2:20 and Ted Gioia1:00:21
  • sequences his morning: 10 to 15 minutes reading the model book, 30 minutes of research on a timer, then writing to a word count. The reading is an easy on-ramp before the blank page.
  • read Red Rising each morning to prime himself with fast prose. When his sci-fi draft lost description, he switched to slow books like East of Eden.
  • spends the whole morning reading hard books and listening to music, and starts writing in the afternoon. He has done this for about 50 years.
• Change your state, and test your own conditions. Shaan Puri54:15, Johnny Harris38:20 and Ada Limón and Joy Harjo6:14
  • says writers start cold, like athletes who skip warm-ups. His order is physiology first (sprints, pushups, 20 air squats, cold water on your face), focus second, story third.
  • takes a ten-minute ramp up at a cleared desk and plays his composer's music or synthwave mixes.
  • cannot write with music on, because they lose their own rhythm. Harjo notes that novelist Leslie Silko plays loud music as a wall of sound, so test what suits you.

2.4 Stop the session

End on purpose, with a fixed limit and a known next step, so tomorrow starts easy.

• Set a fixed end time, or stop when quality drops. Jerry Seinfeld8:05 and Steven Pressfield1:32
  • says to pick 60, 30 or even 15 minutes, work until the alarm goes off, then walk away. Knowing the session ends makes it easier to push through.
  • stops the writing day when he starts making mistakes. Typos arriving one after another read to him as plain exhaustion.
  • Seinfeld told his daughter the end is the reward: the alarm goes off and you get your cookie and milk.
• Leave a handle for tomorrow. Mitch Albom29:50, Robert Macfarlane1:06:00 and Steven Johnson1:03:05
  • stops mid-sentence in something he wants to finish, so he is eager to get back the next morning.
  • says to make sure you know what the next sentence will be. Then you only have to finish it, like pushing off on a bike.
  • warns that if you quit when stuck, your first thought the next day is dread of the bad pages.
  • ends each session with a note to self about where to go next.
• Rest between blocks. Diarmaid MacCulloch6:57
  • He starts no earlier than 8:30, stops by 7:00, never works evenings, and takes a lunch break and a nap.
  • His supervisor Sir Geoffrey Elton told him to divide the day into three and work two of the thirds. The rule removes the guilt and the work improves.

2.5 Keep it going for months

A routine that lasts uses outside deadlines, expects uneven progress, and never waits for the last project to be judged.

• Borrow a recurring deadline so the schedule does not depend on motivation. Fareed Zakaria4:44, Ben Thompson10:45 and Tish Rabe1:13:18
  • chose journalism for the forced structure of weekly deadlines. Repetition made him faster: his column once took half a week and now takes about two hours of writing plus research.
  • calls himself a procrastinator, so he built a daily deadline and publishes even on days he does not feel like it.
  • moves every deadline up, so a June due date is May in her head. That leaves a gap if she cannot think of anything.
• Expect progress to be uneven, and take longer blocks when you can. Ezra Klein31:20, Sam Corcos54:56 and David Whyte34:53
  • took five-day chunks at a cabin. He often made no headway for three or four days, then got a large amount done in the last two.
  • schedules one think week per quarter, offline. The first two or three days are tactical, and the bigger questions show up once he has detached.
  • starts a book at half an hour a day. As the theme tightens, sessions grow to 8, 10 or 12 hours.
• Start the next piece instead of polishing the last one. Michael Jamin54:43, Ryan Holiday3:41 and Nick Bilton48:29
  • says to finish the script, start another, and finish that. The early work is not wasted, because you needed it to get to script five.
  • starts the next book in the dead time around a launch instead of taking an off season. Good news and bad news about sales both cost him a day otherwise.
  • has written millions of words and forgotten 90% to 98% of them, so he does not treat any one piece as precious.
  • Michael Arndt1:12:27 wrote 11 scripts before he sold his first.

2.6 Where writers disagree

Most writers work on a fixed schedule, but some write only when moved, and several tactics depend on your temperament.

• Daily schedule versus writing only when ready.
  • Jason Fried33:00 does not schedule writing, because forced sessions risk the wrong mood. He keeps slack in his calendar, and wrote the essay "Separation" in about 20 minutes before a call.
  • Howard Marks4:04 writes when he has an idea, with a loose goal of no less than quarterly. A memo has appeared in September and January for 35 years.
  • Jayne Anne Phillips17:53 writes for weeks or months, then stops for months. Paul Harding36:12 goes months seemingly napping on the couch, which he calls riding the updrafts.
  • David Baldacci1:18:10 skips word counts and starts only once his passion tank is full. Against that, Lamott7:40 says there is no such thing as inspiration.
• Reread your pages or leave them alone.
  • Eric Roth0:26 starts on page one every day and says he has never had writer's block.
  • Steven Johnson1:03:05 dropped daily rereading because it wasted twenty minutes and left nothing surprising. Michael Connelly23:44 does not want to take his eyes off the screen to check notes.
• Deadlines: how often, and how hard.
  • Steph Smith1:27:16 says without a deadline her excited projects never ship. She finished a 70,000 word book and a 50-plus video course within two months each. David Perell warns that a deadline only has integrity if it is rare.
  • Packy McCormick22:03 rewrites his essays at 4:30 on send morning. He is unsure it makes them better, but he needs the time pressure.
• Time of day.
  • Johnny Harris38:20 says an afternoon block would not work for him. Ted Gioia1:00:21 reads all morning and writes only in the afternoon. Test both and keep the one that works.