Which of the following statements best describes your situation?
A. You are expected to produce grants, reports, strategic plans, policy briefs, or other lengthy texts
B. You spend much of the day in meetings and attending to time-sensitive tasks
C. You rarely have long, uninterrupted blocks of time to write
D. All of the above
If you answered (D), you’re not alone. Time and time again, I’ve watched organizational leaders struggle to find focused time for writing. This predicament isn’t merely a time management problem. In my experience, most leaders are already optimizing their time to such an extreme that there is little room to maneuver.
I recently finished a book that has given me a fresh perspective on the challenge of writing: Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. Burkeman’s basic premise: our time on earth is limited, and there is little sense in churning through endless to-do lists in hope of arriving at some imaginary point in which our work is “finished” and we can enjoy life. In his words, “Rather than fueling the fantasy of one day bringing everything under control, this book takes it as a given that you’ll never get on top of everything.”
How can this mindset help busy people (aka mortals) write? In this week’s newsletter, I’ll highlight three approaches to try.
Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear
For most of us, writing is the task we most fear, and therefore the one we most reliably avoid. We tell ourselves we’re waiting for the right conditions—more time, a quieter week, a clearer head—when in fact we’re simply postponing a confrontation with our own limitations.
Here, Burkeman invokes the Dutch Zen monk Paul Loomans’ metaphor of a shed piled high with junk. Rather than wait until you have the courage and motivation to tackle the disorder, the best way forward is simply to sit in the shed—a far less intimidating prospect than cleaning it out.
When it comes to writing that grant proposal or report, start with a task that is more likely to diffuse your anxiety than feed it. This could involve taking 10 minutes to jot down notes, collecting and organizing source materials, or setting up your document with the appropriate headings and styles. It may not feel like “writing,” but that’s the point. If you sit in the shed long enough, eventually the act of cleaning it won’t feel so fraught.
Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos
Both research and anecdotal accounts have shown that the majority of so-called “knowledge workers” are most productive if they limit their focused work time to three to four hours per day. For Burkeman, this insight brings two implications: first, we should do whatever we can to block out a few hours per day, free of interruptions. And second, it absolves us of attempting to optimize our time outside of those few hours.
If even three hours per day feels impossible, try starting with shorter periods—but do everything you can to keep this time as interruption-free as possible. Close your e-mail, place your phone in a different room, abscond to a different workspace, and let colleagues know that you are unavailable. (Bonus: in doing so, you signal that it is acceptable for others in your organization to do the same.) Even sixty minutes of focused writing will outproduce three hours of fragmented, interrupted effort.
Set a quantity goal: On firing your inner quality controller
One of the most persistent obstacles to writing isn’t the absence of time—it’s the presence of judgment. Most of us, when we sit down to write, immediately begin evaluating what we produce. This internal editor is useful at the revision stage, but it is a major impediment at the drafting stage, because it conflates two tasks that need to happen separately: generating material and refining it.
Burkeman’s solution is to replace quality targets with quantity targets. Instead of sitting down to “write a good introduction,” you sit down to write three hundred words. Whether they are good words is a question for later. This approach works because it gives the inner critic nothing to act on. You can’t fail to meet a word count by writing badly. You can only fail to meet it by not writing at all.
For the grant writer or policy analyst, the practical version of this might be: commit to drafting two pages before you open your email, without reading back what you’ve written. The quality assessment comes in the next session. For now, your only job is the quantity.
Final thoughts: No perfect time, no clear calendar
Burkeman’s broader lesson—that we are finite creatures who will never reach the bottom of the to-do list—is liberating when applied to writing. You don’t need a free day. You don’t need to feel ready. You just need to sit in the shed, protect a few hours when you can, and measure your initial progress in words rather than quality. Do that consistently, and the grant proposal or strategic plan that has been languishing on your task list will start to look a lot more manageable.
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