Why Having Less Time Makes You a Better Writer
The counterintuitive truth about time constraints and quality
More time = more quality.
Right?
Naturally, if you have less time, you create worse quality. And when you have more, you create even better things.
The logic sounds simple.
Yet it isn’t actually that simple. Let’s say it’s your off day. Full day for whatever you want to do. And you choose to write.
You start off the day with 100% motivation and full energy, and feel really good after finishing a full article in 90 minutes. Then you try to replicate that. Your body screams to take a break. You’re getting slower the more you work. You somehow manage to push through half the post, but you’re completely done. You tell yourself to have a break because you “deserve it”.
And 2 hours goes by from social media. Another one for lunch. Then 2 for the sluggish hours after lunch. You’ve lost half your day doing nothing.
You can’t get your mind back to the right energy level and you procrastinate the rest of the articles to tomorrow and do the bare minimum things for today.
I don’t know about you, but that’s exactly how my day goes when I have the full time and dedicate it to writing. The worst part: those articles aren’t even the best ones I’ve written.
The best ones are one that I wrote right before school without thinking about it.
We think time = higher quality, but have we actually tested it out? And what happened then.
Here’s a look into a different perspective: that time constraints make things better. You need pressure to create diamonds, temperature and pounding to make swords. The abundance of time isn’t freedom, it’s a curse.
My Daily Routine (That Gets Things Done)
I wake up at 6:30am almost every single day. I start my day by brushing my teeth, getting a glass of water and coming back in to turn on music.
Then, I start writing. It’s a lot easier to work when I already have the ideas for my post down. I write until 7:20, and start replying to notifications on substack and engaging in notes.
The best thing is that there is always a hard stop before I burn out. I have to stop whatever I’m doing at 7:40 and start getting ready to leave for school. Whether my work is done, that’s all the time that I will get for morning engagement and writing deep work block.
I get 7 hours of school, and get back home at about 4. That’s when I eat a little snack and start working at 4:15. I’m usually handling all of the schoolwork right after coming home, but it stops at 5:45 when I handle substack engagement and restarts at 6pm usually until 6:30. Then I have dinner, a small wind down and I have 30 minutes pocket to pack in extra writing or usually scheduling notes.
Then, at 9, I’m getting in the routine of learning a new skill each week and at 9:30, I’m preparing to sleep.
This routine, thought it doesn’t seem like there’s much time, has allowed me to post 74 articles and 2-3 notes each day while engaging with my audience and replying to every single comment.
It’s definitely less than I could have done if I had the full day, but I finished what I need to very efficiently and made the quality even better.
What does your daily writing routine look like? And how does it influence your writing?
The Mechanism: Behind Why Less Time is Better
1. It Provides The Structure For Your Day
When you have a huge portion of your time stuck with work or school, you have no choice or freedom of how you organize your calendar.
It seems like a huge constraint at first, but it actually isn’t.
When I come back from school, and finish my other work, I immediately know it’s time to write. School decides the rigidity of my schedule and I don’t wake up in the morning having to think about what I’m going to do today.
When the schedule is fixed for 5 days a week, it gives me energy to spend thinking about how to write instead of when I should write.
2. It Forces You to Build an Efficient Routine
When you’re limited to 60-90 minutes of writing every single day, you’re not going to waste a second thinking about something useless.
You’re going to be out there executing and writing the best and fastest that you can.
With time constraints, you start to optimize routines to finish everything you need to do in even fewer minutes.
The moment I wake up or when the clock hits 5:45, I know that I need to transition straight into writing mode. I built habits that make the routine faster, like using AI to cut out the mundane parts of writing, having a doc of saved ideas to write about or a system to write.
Those routines take up less time that I would otherwise have spent doing the same things and allow me to rest assured that I have finished everything that I need to today.
3. It Removes Perfectionism and Whatever Doesn’t Move the Needle
Perfectionism isn’t caused by the person. It’s caused by the environment around them.
It’s caused by a lack of restraints.
When you have the entire day to write your best article, you’re obviously going to write it in the morning, adjust every little word, run it through AI, keep editing and only hit publish at the end of the day.
But when you have everything else going on in life, you don’t hesitate to hit the publish button (at least I don’t). I know that if I pull it on and don’t do it now, I’ll just drag it into tomorrow with no more time than I have now.
My time constraints kill perfectionism and allow me to hit publish faster, learn from it better and keep improving for the next time.
Other than that, time constraints also force me to do 80/20. To only focus on the 20% (or so) of things that cause 80% of the results. I stopped doing everything I can on substack and started doing the things that actually converted: writing posts, scheduling notes, engaging and sending DMs to readers.
The net total results might be lower than the person who does everything, but that person will also burn out faster doing more things.
The problem was never that you didn’t have enough time. It was that you had too much of it.
That meeting that runs until 7pm. The lecture. The schoolwork you have to finish.
That’s not an excuse to throw around. That’s not standing between you and your writing. That’s exactly what’s making it better and an opportunity to cut out the useless things.
Look at the smallest pocket of time to write this week. That’s not a limitation, that’s an edge.
-Nathaniel from Writer’s Productivity
P.S. I showed you exactly how having less expendable time is actually beneficial to building good writing habits above. But what about how to turn that time into systems that help you hit publish. I’ve build a system that basically runs on autopilot for me that allows me to write efficiently with ease.
I wrote the consistent publishing blueprint—$7 exactly to help writers publish more and consistently. Check it out here.
I agree so much. That is what I noticed helps in a tight place - scheduling stuff. When you have decided when to do e.g. writing then you stop waiting for a better mood. Which usually rarely comes. I know what I am doing more in the future I will be scheduling.