Rethinking daily writing

For many years, my daily writing was something I swore by. Every workday, for the first 1-2 hours of the day, I would write. This strategy has been crucial for me in making my writing priority.

Fast forward to 2020 and a global pandemic – and I have been struggling to keep my daily writing up. The pandemic threw a wrench into most of my planning strategies. I tried getting up very early and writing before every one at home was awake, with mixed results. At the same time, I supervise many more students than before now, and since the vast majority are in Europe, my early mornings are the time when I have an overlap with the afternoon in Europe. More and more, meetings are taking up time and space in my mornings, and my writing time goes out of the window.

I have tried instead to reserve larger chunks of time during the week to be able to do research and writing. This approach worked well over the summer, as a number of my other responsibilities had slowed down, but in the Fall semester, I noticed that there’s always something urgent to gobble up that time again.

At this moment, I’m not quite sure yet how to tackle my time management dilemma. I’ve been taking about blocking off 1,5 hour in the morning, every morning, for writing again, and not allow any meetings to come in that time. I’ve been thinking about restructuring some of my days. But, all of these approaches are just quick fixes to a deeper issue – my workload in itself. I’m aware of the issue, but I haven’t found a way out of the problem yet.