I recently coached a new retiree who wants to be a writer-editor in her retirement (a lot of people wait until retirement or near retirement to decide to pay attention to their creative lives). This client wants the editor side of the hyphen to help bolster her retirement income and the writer side to help bolster her need for creative work.

The Challenge of the Balancing Act

During one of our meetings, she mentioned, “I haven’t been doing any writing, and this whole endeavor was supposed to give me the time to write!”

She was extremely frustrated. And I understand the frustration. But it’s like anything. It’s difficult to launch two different things at once. In her case, she’s launching an editing business and a writing career – and that’s a lot.

The Magic of the First Two Hours

But writer-editors want to do both. And they want to do both now. So, my recommendation regarding this is almost always the same: take the first two hours of every day for your creative work.

Treat this like a standing appointment that you can’t cancel. Once the two hours are up, you begin doing the editing/paying work.

The reason this approach is effective is that it allows you to do the creative work when you are most likely to have creative energy. Then the paying work can fit into the rest of the day.

Making the creative work the first thing you do and protecting that time as if it were an urgent appointment is a message to yourself that helps you take the work more seriously.

Additionally, one of the challenges of a writing-editing career is that you can spend a lot of time solving other people’s story problems, leaving little creative energy for solving your own storytelling problems. This is another reason I recommend keeping the first two hours for your creative work. Your best problem-solving skills will be used on your own work and your sharpest creative energy will go towards your creative goals. That’s as it should be.

Time and Space, Not Word Count

“But I don’t have two hours a day!” you may say.

Okay. Maybe you can’t do two hours a day; maybe you can only do one. Do one.

Maybe your best creative time really is midnight to two in the morning.

Okay. Schedule and guard that time.

Notice that the two hours isn’t about productivity, it’s about time. We’re not saying 1,000 words. We’re not saying five pages. Giving something time means that it matters to you. It’s also easier to plan around.

A goal of 1,000 words a day is too hard to schedule; it could take twenty minutes or five hours. If you’re also running an editing business, you probably can’t afford to spend five hours on a workday doing something other than paying work.

Besides, sometimes the most productive thing you can do is take out 1,000 words.

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Jennifer Lawler has been a writer-editor for more than twenty-five years and has published more than forty novels and nonfiction books. She is the founder of the online education company Club Ed LLC