How to Find Time to Write When You’re Busy

Some days, finding time to write feels like trying to catch a firefly with oven mitts on—possible, technically, but wow does it take effort.

People often assume that because I’m an author, an agent, and a coach, I must have a perfectly structured writing routine. As if my days are lined with quiet mornings, hot coffee, and a steady stream of brilliant ideas. I wish. My reality looks a lot more like this: half-finished mugs, emails multiplying like rabbits, manuscripts waiting for feedback, characters tapping their figurative feet, and my own stories whispering, Hey, remember us?

For a while, I believed the lie that I needed a big, magical block of time to make real progress on my own manuscripts. An uninterrupted morning. A whole afternoon. Maybe an entire weekend when the stars aligned. Spoiler: the stars rarely aligned. And even when they did, I was usually too tired to use them.

To find time to write, think smaller.

What finally shifted things for me wasn’t discipline—it was acceptance.

✅ Accepting that life was busy because I cared about a lot of things.

✅ Accepting that waiting for “the perfect moment” had left me with half-drafted ideas and a whole lot of creative guilt.

✅ And accepting that small steps, taken often, could actually move me farther than those elusive marathon sessions I kept dreaming about.

One day, between calls, I had exactly sixty seconds before jumping into the next item on my list. Instead of scrolling or reorganizing the pens on my desk (a very serious and urgent task, apparently), I wrote one sentence. Just one. It wasn’t poetic. It wasn’t a breakthrough. (It wasn't even good!) But it was something.

And strangely enough, that one sentence felt like opening a window.

From there, I started leaning into tiny pockets of time. Not while boiling something on the stove—trust me, half-written ideas are great, but so is not calling the fire department—but in the quieter transitions of the day. A minute before a meeting. Two minutes after sending a batch of emails. The small pause before bedtime when my brain still had enough spark left to think.

Writing doesn't always mean...writing.

Sometimes I didn’t draft at all. I brainstormed. I recorded a voice memo while taking a walk. I scribbled a question about a character’s motivation. And the more I collected these fragments, the easier it became to sit down later and actually write. I wasn’t starting from zero anymore. I was starting from breadcrumbs that led right back into the heart of the story.

Now, I protect one tiny window each week—just one—that’s solely for my own writing. It’s not long. But it feels like a small, steady promise to my creative self: you’re worth making space for.

The Bottom Line

If you’re juggling a full life (and who isn’t?), maybe you don’t need more hours in the day. You don’t need sprawling writing sessions or a cabin in the woods. Books are built from distilled ideas, vivid moments, and carefully chosen words. Those precious little pockets of time you reclaim can hold exactly that.

Over time, those sentences, questions, doodles, and sparks you collect grow into manuscripts with heartbeat and purpose. One day, you’ll look at the manuscript in front of you and realize it was built from all the moments you once thought were too small to matter—and that there are more moments ahead, waiting to become your next story.