You may have noticed that the time you set aside for writing is slowly disappearing. Whether your hours are now spent homeschooling, videoconferencing, or searching online for elusive cleaning products, your writing time has slipped away. At Writer’s Relief, we know life can get busy and even topsy-turvy—but that shouldn’t mean giving up all the time you’ve scheduled for writing. Here are ways to reclaim your writing time while juggling everything else life throws at you.

5 Ways To Reclaim Your Writing Time

Get back on schedule. You may have pushed writing aside to make room for new tasks. But if your writing commitment gets relegated to “I’ll work on it later” or “maybe tomorrow,” it’s not going to happen—other responsibilities will always get in the way. Whether you choose once a week or every day, get yourself back on a writing schedule, and stick to it! Writing time must be held just as worthy and important as any other activity. Soon you’ll be back in the habit of consistently working on your writing.

Write at the edges of your day. You may not have time to set aside an hour to work on your manuscript, but you can take advantage of any downtime between tasks. Waiting for your dentist appointment? Timing batches of cookies in and out of the oven? Jot down ideas for your latest writing project, or take out your red pen and get in some quick edits. Any amount of writing is progress, even if it’s only five minutes a day.

Regularly working on your drafts keeps your head in the game. Then, when you do have a larger chunk of time available, you’ll be ready to jump right in and start writing. Just be careful to also leave time to relax so you don’t risk burnout.

Banish all distractions. It’s finally your “butt in chair” time and you’re ready to write—after you check social media to see if anyone liked your recent post…or you watch a minute or two of that series that’s streaming now…or reply to that latest text. Suddenly a few minutes of distraction become a few hours, and there’s no time left to write.

It’s important to turn off the background noise and put everything else on hold during your writing time. Let your friends and family know you’ll be unavailable, turn off your phone, and get to work. If you need a little extra help staying focused, CalmlyWriter can remove distracting interface, and Freedom only allows access to the programs you need for writing until you’re finished.

Connect with other writers. Who understands the struggle to find writing time better than other writers? Join an online writing group to meet writers and learn what ways they’ve found to work writing into their busy days. Accountability is also a powerful motivator: Committing to completing a part of your manuscript in order to share with the group will provide an added incentive to carve out time to write—and actually do it.

Hire an assistant. When you can barely find time to write, you don’t want to spend any of that precious writing time on market research. But it can take hours (and hours!) of time to research and find the best literary journals or agents for your work—and to eliminate all the markets that aren’t right. Instead, delegate your research busywork to an assistant like Writer’s Relief. Our research experts will pinpoint and target the very best places to submit your work and boost your odds of getting an acceptance! And we’re very good at it: Check out what our many happy clients have to say. We’ll do all the research so you can focus on writing. Submit your writing sample to our Review Board today!

With so much on your plate these days, writing time can get lost in the shuffle. Use these tips to reclaim your lost writing time and get back to doing what you love to do!

Question: How do you ensure you have time to write?