Being a writer is a fickle business. Some days I can have so much writing to do that there’s not enough hours in the day to get it all done. And other days I get no writing done at all because I’m busy dealing with financial matters, making telephone calls or researching.

And so it often seems impossible to set aside a few hours every day for writing.

So eventually I stopped trying.

I came to realize that it isn’t possible to make a schedule of how long I’m going to sit and write every day because every day is different.

It’s taken me years to accept this because I’ve always read articles written by others who say that they always write for 2 hours every day or they write 3,000 words every day or 10 pages or have some other kind of writing routine that they stick to religiously.

And I always used to try and do the same thing. But it never worked for me and so I’d end up feeling like a failure because I stopped writing before my allotted time was up or I didn’t reach my self-inflicted word count.

Then one day what suddenly dawned on me was that the reason it never worked for me is because my days are usually all different. I don’t know how other writers manage to set aside the same amount of time to write every day, but my days just aren’t like that.

So now I have a much better way of finding time to write that works perfectly for me.

I don’t give myself the same number of hours to write every day and I don’t have a quota for the number of words I have to have written by the end of the day.

Instead I work on a day-to-day basis. So at the end of each day I write the next day’s tasks in my diary.

I buy a big diary every year; one that has a whole page for each day. On each page I write all the next day’s tasks that need doing no matter how small or insignificant the task seems such as emails to write, pens to buy or even packages to take to the post office.

Then I allot a time to do each one. I make sure that I do this at the end of every day because it helps me to stay right on track with everything I need to do without missing a thing.

It also helps me to know how long it takes me to do things. So if I allow half an hour to write an article, but it takes me longer, then I know to allow an hour instead. That way I know that if I have 6 articles to write, it’s going to take me 6 hours to write them.

This works perfectly for me because every day when I sit down to work I know exactly what I have to do, when I have to do it and how much time I have to do it in, and this has really helped me to work much more efficiently and grow my writing business to where it is today.

And you can do the same.

Don’t try and work the same way every day. Just use a diary to block out time to write and to complete other tasks every day and you’ll soon be working much more productively.

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About The Author: Ruth Barringham is a freelance writer and online marketer and has been writing professionally since 1999. She started her own publishing company in 2007 where she publishes all her books and ebooks. She also has an inspirational website for writers at Writeaholics.net.

She is also the author of the popular writing course, The 12 Month Writing Challenge. This is a course that walks you all the way through one whole year of writing consistently and earning a full-time income. Read more about it at http://www.12mthchallenge.com.