Finding Time in Our Finite Lives to Write the Stories and Books We Feel Called to Write
By Brooke Warner
Time is a heavy topic—an elastic, sometimes scary, and slippery one, too. Time is finite, and each of us is living out our days knowing that every hour forward is moving toward less time left. Like I said, heavy. In part because you can’t talk about making time without thinking about running out of time, or never having enough time. And so we must make the time—and find the time—to do the things we say we want to do.
Working with writers as we do, Grant and I know the pressure people feel around time. When you’re young, time is measured more around all the pressing things—of raising a family, of a full-time job, of caretaking an elderly parent. When you’re older, you may have more freedom, and more time, but then time is measured in the awareness that you don’t have forever to accomplish the things you want to get done in this life. In other words, our relationship with time is never truly fluid and easy.
This week on the Memoir Nation podcast, we interview time-management expert Laura Vanderkam about making time to write. One of her insights is to think about time not in daily increments, but instead in weekly increments.
Laura recommends thinking in weekly increments, which looks something like this.
You have 168 hours each week. You have 112 hours after sleeping 8 hours a night. And 72 hours after working 40 hours. How do you fill those 72 hours?
Even if your days are uneven, you can almost always find 3–5 hours scattered across a week.
Creative goals should be planned and measured weekly, not daily.
We hope all of you who are planning to participate in JanYourStory will take this in stride. The point of a challenge is to rev that engine a bit out the gate. Or, because I’m a runner, let’s consider January like the starting block of a race and that initial burst off the blocks. If you give yourself a good start, you’ll have a significant advantage for the rest of the race.
Writing a book is no small endeavor. For so many writers, it takes years. Writing a memoir asks so much of us. It requires us to lay bare our deepest truths, and to do so beautifully and poetically, and then to find universal meaning in our stories. This takes time!! And the thing is, you won’t finish if you don’t give yourself the time it takes.
It’s a bit odd, truth be told, that we talk about death so much in relation to writing our books. Grant has said many times that no one’s ever on their deathbed wishing they did more dishes. No—they regret the things they wish they would have done. Writing a book, because of the unique nature of the kind of goal this is, awakens and agitates us in unique ways. Writing a book is about legacy, what we leave behind, and, importantly, it’s about claiming or reclaiming the narrative of our own lives.
We don’t have all the time in the world, which is why time has been described as fleeting, precious, borrowed, slipping through our fingers, as the clock ticking, as the steady walk toward the horizon of our lives.
This post is meant to be uplifting, not so much reminding you that death is
calling, but sometimes we need to feel the press of time to reset our
priorities.
Mary Oliver famously wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
For those of us who write, the answer is just that: Write. Finish. Publish. Share. Be seen. Touch lives.
We invite you to carve out time to write 500 words a month in January. We invite you to consider where your own windows of time to write exist in your 168 hours a week. We invite you to embrace your writing as a habit you must tend, and a commitment you will not break.
What is your current commitment to your writing? What is one thing you want to do different in 2026? What is one thing you want to do the same in 2026? If you want to share in the comments, we’d love that! And counting down to January—see you there. Sign up for free here.
Write on!
