“Write the first thing you do, before the tasks of the day pile up. Eat the frog, the first thing you do.” A few weeks ago I read Chris Fox’s book 5000 Words per Hour and it inspired me to start writing every day, the first thing I do in the morning.
Why should you write first thing in the morning? Because otherwise it’s easy for you to come up with excuses or distractions so you end up not writing. Once the day has started and the “to-do list” gets longer and longer, it’s easy not to prioritize writing. Especially if, like me, you write in your spare time.
After reading 5000 words per hour, I downloaded a google sheet from the Fox website and started tracking how much time I spent writing and how many words I wrote each day. In March, I wrote for a total of 18.5 hours, which resulted in me writing and editing 101,769 words in total. In April, I wrote for 20.5 hours resulting in 90,592 words written and edited. That is so much more than I usually write in a month.
The book also discusses how to train yourself to become a faster writer. The goal, according to Fox, is to reach a staggering 5000 words per hour. I’ve approached that when editing, but not when writing. Yet.
Sprints and micro-sprints are a great way to speed up as a write, even if the goal of a sprint is to get into a writing flow. Microsprints are short sprints that only last a few minutes. Why is this good, you might ask? Because you start to train yourself to write at any time, even if it’s just three minutes while you’re waiting for everyone to join a meeting. If you train yourself you’re more likely to end up in writers flow later.
You also teach yourself that you can write without having several hours set aside for writing. Because that’s a mistake I’ve made myself, waiting to write until I have a whole morning or afternoon dedicated to writing, only to get stuck on Instagram for hours.
What I can say after getting up earlier for two months is that I have become more productive since I started writing and tracking my writing every day. I’m almost done rewriting book two in the Forbidden Circle series and we’ll see if I start writing something new here next or edit the book again.
