Finding time to write often feels like trying to find a diamond in a snowbank. I’d sure like to find it, but there’s just so much snow. Obligations and competing priorities stack up all around, especially with kids and a full-time job. It feels nearly impossible to find any sort of “me time” at all, let alone dedicated writing time.

But …

What about five minutes? Can you spare five minutes?

I signed up for a Highlights Foundation workshop this winter, something I’ve long wanted to do. One of the pledges we students made is to be more dedicated about writing regularly. This pledge scared the crap out of me. Writing “regularly”? How was I supposed to make that happen?

For a while now, my writing time has been an all-or-nothing affair. Either I binge write for five hours, or I don’t write anything at all. Unfortunately, trying to find a big block of time to write has been like the diamond/snowbank analogy.

Start with five minutes a day, our instructor, Sarah Aronson said.

My freakout factor dropped a bit. I could probably sneak in five minutes a day. I wasn’t sure how much writing I could squeeze into such a short time frame, but it was worth a try at least. Five minutes is better than nothing.

Day One, after getting the kids to bed, I set the timer on my phone, hit start and began writing. The timer dinged. I wrote a few minutes more, then stopped. I got a couple paragraphs in. Was it an entire chapter, a whole scene? No. Was it more than I’d written in a month? Yes. And the best part was I knew I’d get five more minutes the next day to work at it again.

Now, several weeks in, I see a lot of benefits to writing in these dedicated pockets of time:

• I’ve made more progress on my stalled-out manuscript. Working in those bite-size, five-minute chunks has taken away the daunting feeling of figuring out how to tighten up my WIP’s saggy middle. I just have to take it a little bit at a time.
• I’ve played more. Sometimes I spend the five minutes free writing whatever pops into my head. Sometimes it’s totally unrelated to my WIP. Those are my five writing minutes to spend however I want. It’s helped me rediscover the fun of writing.
• I can jump into the story faster since I’m writing every day.
• I make better use of big blocks of writing time when I have them.
• I feel more creative.
• I look forward to those five minutes. That time feels very purposeful, which gives it extra meaning too.

Writing time is precious. It will only continue to be more so as the kids get older and work demands ramp up. But I can make it a priority. This TED talk from Laura Vanderkam on how to gain control of your free time puts it in a really good perspective. What have you done that’s helped you make or find time to write?

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