It would be an understatement to say that many of us have a tricky relationship with writing. Often, it’s the thing that we desperately want to do, but it’s also the thing that we stop doing – or indeed, never start.

Deadlines improve the effectiveness of goals. Without a time frame and some pressure, there will be no urgency to act. They might not be pleasant, but they will increase your focus and direct your limited energy.

Rather than wait for distractions to disturb you, obstacle thinking helps you predict your interruptions. And

I realised that ‘writing a book’ was stressing me out, so I built my confidence by starting small and writing regularly for my own blog. This turned into writing articles for others, which led to a book proposal, an agent, a book deal with a publisher, and in 2020, an award for my first book.

we’re going to tell you about the last and final myth of the book – it’s what we call the ‘quantity myth’ – and we’re going to turn to Adam Grant, one of the most prolific and high-profile academics in his field to explain. ‘It’s widely assumed there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality,’ he writes, ‘that if you want to do better work you

While some productivity advice focusses on swallowing a frog first thing in the morning,† we find the best way to get started is to do something you enjoy – and the research backs this up.21

1. GET CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WANT TO DO Stop delaying on your goals. If you’re feeling stuck, the best way to get started is to go small. This approach works at every stage of your writing life. You might be at the beginning of a project, dancing round your dream trying to find out where to start, or you can apply this as a daily practice of

Once you’ve set a writing goal, check in with yourself to see how it makes you feel. Ask, is your goal: a)Overwhelming and daunting? b)Like it will be a walk in the park? c)Exciting, challenging but also achievable? If you chose a) it’s likely that you’ll never start because over-ambitious goals can lead to procrastination – make your goal smaller.

Some people just can’t dedicate a complete hour for a writing session, so they have to rely on time confetti. We found that the writers who used this approach often wrote for an hour or more a day even though it was scattered into five-, ten- or fifteen-minute mini-sessions. There