When I started teaching full-time, I quickly realized something: the academic year was a beast.

Classes, meetings, students, committees — all perfectly capable of devouring every spare minute of the week. I knew if I didn’t get serious about protecting my writing time, it would vanish completely.

To survive I needed to claw back time from the beast.

At first, I thought I needed giant, uninterrupted blocks to write. But those were as rare as sabbatical leaves. Over time, I found strategies that helped me keep writing no matter how loud the rest of life got:

• Learn to say “no”. When I looked back at my first year, I realized that a ton of meetings were nonessential things I said “yes” to without realizing the cumulative impact. Every meeting you ditch is another 60 minutes or more you can write.

• Delegate like your writing depends on it. I handed off anything I possibly could to grad students, assistants, and collaborators. Every small task delegated was another 30–60 minutes reclaimed for writing.

• Use the “in-between” minutes. Busy people can’t wait for perfect conditions to write. Ten minutes before class? I’d sketch an outline or edit a paragraph. Waiting for a meeting to start? I’d jot notes for the next section. It’s easy to dismiss these as scraps of time, but even fifteen minutes adds up — fifteen minutes a day is over 90 hours a year of bonus writing time.

• Time box your days. If you don’t work hard to keep non-writing tasks in a box, they will overflow into your writing time. I learned to schedule all my non-writing tasks in “boxes” to ensure they got done and wouldn’t interrupt my writing blocks. When I got good at this, I could reclaim 3–5 solid hours a week that had been swallowed by “urgent” but less important tasks. Over a year, that’s 150–250 hours — the time it takes to write an entire book draft.

Every writer has their own version of the beast: a day job, family life, clients, the endless swirl of obligations. The beast never sleeps — but it can be managed.

Your mission this week: find one hour you can claw back. Maybe you can delegate a routine task, skip a nonessential meeting, or protect a 30-minute window twice a week for writing. As you do, your writing progress will accelerate and the beast will seem a lot less frightening.

Happy writing and happy time hunting,

Trevor