Hello everyone. I know I’ve been scarce here but never fear! I am still around. I have been busy with the House of Stitched Magazine and the interviews, so time management has been a little juggling act, as of late.

One of the things keeping me going is that I love what I do. Because of my passion, I thought this would be the perfect post for today.

I hear a lot from authors, “I want to write but I can’t find the time.”

I get this. As a mom and caregiver to an adult son who lives with treatment resistant schizophrenia, my time wasn’t really my own because he needed me more. So the first thing I tell everyone I mentor is this: Decide where you are at in life and how much you can dedicate to writing.

Knowing what you can do is different than knowing what you want to do. Once you have good time management, you can accomplish anything you need-or want-to do. Without knowing what your time is spent on, you can’t allocate time for much of anything else.

Let’s have some real talk for just a moment, shall we? Professional athletes don’t “wish” they had more time for their sport. The live it, breathe it, and dream about it. They practiced their whole life for it. They made sacrifices for it. If you’re not willing to make the sacrifices, you may not be as serious about it as you think.

My family can attest to how many hours of missing sleep I’ve given up to accomplish the writing I have done. It’s not a numbers game. I don’t quantify whether I’m successful on how many things I’ve written, I base it on the quality of my work.

Everyone can toss out a lot of books or short stories, but there’s more than just slinging words onto a document or piece of paper. Hours more will be spent selling those stories, editing those stories, and promoting those stories.

What you need to resolve is: Am I writing for a hobby? Or do I want to make this a career?

If you want to make it a career, you have to find the time, or make the time by giving up something else. That’s all there is to it.

To love what you do, you have to be willing to put a ring on it. You have to marry it, commit to it, and stay loyal. When friends call and ask if you want to go out Friday night, you have to be willing to decline. When you are feeling lazy on Saturday, which happens to be your only day off from your “day job”, you have to be willing to get up and write anyway.

The most important thing you need to have is real expectations. Fantasy and dreams belong in your writing. If you can’t find 30 min’s a day to write, then becoming a writer may not be for you. If you give up something else and make the time for it, you might just have what it takes.

500 words a day and you’ll have a novel by the end of the year.

How many words a day do you text? How many words a day do you post on social media?

Avoid the excuses and make your choices. When you do, you’ll discover you have control of your time, your life, and your dreams. A personal audit of your life is never a bad idea.

But more on that in another post.

Tell me what you guys think about this post. Has auditing your week helped you? What tools do you use?