I get asked, ‘How do you manage to write so much?’, a lot. 

And the truth is that, like most established habits, it’s quite easy once you’ve done the work of making it a routine in your life. The routine – and the accompanying triggers – do a lot of the heavy lifting of making the habit continue.

For much of this year, that’s where I’ve been with my writing. I established the habit of writing every weekday. And strange as it sounds, it was harder not to write than to write. 

There are a lot of things that were aligning to create this reality. I was reading a lot – both books and articles. I had a certain amount of headspace to enable creative thinking. And, like I said, I had an established routine.

As you’ll have noticed, my writing has dropped off over the last month. Reflecting on why, I can see that all three of the above factors, which all need to align, have taken a hit.

For whatever reason my reading levels have taken a hit. On top of that, work has been all-consuming for a while now and any free headspace has been reduced to nothing. And, with less creative ideas and less headspace, it has become easier and easier to put off writing when my usual writing triggers have kicked in.

As the title of this post says, writing is easy – until it is hard!

I don’t want to lose the writing habit though and am working to get everything aligned again. Watch this space!

–Sam

Got some thoughts on this? I’d love to hear from you – do hit reply or drop me a note.

@samradford | samradford.com