How Much Time Is The Right Amount To Spend on Your Writing

What's enough, really?

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Jul 02, 2025

The Quandary

Financial planners report that when an individual or family tracks their spending for the first time, they’re often horrified by how much they’ve been spending on groceries. But the size of that number rarely shocks the planner. The client’s sense of shame about it comes from lack of context. Most people never see other people’s budgets, so they have no idea what others spend. But the planner, on the other hand, has examined hundreds of budgets and knows what’s typical and that the fact is, we all spend a fair amount of our income on food.

This is an example of a perspective gap. And perspective gaps are common in writing, too. If you are working all alone, without a clear sense of what others are doing, it’s easy to assume you’re not accomplishing enough. Most writers I know feel guilty about our process: not consistent enough, not focused enough, not enough hours.

In the early days of my teaching in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute, when my students asked for advice on how much time they should dedicate to sitting down and writing, I’d hem and haw. I’d ask them about their habits, their goals—and then say, “It depends.”

Now, after working with hundreds of students, like the financial planner, I avoid that unhelpful dodge. After years of observation, I have a data set that’s significant. I can discern patterns that the individual writer, working alone, really can’t.

So I’ll share with you a much better, much more straightforward answer:

Spend 60 to 120 minutes on your writing, five days a week.

Why That Range?

I could wax poetic about why 90 minutes is a sweet spot, but let’s keep it simple: it works. Most writers who stick to this range get good work done. They complete projects.

Still skeptical? Here are a few resources that back this up—books I recommend often to both my students and to OMC clients who wonder what “enough” writing looks like.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

An enlightening look at the routines of 161 creatives—many of them writers. For example, from this book, I learned that in 1899, W.B. Yeats wrote that he forced himself to write two hours a day, whether he felt like it or not. “I have never written more than five or six good lines in a day,” he claimed. Yet, obviously, that turned out to be sufficient. Martin Amis described a great writing day as two focused hours: “Then afterwards you can read or play tennis or snooker.

Advice for New Faculty by Robert Boice

Written for young professors who have to juggle teaching (which pays the bills) with research (which gets them tenure). Sound familiar? Even if you’re not a teacher, this is basically the balancing act in the life of every creative writer. Boice studied what made some academics publish consistently while others floundered. His findings? Short, frequent writing sessions—squeezed in between classes and meetings—beat binge-writing marathons.

The Clockwork Muse by Eviatar Zerubavel

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by a big project, this book is a balm. It’s grounded, calming, and full of simple strategies that actually work.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

A much broader take on the whole question—in this book, Burkeman argues that traditional time management is flawed because it fuels the illusion that we can "get everything done." Burkeman suggests we embrace limits. A human being has roughly 4,000 weeks in a lifetime. So let’s accept finitude and relinquish perfectionism. Choose meaningful pursuits over endless productivity hacks. All three of us here at OMC—Sophie, Raghav, and I—have found Burkeman’s approach beneficial.

Hope this helps!

P.S. One more thing— if this protocol doesn’t end up working for you, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, act on this advice from the inimitable Martha Beck: if you set yourself a goal for a particular day and fail to meet it, instead of grimly announcing “I’ll do it tomorrow,” cut whatever that goal was by half. Let’s say you told yourself, “Tomorrow I’m going to write for ninety minutes,” but things got in the way, and somehow you didn’t write at all. Rather than setting the same goal again for tomorrow, change that goal to “I’m going to write for 45 minutes.” If the same thing happens yet again, then chop the 45 minutes in half. Change your goal for the next day to “I’m going to write for 22 minutes and 30 seconds.” If you don’t meet that one, then make it 11 minutes and 15 seconds. And so on, until you DO meet the goal.

BUT if the goal decreases to just a few minutes and you still haven’t managed to show up at your desk, then try altering it to something that you know you absolutely can do. Try “I’m going to show up at my desk and sit quietly for two minutes, not doing anything, just sitting still without distractions, and if I feel up to it, I will put a piece of paper in front of me and arrange my fingers into the position I assume when I’m holding a pen. For 30 seconds, I will go through the pantomime of writing, moving my hand across the page as if I were writing sentences onto the page.” Or another real-life example: “I’ll show up at my desk and open up a book. I’ll copy out the book’s first three paragraphs by hand. I’ll write them onto a sheet of paper.”

These are real examples of methods real professors of writing have told real students who had paid real money for real Master’s degrees. They're nothing if not motivated. But sometimes, even they get stuck. To me, this is absolute proof that being blocked and trying these sorts of tricks is nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes new methods are what it takes to persevere.

This Martha Beck technique prevents one from foolishly attempting to “push through” by continuing over and over again to set and meet the same darn goal. If after day after day, you aren’t doing what you set out to do, then that goal simply isn’t the right goal for you at this time. Develop trust in yourself. Experiment until you manage to create a goal that you CAN meet. Then continue to show up daily to do that amount of work—and no more—until you feel a slight shift, like perhaps you’re ready to take it up a notch.

Martha Beck is big on continuing to perform the small nugget of work for four days straight before even consider increasing the possibility of increasing it. (The book she wrote on this method is called The Four-Day Win.)

Do you have any habits or rituals that have helped you when motivation is in short supply?

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