How to Create a Realistic Writing Schedule You Can Actually Follow

Most writing schedules are written on a good day. You've just finished a chapter you're proud of, you feel unstoppable, and you decide that from Monday you'll write 2,000 words every morning before work.

By Thursday you've missed two mornings and you feel worse about writing than you did before you had a schedule.

The schedule was the problem, not you. It was built by the version of you who'd just had a great day, for a version of you who doesn't exist. This post is about building one for the person who will have to follow it: tired some days, busy most of them, and occasionally brilliant.

Start by measuring, not planning

Before you decide how much you'll write, find out how much you do write.

For two weeks, write whenever you would anyway and keep a plain log: date, time, roughly how long, roughly how many words. No targets yet. You're collecting evidence, and you'll probably find it's less than you thought, but steadier than you feared. If you only manage a few sessions in those two weeks, keep logging for another week or two before you set a target.

Those two weeks give you your real pace. Maybe it's 400 words in a good 45-minute session. Maybe it's 250, or 900. The number matters less than having one that came from your own week rather than someone's productivity thread.

Why your first plan will be too optimistic

Psychologists call it the planning fallacy, and the classic demonstration involves students much like writers on deadline. In a 1994 study, Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked honours students when they'd finish their theses. On average the students predicted about 34 days. They took about 55. Fewer than a third finished by their own best guess, and fewer than half finished even by the date they gave when asked what would happen if everything went as badly as possible.

We plan as if nothing will interrupt us. Something always does.

So once you know your pace, plan for less. If your log says you average 400 words a session, schedule for 300. Hitting a modest target five days running does more for the next week than missing an ambitious one.

How many words a day do you need to finish a book?

Here's where a realistic schedule gets sobering, and also oddly reassuring.

Say you write 300 words a session, five days a week. That's 1,500 words a week. A 75,000-word first draft takes 50 weeks, roughly a year, assuming you keep it up and don't take breaks. That's the draft only; revising and editing come after. Write six days a week and it's about ten months. Bump the session to 500 words and it's around seven months.

A year can sound long, but it gives you a real finish line, and you can see exactly what would bring it closer. If a year is too long, change the inputs you control (an extra session, a slightly longer one) and check that the new version still fits a real week.

Drafting, revising and editing also move at different speeds, so don't schedule them with the same target. Revision often removes words rather than adding them, so a daily word count stops meaning much. Many writers switch from a word count to a time target, or a "scenes revised" count, once the draft is done.

Decide when and where, in advance

"I'll write more this month" is a wish. "When I sit down on the train home, I open the draft before I open anything else" is a plan.

That second kind has a name in psychology: an implementation intention, an if-then plan tied to a specific situation. A large 2006 review by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests of it and found a medium-to-large effect on whether people reached their goals. The research covers all sorts of goals, not writing specifically, but the logic carries over cleanly. You stop deciding whether to write each day. The cue decides for you.

Write yours down. When I've dropped the kids at school, I sit at the kitchen table and write until 9:15. After dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays, laptop, desk, draft. Anchor it to something that already happens every day, so you're not relying on remembering.

Build in a minimum, and a plan for missing days

Every schedule needs a floor: the smallest session that still counts. One paragraph. Ten minutes. Rereading yesterday's page and fixing three sentences. On a bad day you do the floor and stop, guilt-free.

You will miss days, though. That's fine, and there's research behind that too. When Phillippa Lally and colleagues followed people building new daily habits, the time it took for a behaviour to feel automatic varied enormously, from 18 days to an estimated 254. The often-quoted average of 66 days is a rough midpoint, not a deadline. And missing a single day had little effect on how the habit developed. Missing a lot of days did.

The career book The Working Version, in BrightChapters' Books section, makes the same point about workplace habits in its preface:

"A skill doesn't have to be perfect every single day to count."

A rule of thumb that fits those findings: miss once, fine, but try not to miss twice in a row. One missed day is a blip. Two starts to look like a new habit of not writing.

Review it once a month

A schedule you set in January won't fit your life in April. A new job, exams, a family wedding, a project at work that eats every evening for three weeks.

Once a month, look at your log. How many sessions did you plan and how many happened? If you hit nearly all of them, you can raise the target a little. If you hit half, the schedule is asking too much, so cut it back until it fits, without treating that as a failure. The goal is a schedule you keep, and you can always add to one you're keeping.

If writing is turning into something you hope to earn from, put this review next to the rest of the business side. Our post on treating writing like a business without losing your creativity covers how to keep that work out of your drafting time.

Make it visible to someone

Schedules kept entirely in your head are the easiest ones to drop. Tell a friend your target. Join a writing group that checks in weekly. Or publish as you go, so readers are waiting for the next chapter.

That last one has a useful side effect. When you post a serial chapter by chapter on BrightChapters, a regular release day gives readers something to look forward to and gives you a commitment outside your own head. Pick a release schedule you could keep even in a busy week. If you're squeezing all of this around a day job, our post on writing with a full-time job has more on finding and defending the time.

Start with two weeks of logging. Everything else follows from what that log tells you.

Ready to put this into practice?

BrightChapters' Write page is free to use, with no account needed to start a draft.