Let me say the rude part immediately: some of you are not too busy to write. You are busy so that you don’t have to write, and the schedule is in on it.
I say this with love and personal experience. I run multiple businesses. I have reorganized a supplier spreadsheet with the focused intensity of a bomb technician, at 11pm, on a day I had promised myself a chapter. The spreadsheet did not need me. The chapter did. The spreadsheet was just safer, because a spreadsheet can’t be rejected by an agent.
The alibi audit
Busy is the only alibi that gets you compliments. Nobody watches you answer forty-seven emails and says “coward.” But your calendar will testify against you if you ask it directly. Try this: for three days, every time you “don’t have time” to write, write down what you were doing instead and what it was protecting you from. Patterns emerge fast, and they’re embarrassing, and embarrassing is useful.
| The busy-work | What it protects you from | The ten-minute trade |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox zero at 10pm | Finding out if the chapter is any good | Ten minutes of draft before the inbox opens |
| “Research” (a fourth competitor scan) | Committing to your own take | Write your take badly; compare after |
| Redesigning the website again | Publishing words under your own name | Post one imperfect paragraph today |
| Saying yes to one more client call | Admitting the book matters to you | Block one writing slot with a client’s name on it: yours |
Discipline for people who hate that word
I don’t teach grind. Grind is just hiding with a gym membership. What works is smaller and sneakier:
- Schedule yourself like a client who pays. You’d never bump a paying client for laundry. You bump yourself weekly. Put “L.A. — manuscript” in the calendar and treat cancellation like a refund you owe.
- Shrink the ask until refusal is silly. Ten words a day survives launch weeks, tax season, and a toddler with a fever. Grand routines don’t survive Tuesday.
- Steal, don’t find. There is no time lying around. There are pockets currently occupied by scrolling. Pick two pockets. Rob them.
- Log the evidence. A visible streak of small wins outshouts the story that you’re “not disciplined.” You were never undisciplined. You were unprotected.
Nobody suspects the person answering emails. That’s what makes it the perfect place to hide from a book.
The dare
Tomorrow, before you open a single inbox, write ten words of the real thing. Then go be impressively busy all day with my blessing — because the book already got fed, and hiding’s no fun once the hostage is free.
Backup, if you want it: “The Avoidance Audit Planner” to catch yourself in the act, the master course “I Don’t Have Time (And Other Lies),” and “Three Days To Stealing Your Own Time Back” — free, because the time was yours anyway.
