Finding an Hour to Write When Your Day Job Doesn't Stop

People ask me some version of the same question at almost every talk I give: how did you write two books while running a full-time career in digital transformation. The honest answer disappoints most of them, because it isn't a productivity hack. It's that I stopped waiting for the conditions to be right, because in a career like mine, they were never going to be.

There is no "found" time — there is only taken time

Early in my career I believed, the way most people do, that a serious creative practice needed long, protected stretches of quiet — a weekend cabin, a sabbatical, a slow season. I don't have those, and neither do most people balancing a demanding career with a creative one. What I have instead is an early morning before the first call, a layover, thirty minutes after everyone else in the house has gone to sleep. None of that time was found lying around. It was taken, deliberately, from something else — usually rest, sometimes leisure — and that trade-off is worth being honest about instead of romanticizing.

The discipline was never "write every day." It was "don't let more than two days pass without opening the file," which is a much more forgiving, and much more sustainable, standard.

Lower the bar for what counts as progress

The version of me who needed a clear afternoon and the right mood to write anything worthwhile would never have finished a chapter, let alone two books. What actually worked was accepting that some writing sessions produce three good sentences and a lot of mediocre ones, and that this still counts as progress. Momentum, in a fragmented schedule, matters more than any single session's output. A messy paragraph you can fix next week beats a perfect paragraph you never got around to writing because you were waiting for a better hour.

Protect the transition, not just the time

The hardest part of writing around a demanding job isn't finding minutes on a calendar — it's the mental gear change from a day full of stakeholder calls and technical decisions into the different, quieter headspace fiction or poetry needs. I learned to build a small ritual around that transition: closing the laptop that runs my day job, physically moving to a different chair, reading back the last paragraph I wrote before adding anything new. It sounds small. It's the difference between forty minutes of real writing and forty minutes of staring at a cursor while still mentally answering emails.

If you're trying to sustain a creative practice alongside a career that doesn't slow down, my honest advice is this: stop waiting for spare time to appear, because it won't. Decide what you're willing to trade for it, lower your definition of a good session, and protect the few minutes of transition that let you actually show up for the work. That's not an inspiring formula. It's the only one that's worked for me across two very different books and two decades of a career that never once made room for me on its own.