Most songwriters say that the hardest thing about writing songs is finding the time to write and as we live in a world that tells us we have no time to do anything, how do we overcome this?

We overcome this situation by not buying into the fact that we have no time to write.

I think it was Zig Ziglar who once said that a “…lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days.”

Every day, through every type of media, we’re bombarded with words and images promoting the latest time saving device or yet another solution to the “problem” of life just being way too busy.

It seems that society is cleverly turning us into obsessive time freaks and for what? So we can be sold the latest and greatest time saving device?

Now, I realise that this is a blog post about the gentle art of writing songs, not a forum about the ills of our western world but I wanted to give you all a bigger picture of what we, as songwriters, are up against.

Making time to write songs is essential for being a songwriter. The trick is to know that it doesn’t matter how much time you devote to your craft, but that you at least devote some of your time to your craft every single day.

Let’s do some simple math shall we…

So, starting from today April 28th, 2018, if you devoted one hour a day to your songwriting, by the end of the year you will have have spent 247 hours honing your songwriting craft.

That’s 10 days and 7 hours of continuous songwriting time. How many songs do you reckon could you write in that time?

Or, let’s be even more generous. Even if you devoted just 30 minutes everyday, you’d still have a little over five days of continuous songwriting time at your fingertips.

Making time to do anything requires some sort of an evaluation of what you’re doing with your time right now. Ask yourself the question “What am I doing now that can be let go of or, made more efficient so I can fit in my songwriting?” 

Now, the answer to that question is going to be different for everyone but the way you come to that answer is pretty much the same for everybody.

Try this exercise, do a time audit.

For the next seven days (say, start on a Monday), write down everything that you do plus the times you do them. I’m talking about when you get up, when you go to work, go to sleep, have meals, watch television and everything else in-between.

To make this time audit work it’s important to be brutally honest with yourself here.

By the end of the seven days, you should be able to see some activity patterns emerge. Maybe you need to stop watching TV so much or get up an hour earlier to fit some songwriting into your day.

Once you can see your life from a different perspective, it’s easier to make the changes needed. If you start making the time to write now, the rewards will become self evident down the track.

Until next time, keep on writing,

Corey Stewart
All About Songwriting