Free tool: How long would your book take, how big is it, and should you hire a ghostwriter or write it yourself? The Book Planner answers all three.
For twenty years I was Director of Computer Operations and Technical Services at Trader Joe’s, a $16 billion retail chain. I managed teams, budgets, vendor relationships, and the technology infrastructure for a national operation. During that same period I was also writing. Not dabbling. Writing seriously, building the skills and the body of work that became a 54-project ghostwriting career and 113+ published books.
I didn’t have extra hours in the day. I had the same 24 as everyone else, and most of them were committed to a demanding corporate job. The writing happened because I built systems to protect creative time inside a schedule that was already full. If you’re a professional or entrepreneur who wants to write a book but can’t figure out where the time comes from, this is what I learned doing both.
How do writers with day jobs find time to write?
From the podcast
Ralph Brown holds four world records in extreme boating, taught high school science, and spent fifteen years in financial services. The turn came on a ruined camping trip, on Leaders and Their Stories:
I didn’t know that was going to be a life-changing moment in my life.It was a broken motor on a Black Friday he hadn’t wanted to spend shopping. The hours you carve out rarely announce what they’re for.
The biggest misconception about writing a book is that you need large blocks of uninterrupted time.Share on X
Nobody is going to hand you writing time. Your employer won’t schedule it. Your family won’t volunteer to disappear for two hours. Your calendar won’t spontaneously develop a gap. Writing time exists only when you deliberately create it and then defend it against everything that wants to fill it. For more, see how to deal with a micromanager and augmented beats replaced. Every time.
At Trader Joe’s I was managing a technology department for a company that operated hundreds of stores nationwide. My days were packed with meetings, vendor calls, system issues, budget reviews, and personnel decisions. If I waited for free time to appear, I’d never have written a word.
I wrote early in the morning before the workday started. That time belonged to me before it belonged to anyone else. By the time I walked into the office, I had already produced pages. The writing was done. Whatever the workday threw at me couldn’t take it back.
John Grisham wrote his first novel the same way. In 1984 he was a small-town lawyer in Mississippi with a practice in criminal defense and personal injury, and he was also serving in the state House of Representatives. According to Mississippi State University’s John Grisham Room, he wrote A Time to Kill from 5:00 to 8:00 each morning before the workday started.
The book took him about three years. The first draft ran around a thousand pages, and a third of it was eventually cut. Publishers gave it a lukewarm reception until Wynwood Press, a small house, took it on and printed 5,000 copies.
Nobody handed Grisham writing time. He took it at 5 a.m., and people with half his obligations who tell me they can’t find thirty minutes are making excuses.
Nobody is going to hand you writing time.
The time slot doesn’t matter. Some people write late at night after the house is quiet. Some write during lunch. Some write on the commute. What matters is that the time is scheduled, consistent, and non-negotiable. Treat it like a meeting with your most important client, because that’s exactly what it is. Back in 2024 I’d block 6 to 10 pm on my calendar for writing, sometimes for several evenings in a row. My writing is creative work, so some nights the muse never showed up, and then I’d go take a walk or work on model kits.
Can Small Time Blocks Produce a Book?
The biggest misconception about writing a book is that you need large blocks of uninterrupted time. You need consistent small blocks applied over months.
Five hundred words takes roughly thirty minutes. Five hundred words a day, five days a week, for six months produces 65,000 words. (See also a free book planning tool) That’s a book. Not a hypothetical book. An actual, publishable manuscript produced in half-hour daily sessions that fit inside any working professional’s schedule.
Five hundred words in a half hour, five days a week for six months, produces a 65,000 word book.
When I coach writers who have demanding careers, the first thing I do is find the thirty minutes. It’s always there.
It’s hiding in the morning before the household wakes up, or in the evening after dinner, or in the lunch break that currently gets spent scrolling a phone. The thirty minutes exist. The question is whether you’ll claim them.
Now that writing is my full-time profession, I work in 45-minute blocks with 15-minute breaks and produce 10,000 to 12,000 words a day.
But the principle is identical to what I did while working at Trader Joe’s. Defined blocks of time. Consistent schedule. Non-negotiable commitment. The scale changed when writing became my career. The system didn’t.
These days my writing day runs in three blocks. Client work takes the morning, my own books get the afternoon, and client work comes back in the evening. I shuffle the order sometimes, but my own books always keep a slot, because the corporate years taught me that anything without a slot on the calendar never happens. In the middle of the day I usually wind up taking a 30 to 60 minute nap. I don’t know why my schedule works that way. Maybe I’m getting old.
Back in 2024 my routine ran differently. The first three hours of the day were mine. I got up early, worked those three hours and then took an hour’s nap. All my interviews and calls happened before 5, and starting at 6 I wrote for clients. I kept a separate booking calendar for existing clients so their time stayed free.
How Do You Protect Creative Energy for Writing?
Most time management advice misses that, for writers, time management is about protecting the mental energy that produces good writing.
A day of back-to-back meetings, difficult personnel conversations, budget disputes, and vendor negotiations leaves you cognitively depleted. If your writing time is scheduled after all of that, you’re trying to produce creative work with a brain that’s nothing left to give. The words come out flat, mechanical, and not worth the time spent producing them.
This is why I wrote in the morning. Creative work got my best energy. The corporate work got whatever was left, and corporate work is more tolerant of depleted energy than creative writing is. Running a meeting while tired produces a slightly less efficient meeting. Writing fiction while tired produces pages you’ll delete tomorrow.
If morning doesn’t work for your schedule, find the slot where your energy is highest and assign writing to that slot. Give your best hours to the work that demands your best thinking. Give your leftover hours to email, administrative tasks, and everything else that runs on autopilot. In 2024 I kept a wall between my modes, with marketing and coaching in the morning and ghostwriting in the evening. I can switch, but the coaching is exhausting, because when people get stuck, you have to unstick them.
What can a day job teach you about writing?
Twenty years in corporate management taught me skills that translate directly to professional writing, and most writers who came up through creative writing programs don’t have them.
Deadlines are real. In corporate life, when the budget is due Friday, the budget is due Friday. Nobody cares about your creative process or whether you’re feeling inspired. That discipline transferred directly to ghostwriting, where client deadlines are contractual obligations, and to my own fiction, where I set deadlines for myself and treat them with the same seriousness.
Managing complexity across multiple projects at the same time is something corporate professionals do every day.
I managed technology projects across hundreds of stores while handling personnel, vendors, and budgets. Now I manage ten writing projects at the same time. The organizational skills are identical. Outlines, timelines, milestones, status tracking. A writing project is a project.
Knowing business means knowing clients. When a Fortune 50 executive hires me to ghostwrite a book about digital transformation, my twenty years managing technology for a $16 billion company means I speak their language. I understand their challenges, their audience, and their goals because I lived in that world. Every ghostwriting project I take on benefits from the domain knowledge I built during my corporate career.
I get impatient with writers who treat their day job as the enemy of the book. Mine taught me deadlines, project management and how clients think, and every one of those skills pays off at the keyboard. Your day job is training for your writing career, if you let it be.
When the Day Job Ends
Eventually I left Trader Joe’s and writing became my full-time work. The transition was possible because the writing career had been built alongside the corporate career. By the time I went full-time, I had the skills, the portfolio, the client relationships, and the reputation to sustain a professional ghostwriting practice. None of that would have existed if I’d waited until I left corporate life to start writing.
If you’re building toward a writing career while working a day job, you’re not wasting time.
You’re doing exactly what I did. The book you write in thirty-minute morning sessions while managing a full-time career is the same book you’d write with eight free hours a day. It just takes longer. The quality doesn’t suffer. The timeline stretches. That’s all.
| Principle | What to do | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| Create the time | Schedule a writing block and defend it | Nobody is going to hand you writing time |
| Make it non-negotiable | Treat it like a meeting with your most important client | Consistency matters more than the time slot |
| Use small blocks | Write 500 words in about thirty minutes, five days a week | Six months of that produces 65,000 words |
| Write before the workday | Produce pages early, before the job starts | The day can’t take back what’s already written |
| Protect creative energy | Give writing your highest-energy hours | Tired writing produces pages you’ll delete tomorrow |
| Push routine work later | Leave email and admin for leftover hours | That work tolerates depleted energy better |
| Use your day job skills | Apply deadlines, outlines, milestones and tracking | A writing project is a project |
| Build alongside the job | Develop skills and portfolio before going full time | The book just takes longer; quality doesn’t suffer |
Getting Help
If you want to write your book yourself but need guidance fitting the process into a demanding schedule, book coaching at $250 per hour gives you a collaborator who has done this from both sides: the corporate side and the full-time writer side. Every session is recorded so you can review on your own time.
If you have the story and the expertise but don’t have time to write it yourself, ghostwriting with milestone-based payments produces a professional manuscript while you continue running your business or career. Your time commitment is interviews and draft reviews. The writing happens on my end.
My handbooks at The Writing King cover every aspect of writing craft for those who want to develop independently. The Writer’s Productivity Handbook addresses building sustainable writing systems around a busy life.
Start with a conversation and we’ll figure out the right path for your situation.
My take
Day jobs slow a book down without hurting it. I wrote seriously for twenty years while working as Director of Computer Operations at Trader Joe’s. That work made full time ghostwriting possible. Protect a short block every morning and save your creative energy for it. Thirty minutes a day writes the same book eight free hours would. It takes longer, and I’m fine with that.
Time Management for Writers FAQ
Most writers find the missing hours on a screen. Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something is my book on getting that time back and putting it to use.
- The Writer, Mississippi State University Libraries, John Grisham Room
- John Grisham, Mississippi Secretary of State
