I'm sure it's a struggle that all of us face. How does one find time to write amidst the business of life - work, school, whatever it may be. So to you more experienced writers and authors out there, how do you do it? How do you make time in your schedules for writing when there's always something else you should be doing and often easier, procrastinatious (not a word, I know) things you might want to do?

Why do you write? If for pleasure, then what gives you less pleasure? Drop those activities and you have time for writing. You never get time to write, you take it from other things. What things mean less to you than writing?

I was at a writer's conference in September and one of the sessions was on 10 Steps to Superior Stress and Time Management. I wrote a blog post (linked back there) about it with permission from the speaker. The steps were super helpful. I can't say I always follow each one every day, but it's definitely helped me prioritize some things.

Good question! Finding time and motivation (and making them coincide) is the single biggest challenge of the "writing" part of my life, and I have had some success with this technique or that for a while for increasing motivation for productive pursuits when I am at loose ends, but I haven't yet found anything that works for more than a few months. (Getting rid of or hiding away "attractive nuisances" is reliably effective, but very hard to implement when they're digital, not physical, distractions; just about all the other techniques I've found have been ways to "fool yourself into [fill in the blank]," and my mind is all too good at becoming unfooled or stubbornly resisting being fooled in the first place.)

On the other hand, I have found that on any project, for me, coming to a point where the answer to "what should I do next?" is either too big for me to just sit down and do, "any one of these five dozen tasks---pick one," or "that was as far as the plan went ..." always nearly-instantly kills my motivation. So to avoid that, I make a single list of necessary tasks of tractable size, in an order that won't leave me stalled on an one item because some later item needs to be finished first, and maintain it as the project goes on, so that whenever I have time and motivation I can just pick a task from near the top of the list. If a task ("X", say) isn't granular enough, I try to put "create tasks for doing X" (i.e. "break it up into manageable 'bite-size' pieces") well up the list from where I want to actually do the work. This technique (having an order of tasks, so that I don't have to think about what comes next if I don't want to) is probably the single biggest contributing factor to any progress I've made on any of my (far-too-numerous) projects over the last decade.

I hope this helps, and that other, more successful, HWers will chime in with their approach to this perennial problem.