The art of sustainable productivity: A writer's guide to doing more with less

A comprehensive deep dive into sustainable writing productivity, focusing on leveraging your time effectively while working with your natural resistance to change.

Hi,

For years, I've heard the same advice repeated in the writing community: write more, publish more, market more. The modern writing world seems obsessed with churning out content at an ever-increasing pace, but after spending over two decades in this industry, I've come to realize we've been thinking about productivity all wrong.

When I talk about productivity, I'm not interested in cramming 200 hours of work into a 20-hour week. I'm focused on something far more valuable: leverage. What I mean by productivity is doing an hour's worth of work in 10 minutes. I don't want to fill up the rest of those 50 minutes. I just want to do the work efficiently so I can move on with my day and have more time for myself.

True productivity isn't about doing more. It's about getting more value from what you do.

Consider an email list. Whether you have 100 subscribers or 1,000, you're still writing one email. The leverage comes from having your same effort reach more people, create more impact, and generate more results.

Before we dive into productivity strategies, it’s important to state for the record that you don't need to be productive to be a writer. You can write less than one book a year. You can write articles instead of books. You can focus on short stories. You can write one book and share it just with friends. Your legitimacy as a writer isn't tied to your output.

I understand the many valid reasons why someone might not be able to maintain high productivity. Maybe it's your day job, your health, or caregiving responsibilities. Perhaps it's financial constraints or social obligations. Or maybe you simply choose to work at a different pace. Each of these is completely valid.

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The modern productivity paradox

The challenge writers usually face isn't that they're not productive enough. It's that they're trying to be productive in unsustainable ways. They burn themselves out trying to match someone else's pace, or they scatter their energy across too many projects, diluting their effectiveness.

Sustainable productivity looks different. It's about creating systems that grow more powerful over time. It's about focusing energy where it matters most and building momentum through consistent, manageable effort. It's about understanding and working with your personal limitations, and making your work compound in value.

Think of it like compound interest for your creative career. Just as a smart investment grows over time without additional effort, well-designed creative systems should deliver increasing returns without requiring proportionally more work.

This is the foundation of sustainable productivity. It’s not doing more, but doing better. It's about building systems that grow more valuable over time, creating work that compounds in impact, and maintaining a pace you can sustain for the long haul. In the following sections, I'll show you exactly how to build these systems and create this kind of leveraged productivity. The goal isn't to exhaust yourself doing more. It's to create more impact with the energy you have, while maintaining the space and freedom to live your life.

The four phases of a writing career

When I started my writing journey, nobody explained that careers develop in distinct phases. Understanding these phases has transformed how I approach productivity and success. Let me walk you through them.

The learning phase

Most writers want to start with their dream project; that epic fantasy series they've been imagining since childhood or the great American novel they know will change literature forever. I understand the impulse, but it's usually a mistake. Here's why.

Starting with your dream project often leads to spending years churning on the same idea without making real progress. Instead, I recommend beginning with more structured projects. Mystery, romance, or other genres with clear frameworks give you something concrete to learn from and build upon. You can judge your progress because there are established patterns to follow.

I spent my first decade writing and getting nowhere, but each finished project taught me something valuable. Even my documentary that didn't work out, my failed movie scripts, and my early attempts at different genres all contributed to building my skill set. The key was finishing things, even when they weren't perfect.

The discovery phase

Once you understand the basics, you enter a phase of finding your voice and what you really want to say. This is when you should experiment with different genres and styles. I wrote comics, then novels. I tried romance, YA, and various other forms. Each attempt added new tools to my creative toolkit.

It wasn't until 2018, after writing Anna in the Dark Place, that I felt I truly understood how to write romance, how to pace a story, how to write monsters, how to handle contemporary settings, and how to write anything. I was 20+ books in at that point, after starting serious writing around 2005. The discovery phase takes time, but it's essential for developing your unique voice.

The monetization phase

You can't really scale your business until you know how to put in a dollar and reliably get at least a dollar and one penny back. Preferably closer to two dollars, but let's start with that penny of profit.

Many writers, myself included, have made the mistake of trying to scale before establishing this basic unit of profitability. You need to understand what works consistently before you can grow it effectively. This might mean writing in a specific genre, building a particular type of audience, or focusing on a specific marketing channel.

The scaling phase

Only after you've mastered the previous phases can you effectively scale your writing business. This is when you can take what's working and amplify it. Your writing speed naturally increases, your quality improves, and you can handle multiple projects without losing effectiveness.

Even at this phase, you’re still learning and adapting. These days I write fewer books than I used to, but they're better books. I'm more selective about my projects, only taking on things that truly excite me and fit my long-term goals.

Yes, you can make money before reaching the scaling phase. Honestly, I spent years in the monetization phase doing fine, even making six-figures, but it didn’t feel sustainable until I got the monetization phase locked in, and I certainly didn’t feel like I could invest heavily into growth until then. If you want to develop a sustainable, fulfilling career that plays to your strengths, understanding and respecting these phases is crucial. Don't rush through them. Each phase builds the foundation for the next, and trying to skip ahead usually leads to frustration and burnout.

The goal isn't to race through these phases but to use them as a framework for understanding where you are and what you need to focus on next. Whether you're just starting out or well into your career, knowing which phase you're in can help you make better decisions about where to spend your energy and how to measure your progress.

The power of leveraged assets

Let’s go back to that email list we talked about earlier. When you have a thousand people on it, it should be more effective than when you have 100 people on it. But you're not doing 10 times more work in that email. You're still sending probably one email a week or maybe even one email a month. That's leverage, getting more results from the same effort.

Another great example is writing a series. If you have 10 books, theoretically, you're making more money than when you had two books. If you're not making more money, that's where issues come from. That's where burnout often originates. When people are leveraging their actions by being more productive or making their money work harder for them, they feel better.

It's like a stock portfolio. When you have $100 in it at 8% return, it makes $8 a year. But if you have a million dollars in it, that same 8% return now makes $80,000 a year. You're not doing any more work to make that money, the system is working for you.

In my own business, I've learned to create content that serves multiple purposes. I write an article, that article becomes a book. Those articles then also become teachings or presentations or part of a course. I'm always using my work to do more things.

Fiction is a bit harder to leverage this way, which is why I think more strategically about which fiction projects I take on. Every book I write now has to have the potential for increasingly greater returns, whether through series potential, audience building, or opening new opportunities.

This approach to leverage has transformed how I work. I used to drive an hour each way to my office when I worked in sales. The only time I had to write was in the hour between when I got home and when my wife got home. So, I would think about what I wrote the previous day all the way to the office, think about what I was going to write that night on the way back, and then write it in that hour.

That's leverage, too. You’re using otherwise dead time to make your productive time more effective. Now, with my health challenges, I can't do conventions like I used to in the old days. I can't be on live video much. Even recording something takes a lot out of me. So everything I take on has to have some form of leverage where I can use it multiple times.

The key is to stop thinking about productivity as doing more and start thinking about it as making everything you do count for more. It's about building systems that grow more valuable over time, creating content that can be repurposed and reused, and focusing your energy on actions that compound in value.

When you understand this principle, you start looking for opportunities to create leverage in everything you do. Every piece of content, every marketing effort, every system you build should be designed not just to work once, but to keep working for you over and over again.

Understanding resistance

Most productivity advice skips over the most fundamental challenge. Your body is actively working against you. This isn't metaphorical. It's biological. Your body cannot tell the difference between physical danger and mental danger. When you try to push past your comfort zone as a writer, your body interprets that just like it would interpret being chased by a lion.

When you're going into mentally dangerous territory, like a place outside your comfort zone, your body wants you to stop. It wants you to stay in the safe space because if you stay in the safe space you know, you won't die. We haven't evolved past this primitive response, even though the "dangers" we face as writers are more about ego than survival.

What makes it harder is that everyone around you also wants to stay in their safe space. They have all evolutionarily been brought up to be in that place too. So you have to break through a lot to do this work. The best writers have broken through hundreds of these blocks to be able to speak authentically and vulnerably.

I've spent years observing this in myself and other writers. When we try to level up our craft, push into new territories, or put our work out into the world, our bodies start throwing up warning signals. Your brain is screaming "DANGER! RETREAT TO SAFETY!"

And it's not just your own body. Everyone around you is hardwired the same way. When you try to do something risky or different, you're not just fighting your own evolutionary responses. You're fighting against a whole society of people whose bodies are telling them to stay safe, stay small, stay in the known territory.

This is why it's so hard to build a writing career. Every time you sit down to write something new, every time you try a different genre, every time you publish a book, you're going against millions of years of evolutionary programming telling you to stick with what's safe. Your body wants you to stay in your comfort zone because historically, that's what kept our species alive.

Successful writers aren’t just good at writing. They're good at pushing through this biological resistance. The best writers have broken through hundreds of these internal blocks to be able to speak authentically and vulnerably. Each time they pushed past their comfort zone, they expanded what their body considered "safe territory."

This is why positive self-talk is so crucial. Your body is already telling you negative stories about danger and safety. You need to actively counter those stories. You need to remind yourself that stretching beyond your comfort zone is how you grow, that the discomfort you're feeling is the sensation of progress.

This never fully goes away. Even after writing dozens of books and building a successful business, I still feel this resistance. The difference is that now I recognize it as a signal that I'm pushing into new territory, that I'm growing, that I'm doing something worthwhile.

Understanding this biological resistance has transformed how I think about productivity. It's not just about time management or writing techniques or business strategies. It's about learning to work with, or despite, your body's primitive survival instincts. Every time you sit down to write, you're not just crafting words, you're engaging in an ancient battle between your creative aspirations and your survival programming.

The resistance you feel is natural. It's biological. It's human. But it's also outdated. Your body thinks it's protecting you, but it's actually holding you back from the very things that will help you grow and thrive in the modern world. Understanding this is the first step to building a sustainable writing career.

The cost of context switching

Research shows that every time you switch between ideas or tasks, you lose about 40% of your productivity. That's not a small number. It's estimated that lost productivity due to context switching costs the global economy $450 billion annually.

This is why finishing projects is so crucial. If you just complete the thing you're working on, you'll be 40% more productive than if you keep jumping between projects. That doesn't even include all the time you've already sunk into the current project.

Even if you don't love what you're working on, figure out a way to finish it. You learn so much from just finishing something. The last 10% is often where a piece becomes exceptional.

The middle isn't sexy. After the initial rush dies down, when no one's cheering you on, staying with a project is hard. But that's exactly why finishing is so valuable. Each completion teaches you something new and builds your creative resilience.

The hard thing about hard things is that they're hard. That's their defining characteristic. You cannot write books, build businesses, or have success if it's not hard. And if it's going to be hard, we have to accept that it's hard and push through anyway. Because that's what professionals do.

The ONE thing principle

Let me tell you about my favorite concept in all of productivity. It comes from a book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, and it's about unlocking the one thing that will take your career to the next level.

So often, we're scattered through 100 different things, but if we just take that same energy and line it up the right way, we can use it to create a domino effect. There's one task that if you finish it every day, you will knock down the big domino. It's about finding these little dominoes that lead to the next domino.

A domino can knock over another domino 1.5 times bigger than it. Stack them right, and after just 10 dominoes, you're knocking over something enormous. That's what we're talking about here, little, continuous tasks that compound into something huge.

For me, at different times, it's been writing 5,000 words a day, editing 25,000 words a day, getting people on my mailing list, or running ads, among others. Whatever your goal is, if you work backwards and say, "I'm going to expend all of my energy on this one task instead of across 50 tasks," you'll see exponential results.

Instead of starting 10 social media accounts, start one on a platform you love. Once that's up and running, do the next one and the next one. Take all of the energy you have and condense it into a single point. You'll not only save that 40% of productivity lost to context switching, you'll also be able to push progressively bigger and bigger dominoes over with very little effort.

Think about what you're trying to achieve. What's the one thing that would make everything else easier or unnecessary? That's where you need to focus. Not on doing everything, but on doing the right thing consistently.

Every time you perform an action, it should get more and more powerful. That's how you build true momentum. That's how you create lasting change. That's how you transform your career, one focused action at a time.

The beautiful thing about this principle is that it simplifies everything. You don't have to worry about a hundred different tactics or strategies. You just need to identify and execute your ONE thing. Everything else becomes secondary.

I know it sounds too simple. That's why most people ignore it, but in my experience, the simpler the strategy, the more likely you are to actually do it. And doing it consistently, day after day, is what really matters.

Time blocking your way to success

If you’re trying to avoid context switching, then the best method I have found is called time blocking. It’s something I learned in my old school sales days, and I still use it today.

First, I block out every day as a specific type of day. Writing days, editing days, promotion days, launch days. Then I define what green time means for that day.

Green time is sacred. These are the things that will directly lead to me making money. That might include writing words for a books, doing sales calls, running ads, taking meetings, doing coaching calls. The key is that doing coaching calls on a writing day isn't green time because it's taking away from the main focus. Green time is immovable. Nothing else goes where green time goes.

Then there's yellow time, which is the ancillary stuff that relates to your job but doesn't directly make money. Answering emails, doing promotion on podcasts, writing blog posts, PR activities, etc. are all yellow time activities. These activities might lead to money eventually, but they're not direct revenue generators.

Finally, there's red time. These are the things that have nothing to do with making money. Picking kids up from school, having lunch, doctor's appointments. You're probably not going to make money as a writer picking your kids up from school, unless you happen to meet the publisher at Random House or something. I'm sorry to tell you.

Time isn't inherently good or bad. It's just how you use it. Sometimes taking a nap is more valuable than a sales call. Sometimes eating lunch with your child is the most important thing you can do that day.

I love my green time activities because they're focused and productive, but I love my red time activities, too. The yellow time activities? Some I enjoy, like writing blog posts. But there's a lot of administrative stuff that at this point I probably should offload.

The goal isn't to eliminate red time or even yellow time. It's to be intentional about how you use each type of time. When I'm in my green time block, I'm fully focused on that revenue-generating activity. When I'm in red time, I'm present with my family or taking care of myself.

This system works because it acknowledges reality. You can't be in revenue-generating mode all day. You need breaks, you need administration time, you need life time. The trick is to stop pretending all time is equal and start being strategic about how you use each type of time.

Some days I just don't have any energy, and taking a nap is more valuable than anything else I could do. If I don't do something with my hands during yellow time, I'll start thinking too much, and my brain will start associating or dissociating things I don't necessarily love.

The power of this system isn't in maximizing every minute. It's in being honest about how time really works and using that understanding to create a sustainable schedule. Because at the end of the day, productivity isn't about doing more. It's about doing the right things at the right time.

Prioritizing your business using a modified Eisenhower Matrix

One of the best tools I use is a modification of an Eisenhower Matrix, maybe the single best prioritization tool I’ve ever found.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a powerful time management tool that helps you prioritize tasks by dividing them into four distinct quadrants: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important.

Building one for yourself allows you to focus your energy on what truly matters, ensuring that essential tasks are addressed promptly while avoiding the trap of busywork that often feels pressing but yields little value.

My process isn’t exactly an Eisenhower Matrix, but it’s very, very close. If you’ve never done one before, then I highly recommend taking taking some time to audit your business.

Here’s the exercise I do every year.

1. Write down all your responsibilities and tasks, no matter how small, either on a notepad, a spreadsheet, or a whiteboard. Really it doesn't matter where you write it down, but try to make it comprehensive.

2. Create two new columns with headers NECESSITY and ENJOYMENT. The necessity column deals with how important a task is to the day-to-day functionality of your business. The enjoyment column deals with how much you like doing that task.

3. Now, rank each of your tasks on a scale from 1-10. Something with high necessity can be monetary or functional, but not always. Some admin tasks are critical for a business, even if they don’t add any revenue to your business. Meanwhile, some monetary tasks might not be very necessary at all. The enjoyment level should be self-explanatory. Here’s the rub. You can’t use the number seven as an answer. Seven is the default when you don’t want to make a hard choice, so you can’t use it here. You must choose either a six or an eight, for reasons that will be clear very soon.

4. Once you have your list, it’s time to make a hard break between 1-6 and 8-10. This is why you can’t use seven. Everything on the 1-6 side falls on the DON’T LOVE/DON’T NEED side of the barrier. Everything 8-10 falls on the LOVE/NEED side of the barrier depending on the column.

5. Draw a grid with four quadrants. Mark the X-AXIS as ENJOYMENT and the Y-AXIS as NECESSITY. Everything you LOVE and NEED should end up on the TOP RIGHT QUADRANT. Everything you NEED but don’t LOVE should end up in the TOP LEFT QUADRANT. Everything you DON’T NEED and DON’T LOVE should be in the BOTTOM LEFT. Everything you LOVE but DON’T NEED should end up in the BOTTOM RIGHT. It should end up looking something like this when you are done.

6. Now, you assess. What is in the top right quadrant? Those should be your core products and offerings. You might even find some new services you could offer that more align with your passions. What is in the bottom right quadrant? How can you make those more important to your business? What is in the top left quadrant? How can you outsource those, or change them so you love them? What ended up in the bottom left quadrant? Cut those things ASAP.

What you should find are the things in your business that bring the highest return and provide a high level of satisfaction. You should immediately find ways to double down on those parts of your business. The more time you can spend doing those, the more your company will grow.

By consistently applying this matrix to your business, you can reduce stress, enhance productivity, and maintain a clear vision of your goals, ultimately leading to more meaningful and impactful work. This method isn’t just about managing your day-to-day tasks; it’s about shifting your mindset to work smarter, not harder, by dedicating time to activities that align with your long-term objectives.

Building sustainable systems

When I was younger, I thought productivity was all about speed. How fast could I write? How many projects could I juggle? Now I understand it's about building systems that grow stronger over time.

I think about my body like a computer with a specific amount of RAM. When you're a novice at something, it takes up 80-90% of your bandwidth. You're learning the basics, figuring out what works, making all the rookie mistakes. You can barely think about anything else when you're working on it.

Over time, as you become a pro, that same task might only take 1-10% of your bandwidth. Keep going, become an expert, and it drops to a tenth of 1%. I've been doing this so long that giving presentations takes very little of my bandwidth. It still takes energy, but I can do it while managing other tasks because I've mastered it.

The trick is understanding that you can't do more than one novice thing at a time. You can't do more than three things you're a pro at in one day. You have to respect your bandwidth limitations. So many of us try to open five novice programs at once and wonder why our system crashes.

Some tasks take a long time even when you're an expert. If I can write 2,000 words a day and I'm writing a 100,000-word book, that's still 50 days. That's still almost a sixth of my year writing that book. Then, I have to edit it.

The key is accepting that mastery takes time, but it does come.

When you're learning something new, try not to learn other things simultaneously unless you're already an expert at them. Focus on turning as many novice skills into pro skills, and pro skills into expert skills, as you can. That's when you start doing these things on autopilot.

If something is exhausting you right now, you're probably not far enough along on it. You need to at least get to a pro level at it, or figure out a way to offload it or delegate it before you can move on to the next thing.

This is why it's so important to give yourself space. Your speed of creating things will increase with each stage, along with the number of projects you can produce. But you have to respect the process. You have to understand that your capacity grows naturally over time, and you can't force it.

Even expert-level tasks can take significant time and energy. When I do an expert-level task like giving a presentation, it takes all my focus and energy because I have to be present. The difference is that I know how to manage that energy now, how to prepare for it, and how to recover from it.

This is the reality of sustainable growth. It's not about suddenly becoming superhuman. It's about gradually building your capacity, understanding your limitations, and creating systems that work with your natural rhythms rather than against them.

The mindset for success

It's okay to want attention. It's okay to be successful. It's okay to want fandom. It's okay to want your book to sell a million copies. It's okay. I genuinely like the books I write. I don't understand people who don't like their own books. Why are they writing those books?

If you don’t believe that, then lie to yourself until you do.

Sometimes you have to trick yourself into liking yourself before you actually like yourself. I know that sounds strange, but it's true.

If you tell yourself you're bad, you will start to believe you are bad…

…but it works the other way, too.

If you tell yourself you are good, and the things you are doing are good, and you surround yourself with positivity and people that push you forward, then your whole mindset will change.

This isn't about living in a bubble. It's about refusing to let yourself talk to yourself negatively. If you wouldn't let someone talk to your friend that way, you can't let yourself talk about you that way. If you say something negative to yourself, I want you to say, "Don't talk that way about my friend."

One of the big problems with success is that whether you're going to fail or succeed looks exactly the same in the middle. If they drop you in the middle of an ocean in the dark of night and you start swimming, it's 50-50 whether you're swimming to shore or doing worse for yourself. You don't know in the moment. So you just have to keep swimming.

Because if you don't believe, then you're just going to stop swimming. And then you definitely won't make it to shore.

This might be the most important thing I say in this entire piece: you are good. You are valuable. You deserve to be here. Even if you don't believe that yet, you have to at least say it. You have to say it to yourself all day, every day. Every time something negative comes up, put something positive in its place.

The beautiful thing is that when you stop letting yourself talk negatively to yourself, you'll stop letting other people talk to you negatively too. Your standards for how you should be treated, both by yourself and others, will rise.

This isn't just feel-good advice. Every successful writer I know has had to learn this, because the path is too hard, the journey too long, to survive without building this foundation of self-belief.

The path of a writer is challenging enough without being your own worst enemy. Build yourself up. Protect your creative spirit. Trust in your journey. The rest will follow.

Everything I've shared here comes from twenty years of writing, failing, succeeding, and figuring it out along the way. Some days I still struggle. Some days I still doubt. But I've learned that productivity isn't about doing more. It's about doing better.

The hard thing about hard things is that they're hard. That's their defining characteristic. You can't write books, build businesses, or have success if it's not hard. But we can do hard things as long as we know they're not supposed to be easy.

Start by understanding where you are in your journey. Learn the fundamentals. Discover your voice. Build your foundation. Then scale what works. Don't try to rush the process. Each phase teaches you something essential.

Most importantly, be kind to yourself along the way. Your body might fight you. Your mind might doubt you. But you have the power to push through, to build systems that work for you, to create success on your own terms.

What do you think?

• What's your ONE thing right now, the single most important goal that would make everything else easier or unnecessary?

• When you look at your typical day, what activities fall into your "green time" versus "yellow" or "red" time? Has this breakdown helped you think differently about how you spend your time?

• Who is your model for success? Have you mapped out their path and skills? I'd love to hear who inspires you and why.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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