: Re: Should I take breaks, or focus harder? I often have trouble deciding whether (or how often) to take breaks from writing, or to "double down" and try to write, and try to eliminate anything

@Bethany377

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Unless you are suffering from burn out from working too hard, the answer is always: spend some time at your profession every day. If it is just a hobby and you don't care about the end result, then you can do whatever you want. If your goal is to write good books and publish them then you should at least work as much as a normal person works on any occupation a week. How you organize your time around that is entirely based on how you want to live your life. Want to write 4 days a week for 10 hours a day? Go for it, have 3 days off. But you better be writing for 40 hours a week.

Writing in general is better in smaller creative bursts when you aren't worn out; but long enough periods of time that you get enough words down. But like any creative endevour it takes a while to reach flow state. If you want a real answer, I would research Flow State. Flow state is a state where your attention & bandwidth are committed to a task in the way that the rest of the world falls away. When you commit your entire mind & focus to an idea for a long period of time things just get a lot easier and you produce a lot. This is the space that a musician plays in, or a sportsman enters when giving their all. You are literally using up all of the bandwidth in your mind. This is exhausting, though. You can usually stay in a flow state for several hours a day. You should have a practice that gets you to that point quickly and after you leave it you should have a set of tasks that require a little less work, but are still on point.

The best flow-state work day is 5-6 hours in my personal experience. At 5 hours you need to work 8 days to get to 40 hours; which isn't possible. At 6, you need to work every day for at least 6 hours. A 7 hour day may be better. You can spend your last hour working on the bits where flow-state isn't required and have a day off; but you'll still be working 6 days a week. At 8 hours, you can have 2 days off, but this may kill your momentum and you may not have as many productive hours a week as you would have otherwise.

I've received a lot of down votes; but more up-votes, so I think this section may be of use to better understand my above advice. If you find this text caustic, so did I 6 years ago when I gave up writing. I've still found it to be correct. Writing is not my profession; Writing code is. On a good week I get to write for 7 hours. Over the course of a year I was able to put 200,000 words down into a novel. So you clearly need less time than I'm advocating to actually write a book. But, that's just a first draft. I have not had the time/energy to focus on turning that 200,000k into a finished draft; I do not have time to make mistakes and learn from them. If I am ever confused or conflicted about my direction it takes me weeks to sort it out because I don't have enough time and I'm not in the project long enough.

What I do for a living is write code and I do that 40-50 hours a week, averaging 45. It's still "writing," but it's a different form. Logical constructions with documentation about how I'm doing something, why and what that means for other people. At my profession all of the things I said above actually do apply; and when I've been able to write like I code it simply works better.

You do not need to work-write for 40 hours a week; but if it is your profession, you probably should. And anything less than that will lead to a low production rate (which will make it hard to make a living), or it will really make it difficult for you to stay engaged.

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