Some of the most disciplined people I can think of are fiction writers. To assign yourself the task of producing hundreds of pages of compelling original content — consistently, on a schedule, while also being your own harshest critic — seems like it would require not just a creative muscle but a kind of self-discipline that most people quietly assume they don’t have.
Stephen King writes almost every day, three to four hours, with a goal of around 2000 words. Haruki Murakami is awake and writing by 4am and doesn’t stop for five or six hours. Every day. These aren’t bursts of inspiration — they’re jobs these people have given themselves and show up to reliably, whether they feel like it or not.
Meanwhile I can find myself surrounded by a dozen projects I was genuinely excited about, all of them either perpetually in progress or perpetually about to be started. The ideas aren’t the problem. The showing up is.
So what’s the solution?
Don’t Fix Everything. Fix One Thing.
The instinct when you recognize a productivity problem is to overhaul everything at once. New schedule, new habits, new systems, new mindset. It feels productive to plan the overhaul. It almost never works, because habits are comforting — that’s exactly why they become habits — and trying to dismantle several of them simultaneously just means you retreat back to all of them faster.
There’s a much easier approach, or at least an easier starting point. Pick one bad habit. The one you spend the most time on, the one that eats the biggest chunks of your day. And put your energy into not doing that one thing. Not forever necessarily, not as punishment — just as an experiment in where the time actually goes.
You can do anything you want. Except that.
1400 Hours
For me, that thing was YouTube. I’ve learned a lot from YouTube — genuinely. Storytelling, craft, skills I actually use. I got good at justifying the time because some of it was legitimately useful. But that was never the whole truth. For every video essay worth watching there were plenty of reviews and reaction videos and gameplay clips that I would have been just as well off skipping.
It was never clearer how much YouTube I didn’t need to be watching than when I cancelled my Premium subscription. The platform helpfully informed me that I had watched over 1400 hours of content during my time as a subscriber.
1400 hours. Going back to Stephen King — that’s the equivalent of 350 days of his working output. More than enough time to write a novel. Probably two or three.
The time was always there. I just needed to see where it was going.