How do you write everyday?

How do you write everyday? Where do you find the time? A question that comes to me very often.

The answer is I embrace, Parking lot productivity - a concept that changed my life forever 🔥

We are all extremely busy and we have more work to do than ever. Our never ending to do list gets more overwhelming each passing hour.

How to read and write everyday in this busy schedule?

If you asked this question to me in 2016, I would have had a blank face. But things changed for me after 2017. I prioritised my mental fitness over everything else. Even above my physical fitness. I am not kidding.

I dedicated an hour to read and write everyday. It took me 3 years to set the habit but it is deliberate effort. Reading writing everyday is not easy. There are always urgent things to do and making time for reading and writing feels like a sin. But I commit that sin everyday.

I read/write in parking lots, in airport queues, in lunch counters, in morning/evening walks, in between meetings, in washrooms, in waiting for folks who take forever to come to a meeting and more. These spurts of 5-10 mins in a day accounts to atleast 90 mins in total.

Slowly I got better at using the 5 mins here and 10 mins there. Sometimes I cause the 10 min delay between my tasks and get the parking lot productivity going.

The focus is not great. Worse I hate to cut it in between a flow and go to another task but 5 mins is 5 mins. I have written more in a parking lot than in my desk.

To me reading and writing is like brushing teeth. We don’t say I don’t want to brush today as I am busy. We find ways to get it done. Some days with floss and oil pulling and some days just the bare minimum. That is exactly how I treat reading and writing. It is the ingestion, digestion and expression process for the brain and how can you not feed nutritious input everyday?

The compounding effect blows my mind. I have read more than 1000 books using this method and wrote 600k words. We all can make use of our own parking lot productivity to help us become fitter neurobiologically.

P.S: I am writing this in a parking lot by delaying my onboarding registration for T&P at Salesforce 😉 I can skip a 5 star breakfast at Hyatt today to write this. This habit is more important than all else.

I had a busy week filled with travel so could not find a dedicated time to write. So getting it done in bits and pieces. You will be surprised how much gets done in these bits of time 🕰️

So what is your go to strategy in keeping yourself mentally fitter?