The real reason your 'free' writing time isn't working
Your calendar has space, but your brain doesn't.
Thursday afternoon finally arrives—that two-hour block you’ve been counting on all week to draft the introduction to your manuscript. You sit down at your desk, open your document, and...nothing. Your brain feels like sludge. The words won’t come. You have the time you need, but somehow that’s not enough.
You decide to close your laptop, but you feel guilty for the rest of the day because you believe you should be able to write because you have time on your schedule. You tell yourself that same ole story that you’re lazy or lacking willpower.
Here’s what I’d venture is happening: you’re equating empty hours with usable energy. Just because you have the time doesn’t mean you have the energy. And in academic life, that confusion can slowly undermine even the most well-intentioned writing practice.
The Myth of the Productive 40-Hour Week
First up, we need to get real about how many hours in a day we can actually be productive. We’ve inherited this societal belief that a standard 40-hour workweek means 40 hours of productive output. But that’s never been how work actually functions, even in traditional office environments.
A survey on office workers in the UK reveals a surprising truth: out of an eight-hour day, most people only feel truly productive for around 2-3 hours. The rest gets consumed by meetings, email, casual conversations with colleagues, and yes, online shopping sessions or social media scrolls. According to the survey, employees allocate their “non-productive time” as follows:
Checking social media – 44 minutes (spent doing this during working day)
Reading news websites – 1 hour 5 minutes
Discussing out of work activities with colleagues – 40 minutes
Making hot drinks – 17 minutes
Smoking breaks – 23 minutes
Text/instant messaging – 14 minutes
Eating snacks – 8 minutes
Making food in office– 7 minutes
Making calls to partner/ friends – 18 minutes
Searching for new jobs- 26 minutes
For knowledge workers like academics, the picture is even more constrained. As research from Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index shows, only about a quarter of the average knowledge worker’s day goes toward the skilled work they were hired to do. The rest disappears into what they call “work about work”—emails, status updates, committee communications, and administrative tasks that support the work without actually being the work.
However, "work about work" still requires a lot of effort and energy.
The Cognitive Load Reality
Much (but not all) of our research and writing-related work demands intense cognitive focus. They’re not tasks you can chip away at during the scattered minutes between meetings or half-heartedly pursue while mentally exhausted. Sure, you might be able to do citations or line edits between meetings, but the deep, hard work of argument development? That’s harder in a scattered state.
Cal Newport, drawing on research about deliberate practice in Deep Work, suggests that even experts can sustain only about four hours of truly deep, focused work per day before hitting sharply diminishing returns. He’s not prescribing that everyone can or should reach that four-hour mark—he’s illustrating that cognitively demanding, deeply focused work has natural limits.
Think about what this means for your writing practice. If you spend your morning teaching, your early afternoon in meetings, and your mid-afternoon answering urgent emails, you’ve already depleted your cognitive reserves. That “free” hour-long block you scheduled for writing? You technically have time, but you no longer have the energy that writing demands.
Rethinking Your Schedule
My humble suggestion is to work more strategically with your actual energy patterns rather than fighting against them.
Consider these approaches:
Protect your peak energy hours. For many people, cognitive performance is highest in the morning. (Of course, this doesn’t include the night owls, so you do you!) If you’re using your freshest mental energy for email and administrative tasks, you’re spending your most valuable currency on your least important work.
Stop assigning writing to “leftover” time. If writing only happens in whatever time remains after you’ve burnt your energy doing everything else, you’re setting yourself up for frustration. Your calendar might show availability, but your brain may be unavailable.
Count cognitive costs, not just hours. Before you commit to writing during a “free” block, honestly assess what came before it. Teaching three classes back-to-back? A difficult meeting with an advisee? Hours of student conferences? These activities all draw from the same energy well that writing requires.
Build in genuine recovery time. That hour between your last meeting and your planned writing session? You might need it for actual rest, not just transition time. Your brain isn’t a machine that can switch seamlessly between demanding tasks.
Permission to Be Human
To be crystal clear: You are not lazy because you can’t write during every available hour on your calendar. You are not undisciplined because you struggle to focus on your manuscript after a day packed with teaching and service. You are human, operating within the very real constraints of human cognitive and energetic capacity.
If you want to make writing time a priority, this means you might need to make difficult choices about protecting your writing time—actually protecting it, not just penciling it in. It might mean saying no to that extra committee—not because you don’t have the time, but because you know it will drain your energy. It might mean being less available for impromptu student meetings. It might mean accepting that your writing productivity will look different than you imagined. But acknowledging the difference between time and energy allows you to be realistic about what sustainable scholarly writing actually requires.
And for my U.S.-based readers heading into Thanksgiving week: this is especially important right now. Just because you might have a few unscheduled hours between travel, family time, and leftover pie doesn’t mean those hours are meant for writing. If you’re depleted from the semester—the grading, the emails, the emotional labor, the constant context-switching—those empty blocks on your calendar might not be “writing opportunities” at all. They might be invitations to rest, including rest from the guilt that tells you you should be productive just because you “have time.”
You’re allowed to step away, to let your mind go a little quiet for a few days. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do for your writing life is to stop writing and actually give your brain a break from the work.