I have been reading about other’s people’s success stories on Medium lately, and these are not only from seasoned writers on Medium, but also from new joiners like myself who joined two months prior to this post. I am happy for them and it feels good to know that there is a payoff in the end for those who produce good writing and engaging topics. I also noticed that there were quite a few written post on a 30 days writing challenge that appears to be quite a popular trend at the moment.
The benefits from this writing challenge was that it improves the overall new idea generation, writing quality, increases the views for your posts and hence more income, and ultimately disciplines a person to be consistent in writing and putting up new content onto Medium. I do believe partaking in this does help fast-track a person’s writing ability to a higher standard, but unfortunately at my current situation, I am not able to commit to do so, as much as I want to take part in this ‘challenge’ to get more writing out.
The fact is, I have a full-time job working as a material engineer in the day, and I have three children aged 5 years old and below to care for at home after work.
I discovered my love for writing six months ago when I started my own personal blog, and have been writing since. However, I only am able to write at night after the children are in bed and after basic home chores are done. Even so on some days I do have to work late at my job. Another area not to be neglected is my time spent with the husband, building on our relationship and marriage, as parenting young children is not a small feat and we lean on each other for emotional support.
Even this post took me 3 to 4 days to complete, it being mostly written in chunks over the last few days as I couldn’t find the time to sit and complete an hour plus of continuous writing. Sometimes this does frustrates me as I do want to establish myself on Medium faster and be like some of you who seem to have managed to hustle and ‘write your way up’ in a few months, to the point of getting a good side income and a growing list of followers.
So when exactly is my best time to write? As mentioned above it has to be after the kids are in bed, typically after 10pm at night, and I tend to write till 12 am if it is a weekday night, or even to as late as 2am on weekend nights where I can afford to sleep in a little more the next day. One written post typically takes me two hours to write, word count usually being around the 1000-1500 words range. The next day I am up by 6.30 am to prepare the kids for school and myself for work, so you can imagine I don’t sleep as much as I want to. That is a typical day.
This leaves me in a situation where I have limited time to write new content on my blog and on Medium. Most days I feel torn between the rush of a new writing idea but the inability to sit down and write it out due to being at work or being with the kids and husband. If I have the time, I will quickly draft out the title of my idea into a notepad app on my phone, and save it for later when I can write it out in a full post, again, at night after the kids are asleep.
That being said, my priorities are clear to me. My family comes first, and that includes me being there for the children and my husband when and as needed. I already spend enough time away from the kids, with typically 10 hour long workdays or 50 hours a week schedule. After kids and work, what reserve of energy I have left I will put to writing on Medium.
For now, I can push out one to two written posts on Medium a week, some weeks maybe three if I really push it, taking out the hours at night from my sleep to write more. Hopefully even with this schedule, I can grow my Medium content and accumulated earnings over time.
Bottom line, it seems in my case I will have to take the slow and steady route to achieve more on Medium. At least, for now.
How do other writers with a full-time job and with young children produce consistent good writing on this platform? Would love to hear from you.