I used to end every week wondering where on earth all my time went, telling myself I just needed more hours in the day.
I knew what I wanted to write, I knew the tasks I needed to finish. But the days would fill up, the hours would slip away, and somehow I'd reach the end of most weeks feeling like I've run hard and gone nowhere,
scattered behind,
a little frantic, and underneath all of it, that low hum of guilt that I wasn't doing enough.
That's what I want to talk about today.
And not with some rigid system that turns your writing life into a spreadsheet, because I do not do spreadsheets,
but with a way of managing your time that actually protects the the things that matter most.
Starting with your time with God.
And by the end of today's episode, you'll not only have a way of increasing your productivity,
you'll also know how to manage your time in a way that guards your peace,
protects your time with God, and quiets the striving for good.
So, friend, come sit with me for a while and let's get into it. This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.
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Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia, and you're listening to the Anointed Scribe Podcast,
the show that helps Christian writers grow their author business and their relationship with God.
If you've ever found yourself at the end of a busy day wondering where the time went and why you got so little done,
then today's episode is definitely going to help you.
So let me start with a confession and something I had to learn the hard way.
For the longest time, I really believed my problem was that I just didn't have enough time.
I had a million excuses and householdy things to blame for never having enough hours in the day.
And so I did what I think most of us do. I tried to cram more in. I pushed harder.
I stayed up. Later, I told myself that if I could just be a little more disciplined, a little more productive, I'd finally catch up.
But catching up never came. Because here's the thing.
More effort poured into a day that has no shape just creates more chaos and that chaos comes at a spiritual cost.
Let me tell you what I noticed when I finally got real about it with God.
When my days had no plan, I'd flap around from one task to the next,
half finished things,
reacting to whatever was shouting the loudest at me.
And that scattered way of working didn't just make me unproductive,
it made me anxious. It made me strive.
Because when you don't know what you are actually meant to be focusing on,
you feel like you have to do everything all at once right now.
And that feeling, that frantic everything is urgent feeling,
is the very opposite of the peace God wants for us.
So the problem was never really how much time I had.
It was that I'd never decided in advance and on purpose what that time was actually for.
But before we go any further, I want to go underneath the busyness for a moment and talk about the little word we use so often,
striving.
Because striving isn't only a scheduling problem.
It isn't only a heart problem either.
It's both.
And the two are tethered together.
Let me explain what I mean.
Where your heart is focused is where your schedule is going to follow.
If your heart is fixed on serving God and the mission he's given you,
your time tends to organize itself around what actually matters to serve your mission.
But if your heart has drifted towards money or accolades or proving yourself or perfecting your Amazon ads or your best seller rank or whatever,
well, then that drift seeps straight into your calendar.
You start planning the wrong things,
your priorities shift without you even realizing it.
And scripture even warns us that the heart can deceive us. Which is exactly why we are told to renew our minds daily in the Word.
When we do that, our hearts stay rightly aimed.
And a rightly aimed heart brings a rightly aimed week.
But a heart that's chasing the wrong things will build a week that chases that wrong thing, too.
So before we ever fix our schedules, we have to look at our heart behind it.
Striving,
toiling, labouring in vain. We read and hear these words all the time.
But have you ever stopped to ask why we work so hard in the first place?
Here's what I've come to find out.
We wear too many hats because we are trying to find our purpose and our identity out there in the world.
Somewhere along the way, we bought into the enemy's lies, that prominence and significance. And money will bring us the peace and the freedom and the joy we are aching for.
So we chase it. We add another hat, another role, another goal certain that the next bit of achievement is finally, finally going to settle us, right?
But Scripture tells us something completely different. It tells us that our identity isn't found in our work.
It isn't found in our book sales or our platform or our productivity.
It isn't even found in our hobbies or our family or our friends.
Our identity is found in Christ and Christ alone.
And as I mentioned in last week's episode on Author Branding,
God has already claimed us. We are already his.
We are already secure before we've even achieved a single thing this week.
And when we really believe that, the frantic pace we are stuck in starts to lose its grip on us because we are no longer working to prove something or to become someone.
We already are someone in Christ.
Now. Sometimes we wear too many hats because we genuinely struggle to say no to other people.
And that's very real. And it's definitely a skill worth learning.
But can I be honest with you about something I've discovered in my own life recently?
And this kind of shocked me the moment the light went on?
A lot of my striving didn't come from not knowing how to say no to others.
It came from not knowing how to say no to myself.
My own ambition,
my own fear of missing out, my own competitiveness,
my own quiet little belief that if I just did more,
I'd finally feel like I was enough in my own eyes.
Learning to say no to myself, to my own striving has been one of the most freeing things God has ever taught me.
And honestly, it's where real time management actually begins.
There's a verse in Psalm 90 that brings this all together for us very nicely.
Psalm 90:12 says,
Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.
I love that because it doesn't say, teach us to fill our days,
or Teach us to maximize our days,
or teach us to hustle our way through our days. It says, number them,
be aware of them. Hold them as the limited,
precious gift they actually are.
And the result of doing that isn't a fuller calendar. It isn't more money in the bank.
It's a heart of wisdom.
Because our time is finite,
we get a certain number of days and none of us knows the count.
And Scripture says the wise thing to do with something that's finite and precious is to be intentional about it. Not frantic. Not careless intentional.
So managing your time well isn't some worldly productivity hack that you bolt into your faith.
It's actually an act of stewardship.
It's taking the hours God gave you and handling them on purpose, with wisdom and instead of letting them just leak away while you flap around in the wind.
Now here's where it gets practical. And honestly, this is where the order matters more than anything else I'm going to say today.
When you plan your time on purpose,
the very first thing you get to protect is your time with God.
Take note, I'm saying the very first thing you get to protect is your time with God. God gives you a choice. You always have a choice.
Just think about what happens when you don't have a plan. You wake up.
You reach for your phone. Your notifications and emails are already sitting there, right there on the phone.
Your to do list is already shouting at you and taking shape in your mind before you've even taken a breath or had your first sip of your coffee, right?
You're in reaction mode from the moment you open your eyes.
The day has grabbed you before you ever got the chance to grab the day.
And the thing that gets squeezed out first almost every single time is your quiet time with God.
Not because you don't love him,
because you still shoot up a little prayer as you make your bed right?
But because your unplanned day just swallowed your quiet time with God in entirely.
But when you decide in advance, when you build your day around God coming first,
you get to protect that time before the noise can ever take it.
For me, that looks like an early start. I get up before the house wakes up, before my phone switches the silent feature off.
Quiet time first. And honestly, more often than not, that time gives me the very thing that I need to focus on that day.
God orders my day when I give him the first of it.
That's Matthew 6:33. Lived out in a calendar.
Seek first his kingdom.
Not seek first your Facebook notifications or first your emails. And then try to squeeze God into the gaps.
God first.
And here's the really beautiful part.
When he genuinely comes first.
Everything after, it tends to fall into a much saner order.
So when I talk about author time management,
I'm not starting with productivity.
I'm starting with protecting the most important appointment of your entire day, the one with God. And everything else gets built around that appointment, not the other way around.
The next thing that changed everything for me is planning my week before it even begins.
I sit down, usually on a Sunday evening, and I map out the week ahead. I look at what needs to happen,
what's most important to me, to God, to my children, to my family,
to my mission and what can wait. And I bring God right into that planning with me. I don't just slot tasks into boxes.
I ask him what the week should hold. I let him show me what to prioritize and what to let go of.
And if he tells me what to let go of, I just write it on a list in the back of my planner for future projects. It's part planning session and part prayer.
And I'll be honest with you, this single hour might just be my favorite time of my entire week,
because I've made it into something I actually look forward to, rather than a chore I dread.
I use a paper planner. I love the Erin Condren planners,
a really beautiful one. And I sticker it up. I use color, I use markers. I make the whole thing visual and fun.
And before you go telling me that's a bit frivolous or time wasting, hear me out,
because there's a real reason this matters.
When planning is something that's enjoyable and satisfying instead of purely functional,
you actually do it.
And for me, as a visual person,
all that colour and creativity wakes up my creative mind.
So the very act of planning my week becomes a creative act in itself,
one that primes me for all the writing that lies ahead.
So if you've tried rigid, joyless productivity systems before and abandoned every single one of them, can I gently suggest that maybe the problem was never your discipline?
Maybe this system just wasn't for you.
So make it visual. If you're a visual person,
make it beautiful. If beauty is what motivates you,
figure out which system works for you and make it something you genuinely want to come back to.
Because a plan you actually enjoy is a plan you'll actually keep.
Now, personally, I lean toward paper and planners, but I know a lot of you are far more digital than I am.
So let me mention a few tools that other authors use and love. Take whatever serves you and leave the rest for mapping out projects and tasks visually, a lot of writers really like Trello or Notion.
They let you see everything in one place, move things around and keep track of what's done and what's still ahead of you.
For time blocking plain old Google Calendar works beautifully. You assign your tasks to actual slots in your day so that your writing isn't just something you'll get to if there happens to be left over time.
It has a place on the calendar the same as everything else.
And if you want to see where your hours are really going, a tool like Toggle will let you track your time so you can Spot exactly where it leaks away.
Then for focused writing sprints.
Some authors absolutely swear by those Pomodoro style timers where you write in short, concentrated bursts with little breaks in between.
There's even an app called Forest that grows a little tree while you stay focused, which makes staying off your phone strangely satisfying.
But honestly, the tool itself doesn't matter all that much. What matters is that you've decided on purpose how your time is going to be spent,
instead of just letting the day decide it for you.
Now, let me bring this all the way back to where we started, because this right here is the real heart of it.
A planned week isn't a rigid week. It's a free one when you know what you're focusing on. You stop carrying that whole undone list around in your head all day long.
You stop the frantic flapping. You stop the striving that comes from feeling like everything is urgent and nothing is ever finished.
You get to be fully present to the one task in front of you because you. You've already decided that that's the right one.
And that frees up something really precious. It frees up your peace,
it frees up your creativity, because a frantic mind can't create well.
And it frees up your relationship with God because you are no longer letting all that chaos crowd him out.
This right here is the difference between striving and stewarding.
Striving says, do more, do it faster, or you are going to fall behind.
But stewarding says, here are the hours God gave me and I'm going to handle them wisely with him at the center.
And then I'm going to trust that faithful focus on the right things is enough.
Because let me tell you something here today, friend, you don't have to do anything. Everything.
You just have to do the things God assigned to you in the time he's given you in an order that keeps him first.
And that isn't a productivity hack. That's wisdom straight from David's quill.
That's a numbered days heart of wisdom way to live.
So if you're reaching the end of your weeks feeling scattered and frantic and just vaguely guilty,
can I gently suggest that the answer isn't to push harder, it's to plan on purpose, to put God first in the actual structure of your day, and to let faithful focus replace all that frantic striving.
So number your days,
protect that appointment with God,
do a heart check, refocus,
plan your week before it starts, and make the planning something you genuinely enjoy.
And then do the work in front of you with peace.
Trusting that it's really enough.
Your time is a gift, friend.
Let's handle it like one.
May your pen stay faithful, your roots grow deep. And every word you write bear fruit. For his glory.
