If you think that you don’t have time to write a book, time compression is possible. Think of it like de-fragging your hard drive or consolidating all of the ketchup bottles.
With an embarrassingly-slow typing speed of 25 words per minute, you’d think that it would take me an eternity to write a book. The fact: it took me a grand total of 55 hours to finish a 138-page book, and I didn’t even break a sweat. How I know this: I tracked my time throughout the project. I included all of the time that I spent brainstorming, outlining, writing, editing, and doing miscellaneous stuff. I used a simple Excel spreadsheet to do my time tracking.
Part of why this went so well: I scheduled 2 hour blocks of time to shut out the world. The cell phone got turned off, and I didn’t even let myself entertain the thought of checking e-mail, checking my Facebook page, or indulging in any other such mind-numbing time-wasters. If I even got up to take a bathroom break, I noted this in my spreadsheet.
The lesson I took away from this: we tend to egregiously overestimate the amount of time things take. Take that into account when deciding whether or not you have time for something.