📅Writing a technical book: organizing your writing sessions
In the previous article, I discussed how to calculate writing metrics: writing speed, creative capacity, and writing ratio. Now it’s time to use them to organize actual writing sessions.
But before talking about schedules, one point needs to be absolutely clear: writing sessions must be treated as a priority.
Writing sessions are non-negotiable
Once you decide when and how long you will write, that decision must be respected.
Not after the dishes are done. Not once all pending calls have been handled. Not when everything else is finally quiet. If you wait until all chores are finished, your mind may indeed be at peace — but that moment will rarely arrive.
Writing sessions must come first. When the time comes, you turn your attention fully to the work and deliberately ignore the unfinished tasks waiting for you. This is uncomfortable, but necessary.
Turning metrics into a plan
Once you know your metrics, you can translate them into a concrete plan.
Let’s assume:
- a creative capacity of two hours on weekdays and four hours on weekends,
- a writing speed of one page per hour,
- a writing ratio of 70%
- a target book length of 350 pages.
You plan to use your full creative capacity of eight hours over the weekend. At one page per hour, that gives:
350 pages ÷ 8 ≈ 44 weeks, or roughly 11 months.
However, once you account for a writing ratio of 70%, the effective output drops:
350 pages ÷ (8 × 0.7) ≈ 62 weeks, or roughly 16 months.
If you want to compensate for the writing ratio, you need to increase the total time spent on the project. By extending each weekend writing session from 4 hours to 5, you reach 10 hours. With a 70% writing ratio, that yields:
350 pages ÷ (10 × 0.7) ≈ 50 weeks, or roughly 12 months.
However, extending sessions beyond does not automatically increase output. At that point, you have already exhausted your creative capacity and almost fully accounted for the writing ratio. Additional hours mostly translate into diminishing returns or lower-quality work, not more pages.
In my case, my writing speed was closer to half a page per hour. Writing only on weekends would have pushed the project to more than 2 years — far too long for a technical book.
The metrics forced a decision: I had to write during the week as well.
Adding weekdays to the schedule
By planning 2 hours each weekday and 4 hours on Saturday and Sunday, I reached 18 hours of writing per week, which translated into roughly 9 pages per week (6 to 7 pages once the writing ratio is applied). That brought the timeline to approximatly a year.
Writing on weekends was easy. Writing on weekdays was not — especially with a family. Some writers wake up early and write before work. I’m not a morning person, so that was never an option. Instead, I planned to write in the evening.
From the moment I got home to bedtime, I had about five and a half hours. Daily chores usually take around two hours, but by concentrating most of them on the weekend, I reduced weekday chores to one and a half hours.
That left:
- 2 hours to write,
- 2 hours to rest.
On paper, it looked perfectly balanced. I maintained that rhythm for two months. My writing sessions were immovable. I kept my promise. But slowly, everything else started to deteriorate.
The plan seemed sound. In reality, it exposed a problem metrics alone cannot reveal.
The warning signs
First, daily chores became harder and harder to complete. I reduced them to the bare minimum. Then I started going to sleep later and later. I blamed everything on procrastination. But when the most disturbing change happened, I could no longer ignore the problem.
For over twenty years, my free time had been stable — reading books, watching series or documentaries. Slowly, those activities felt like too much effort. Picking up a book became exhausting. I replaced them with shorter, easier forms of distraction such as brief audio stories. I felt like a different person. That was unsettling. At that point, I had to face the truth: I had pushed myself too far.
I had added 18 hours of work per week — two extra workdays — and I reduced my resting time.
I needed more rest, not less.
Accounting for the human in the process
Most advice about writing a book is about scheduling writing sessions and keeping those appointments. This advice is often written for students working on a thesis, or by people who are their own bosses and can write during working hours. When writing sessions are reducing your rest time, the impact can be significant. To mitigate this, here are my recommendations:
- Be transparent with your family
Explain what you are doing, why you may be less available for chores for a while, why you should not be disturbed during writing sessions, and why you may need additional rest during that period. - Reduce chores as much as possible
Avoid writing a book during heavy chore periods such as planning a wedding, moving, or welcoming a newborn. Use every possible shortcut — grocery delivery, teaching your teenagers to clean their rooms (and maybe load the dishwasher), and postponing non-essential tasks for a few months. - Plan breaks when working with a publisher
If you are self-publishing, it is relatively easy to slow down or stop when things become too intense. This is not the case with a publisher. When defining your schedule, explicitly account for breaks and holidays. - Take care of yourself
Make sure you sleep enough, eat properly — especially food that supports sustained cognitive effort — and do some light physical exercise.
One interesting thing to point out is that I did not experience the same kind of exhaustion when I wrote a self-published book in my native language. Quite the opposite, actually. Writing was not depleting my energy; it was recharging my batteries. It didn’t feel like work, but like leisure.
The stress of having a contract, writing in a non-native language, and meeting the higher expectations of a well-known publisher turned what was once leisure into work. Work that I still enjoyed, but that no longer served as a restorative activity.
Just remember that metrics and discipline are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Writing a book is not just a scheduling problem — it’s a human one.
What’s next
In the last post, I’ll talk about writer’s block and what actually happens inside a writing session.