I wrote a book while working full-time. These 3 productivity habits helped me do it without sacrificing sleep.

Joshua Nelken-Zitser researched and wrote an 80,000-word book in less than a year, while working full-time. He used tools like Google Sheets and ChatGPT to streamline tasks, giving him more time to write. Consistency and celebrating small wins were also vital for achieving his goal. When I got my book deal with HarperCollins UK, I was thrilled that a childhood dream of becoming an author was coming true. Then, reality hit. I had less than a year to research and write an 80,000-word book. I had never taken on anything this big before, and certainly not alongside a full-time job. The prospect of juggling a 9-to-5 as a journalist with such a time-consuming passion project felt terrifying. But by being intentional with my time and relying on a few key productivity habits , I've ended up with a book I'm proud of, all without losing sleep. I need sleep to be productive I asked a couple of author friends how they balanced their day job with writing a book. One said he wrote in the twilight hours; the other woke up at the crack of dawn. I also looked for clues from people I interviewed at work, like 21-year-old Nathaneo Johnson , who ran a startup while studying at Yale and told me he often put in 18-hour days. It became clear they found time for their passion projects by eating into their sleep. But sacrificing precious shut-eye was not something I was prepared to do. While some people are able to get by on less than the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep , I'm not wired that way. When I'm sleep-deprived, I am not my best self, nor my second or third best. I tend to get grouchy, lose focus more easily, and become more prone to getting sick. If sleep was non-negotiable, I knew that I needed to carve out time elsewhere. How I found the time to write My free hours after finishing work and at weekends seemed like the most obvious place to claw back some time to write my book. Normally, those slots would be filled with episodes of "Below Deck," reading fiction, or meals with friends. I worked out that freeing up roughly two hours on workdays and a sensible eight hours on weekends, by cutting down on my favourite activities for almost a year, would be manageable. Although it doesn't sound like much, the hours add up. Over a month, it would give me more than 100 hours to work with. Across the eleven months between signing my deal and my deadline, that would come to almost 1,000 potential hours - the equivalent of 45 straight days of work without sleep. I didn't know how many hours it would take to finish my book, but the math showed that the workload would be feasible if I chipped away at it steadily, rather than cramming the writing into an impossible final stretch. In the end, I doubt I racked up anywhere close...

Preview: ~500 words