Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

The battle for time
Why write FAST?
The setup

Now usually, it’s just an excuse. But one of the biggest reasons students give for not writing is a lack of time. You lead a busy life. You’ve got a career with business trips and meetings. Or maybe you’ve got two jobs and three kids. Or perhaps it’s a full schedule of classes and homework with a part-time job.

Look around. We’re all busy. We watch days, weeks, months, and years go by without achieving the things we had resolved to achieve at the start of the year.

If you need eight hours a day for six months straight to write your book, it’s just not gonna happen. A screenplay isn't guaranteed income, so the kids come first. A report isn’t urgent, so it gets pushed down the To-Do list. The newsletter won’t be done this month because of the sales meeting. And so on.

And when these things happen, you feel a tremendous sense of frustration. Even guilt. Sometimes stress. You know it, I know it. You can’t get out from under it and it drives you crazy.

In a way, the FAST System is a time-management technique. I was tired of hearing my students say they didn’t have enough time. (I was tired of not having enough time myself!)

Even if you only have ten minutes a day to write (which is never really the case, but let’s go with it), the FAST System will help you. In fact, if you really tuck into it, amazing things are possible. What if you could write a book in just a few months, using the FAST System on ten minutes a day? Some readers will. It might take practice, but wouldn’t it be worth it?