As a self-employed professional or creative, how often do you tell yourself you will write, then never get to it? Whether your writing is blog/Substack posts, web/email/social media content, course materials, reports/proposals, or a book/ebook/lead magnet, I know how easy it is for writing intentions to slip away.
Your morning fills up with email or urgent tasks, your afternoon appointments all seem to run long, and by evening your page is still blank and you’re too tired to face it. You might think this is a discipline problem. But actually, it’s a structure problem. And one of the most reliable fixes is also one of the simplest: don’t write alone.
Writing in company — whether it’s a scheduled co-writing session on a video call, a standing coffee shop date with a colleague, or a group that meets to work silently side by side — creates a structure that will change the odds in your favor. A handful of ordinary forces working together add up to more than you’d expect.
Accountability is the first element. When you tell yourself you’ll write at nine, no one notices if you don’t. When you tell someone else you’ll be there at nine, you know they’re waiting for you. Showing up becomes the path of least resistance. The option to skip it becomes much less attractive, because skipping now costs something. You’d have to explain your absence, or worse, sit with the private shame of having flaked out.
Then there’s consistency. A single good writing day is nice, but a regular writing habit is what actually fills blogs and keeps a business visible. When you write in company on a regular schedule, the habit builds itself. Tuesday at ten is writing time. You stop deciding whether to write and start simply writing, the same way you don’t decide whether to brush your teeth.
The third element is benevolent peer pressure. When you sit in a room, real or virtual, with other people who are heads-down working, something in you settles and gets to work too. Nobody’s forcing you, but it’s hard to scroll on your phone or reorganize your desktop when the person across from you is clearly deep in a paragraph. Their focus becomes a gentle current that carries you along.
Finally, there’s the benefit of camaraderie. Writing can be lonely work, and too much isolation will wear you down. When you write alongside others, even in silence, the work stops feeling like you’re living in exile. Being able to share your moments of struggle or success proves you’re no longer alone. That sense of companionship makes you want to come back, and the more you come back the better it works.
So far, I’ve focused on getting your writing done. But writing in company, over time, can produce something even more valuable — better writing.
Most of us write badly when we write in a hurry. Your deadline looms, the piece is due, and you hammer out a draft that has to be the final version because there’s no time for anything else. First drafts are supposed to be rough. They’re often where you find out what you actually think. But when every piece is produced under an imminent deadline, you never get the luxury of creating a sketchy version that you improve later. You end up publishing your initial draft.
A regular writing habit breaks that cycle. When you’re writing on a Tuesday because it’s Tuesday, not because something’s due Wednesday, you can write a rough draft and let it sit. The following week, you can come back and see it with fresh eyes, which is the single most useful thing you can do to improve a piece of writing. When you work only on tight deadlines, you don’t get that all-important distance from what you’ve written.
Once I began regularly writing in company, my writing productivity blossomed. So did the quality of my writing. Cultivating this habit has enabled me to publish multiple books and courses plus hundreds of articles and posts, while simultaneously working with coaching clients, teaching classes, and having time to enjoy my personal life.
Your writing company can be one other person and a dedicated hour. Or, it can be a small group and a recurring date on your calendar. I make use of both Shut Up and Write groups and my own Get It Written Day to make sure I always have the writing time I need set aside.
Maybe it’s time for you stop treating your writing as a task you’ll get to only when it becomes urgent, and instead start making it an commitment you keep with other people. Find some company, pick a time, and keep showing up.
