"Write 3,000 words a day."
You probably wanted to quietly close this tab.
Someone actually hit that number, day after day. Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes.
Here's the interesting part. He didn't do it on willpower.
There were two tricks.
How he used his time, and how he varied his speed.
Let's talk about both.
If you wait for a big block of time, you'll never write
"But where would that time even come from?"
In August 1892, Doyle sat for an interview with The Strand Magazine. He had just gone full-time as a writer.
His working hours are recorded there.
Between breakfast and lunch.
And again from five to eight in the evening.
That's it.
Doyle didn't hand his whole day over to the desk.
One chunk in the morning. One chunk in the evening. Just those two.
Six or seven hours in total. Hardly superhuman.
And here's the thing.
When we decide it's time to write, we go looking for an unbroken eight-hour day.
A Saturday. A long weekend.
We never find one, and the week ends with nothing written.
Doyle didn't do that.
He cut the day in two.
Which is pretty sensible, honestly. Nobody's concentration runs for six straight hours.
Put lunch and the afternoon in the middle. Empty your head. Then sit down again.
Something shifts the moment you stop measuring in hours
In the same interview, Doyle mentions about 3,000 words a day.
Look closely at that.
Not three hours. Not six hours.
Words. It sounds minor, and it's a huge difference.
Measure in hours and you get this.
Sat down at the desk.
Two hours passed.
Quota met.
Even if nothing got written, you've met it.
Hmm.
Measure in words and you can't fudge it. Either you wrote, or you didn't. That's all.
So Doyle's day wasn't about putting in time. It was about producing quantity.
And what did that build?
One short story in about a week.
The Holmes stories in The Strand run roughly 7,000 to 9,000 words. He finished one a week.
So he was at his desk nearly every day.
For comparison, Jack London set himself 1,000 words a day around the same era.
Doyle wrote three times that.
Prolific people tend to be prolific for a reason.
The real secret was refusing to pick one speed
Now for the heart of it.
What fascinates me most is that Doyle didn't write every job at the same speed.
A Holmes story took a week.
But for his historical novel The White Company, he spent two years reading up on fourteenth-century England.
Two years. The same man: one week for one thing, two years for the other. And he wrote them in separate periods.
The reason lies in how he saw them.
He didn't consider Holmes his real work.
In November 1891, he wrote this to his mother.
"I think of slaying Holmes in the sixth and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things."
That's what he said about the most famous detective in the world.
For Doyle, historical fiction was the real job. He said he wrote The White Company because he "determined to test my own powers to the utmost."
And he described novel-writing back then as a congenial pastime. A pastime he felt would inevitably become a profession.
So Doyle kept two shelves in his head.
Work that supported his living and his readers. Work that proved what he was capable of.
And he assigned each one a different speed. That's the crucial part.
Your work needs two speeds too
"So what do I actually do?"
Fair question. Here's how to apply it.
Start with time.
Don't try to secure your writing time in a single block.
Split it between morning and evening. Thirty minutes early, an hour at night. Just make it two.
Then swap the unit from hours to words.
Two hundred words is fine. The size of the number isn't what matters. What matters is choosing a unit that tells you whether you wrote or not.
And hold it daily, not weekly. "Sometime this week" usually ends in tears on Sunday night.
Now for speed.
Divide what you make into two.
Things you turn over fast. Things you take your time with.
The first supports your living and your readers. The second proves what you're capable of.
Then set a separate deadline standard for each.
Because if you try to write everything at one speed, this is what happens.
The one with the near deadline never gets finished.
The one with the distant deadline gets sloppy.
Sound familiar? It does to me, constantly.
Deciding how to allocate your effort isn't cutting corners. It's deciding where all of it goes.
So start by cutting things in two.
Your writing time, into two blocks.
Your work, into what you turn over and what you bet on.