What counts as writing?

Many years ago, I read some famous author saying that to make a living as a writer, you needed to treat writing like a job.  You punch in, do the work, day in and day out.  A few years ago, I was trying to think of some way to boost my writing, so I decided to try making it a job.  The first thing I needed to figure out was how many hours a week I wanted to write.  I quickly decided on 42, because that works out to six hours a day, and it’s also The Answer.  If I had six hours a day to write, that would be great, but I also have a part time job to pay the bills.  So instead of trying for 42 hours of writing each week, I go for 42 minus however many hours I work that week.  (I’ve also started counting my commuting time.)  So this gives me my weekly goal of hours of writing.

But what exactly is an hour of writing?  If I sat down and started typing, “Chapter 1, It was a dark and stormy night,” and continued for an hour, we’d agree that would count as writing.  (I never said it had to be good writing.)  But what if I sat down the next day and spent an hour revising what I had written?  Would that also count as an hour of writing?  I decided that, no an hour of revising would only count as thirty minutes of “writing.” I set this up years ago as a trial and I’ve just continued to do it, so I don’t remember my exact reasonings, but I believe it is because I can get stuck just doing revision after revision after revision.  Part of my goal was to put more words on the page, not just polishing the ones already there.  By only counting revising as half the time, I should be more motivated to write stories.

But what about blogging?  Some of my blogs are just random thoughts I’d like to put out to the world, but I have to admit part of it is the hope that someone goes, “This guy has an interesting take on … exploring Mercury, I wonder what their fiction is like.” It’s a slim hope, but we have to do what we can.  Just to keep things simple, I decided that an hour of blogging would also only count as thirty minutes of writing.  Even blogs about writing, which I don’t care to think too much about otherwise I’ll give myself a headache.

The final writing related thing I decided to count as writing, is social media crap.  Because it doesn’t really matter how many stories or blogs I write if they’re never seen by anyone.  So I spent time each week on Mastodon and Bluesky, just trying to find new people who might take an interest in anything of mine.  But I do see spending time on social media as less important than blogging, and so I don’t waste too much time, an hour on social media I only count as six minutes of “writing.”

I’ve been doing this for years, and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually hit my goal.  I think the only time I came close was when I picked up some extra shifts and worked thirty-some hours, meaning I only needed to write for a couple hours that week.  But even then I don’t know if I made it because I also basically have a third job of taking care of a bunch of stuff around the house, which usually leaves me too tired to do anything but veg in front of a screen binging shows or YouTube videos. 

I still write, just not as much as I want to.  I guess I need to come up with some new motivation to make sure I put in the time.  Any suggestions?