From Time Poverty to Time Affluence: What 1900 Hours of Novel Writing Taught Me About Leaving Biglaw

After twenty-one years of practicing law, billing my time is second nature. Unlike many other attorneys, I never minded timesheets and rather looked forward to tallying how I spent my day in six-minute increments. When I realized I wanted to give this writing thing a go, I researched free time trackers and discovered the majesty that is Toggl Track.

Now, after two years of writing full-time and two years of billable time data, I wanted to share how I spent my time and my experience with pure time affluence compared to my BigLaw time-poor lifestyle.

CAVEAT: BILLING WRITING TIME IS TRICKY

Before I share my annual timesheets, here is the most important caveat:

This is only Butt in Chair Hands on Keyboard (i.e., BICHOK) time! If I tracked every time I thought about my novel while walking my dog or dreamed of a new plot point and woke up to scribble notes or listened to literally every single writing podcast ever made or analyzed every facet of craft when reading for fun at night or listened to an audiobook while cleaning, this number would be BANANAS.

The workaholic inside me LOVES this idea: writing is a fully immersive lifestyle, impossible to separate from normal consciousness (or subconsciousness). And I realize this is how I used to feel about law—full immersion—but in the opposite way. Thinking about beautiful sentences is, like, one million times better than trading snarky aggressive emails with opposing counsel.

My Timesheets

I wrote the first draft of my current novel (working title: Rich Girl Energy) in August - November 2023 before I started tracking my time. I also took a 60-day break from billing my time as an experiment to see how it feels (it felt horrible and I realized I need the dopamine hit of a daily score, just like my Oura ring but for my intellectual effort!)

In 2024, I billed about 885 hours (BICHOK) to this novel project. (I also took classes and worked on my second novel when my developmental editor read my book, etc.)

2024 Billable Hours to Rich Girl Energy

In 2025, I spent about 1020 hours on multiple drafts, inputting editorial feedback, learning to query and polishing the manuscript to 99% perfection (in terms of copyediting).

2025 Billable Hours

So about 1900 hours total on this project across two years, equivalent to one year of minimum client billable hours at a law firm.

Is that "normal"? No clue! It's just how long it took me to feel like I knew enough about the subject matter (female founders, billionaires, startup life, venture capital financing and IPOs) to create a (hopefully) realistic plot and dynamic characters.

These hours also represent me finding my process, which will help my next novel be more efficient (I hope). I tried every writing software (Scrivener, Dabble, Google Docs, Plottr), lost drafts, saved 500 drafts, edited on computer, by hand, and in Kindle, read the manuscript aloud four times, created thousands of tables and spreadsheets, filled five binders with articles and research, had multiple beta readers and developmental readers and put all their notes and feedback in color-coded tables, and created a OneNote with thousands of webpages and articles.

What Is It Worth?

To understand what those 1900 hours mean, I have to talk about what I left behind.

First, and most obvi: money, honey. Those 1900 hours would have generated substantial billable revenue at my former BigLaw partner rate (I can't even type the number but my hourly rate was four-figures so...).

Instead, they've generated one unpublished manuscript and zero income (so far). That is really scary!

However, I had the pleasure of spending as much time as I wanted on this novel which was a real blessing. Feeling chronically "time-poor" is certainly not a lawyer-specific issue, but the pressure of 24/7 client availability plus minimum billable hours created a constant state of awareness of the external demands on my time.

There were also limits on how much time I could spend on a task without invoking client ire at my bills. This saddened me, especially when building a whole new field of law (we used to call it “ESG,” back in the day). I wanted to do the complicated research myself, every time but alas, I had to leverage associates and then review their work.

As a writer, I can work as many hours on any task I please. For example, I can spend 15 hours researching the specific type of French crystalware a European billionaire might have in one of her many homes to enhance a pivotal scene that I probably already deleted from the current draft of the manuscript.

This Saint-Louis champagne flute sliced my protagonist’s hand so it was important to get the research exactly right. (Right?)

Takeaways

I spent 1900 hours+ on a draft manuscript for which traditional publication is absolutely not guaranteed, and I rather doubt I'll make back the income I walked away from (or at least not until Oprah, Reese and Jenna become my besties.) I still crave deadlines and hard, immersive work and some sense of external pressure (can I just say how heavenly it will be to get a publishing contract with a boss-editor and actual deadlines??)

But I do know, for the first time in my professional life, I'm measuring success by how I feel—which is really effing great given my autonomy and time affluence—not by how much I bill. Writing full-time demands my energy and creativity, which are completely different resources that demand to be renewed through rest and relaxation, not nonstop hustle.

I don’t need to BICHOK 9 hours a day. Only if I want to.

So, was it worth 1900 hours writing a novel instead of my BigLaw job? Ask me in six to nine months when we see if this book sells!

But also, ask me right now. Because the answer is absolutely yes.