It's hard to say.
You mention that you are working. Are you working full time?
What I'm wondering is if you have a lack of motivation or a lack of resources? It's a lot to try and write a screenplay, much less to do that on top of full time work.
Living a really balanced, healthy life where you do all of the things necessary for a good quality of life is actually really time consuming. I personally can't work more than 3 days a week and still maintain everything I need to do to maintain a healthy body, excellent mental health, invest in my marriage, and feel fulfilled in my life.
When I talk to people about motivation I talk to them about priorities.
When most people conceptualize priorities, they think their top priorities are the things they most want to work on, but that's a very flawed way to look at it.
Let's take exercise. Many people will believe that exercise is a priority and they're hellbent on exercising more and looking for motivation to do it. And yet, it's often the first thing that's neglected when a day is too busy. Why is that?
Well priorities come in two forms. There are why I call category A priorities and category B priorities.
A priorities are the things you actually do. Look at your life, whatever you drag your ass out of bed to do on a day-to-day basis? Those are your real priorities, those are what are truly important to you.
B priorities are what you *think* should be important to you, but they never actually are unless they graduate to A priorities. B priorities are what you try to add to your already full repertoire of shit you do.
That's why B priorities are so hard to maintain, people are always trying to shovel them on top of a full container and they just fall off the top of the pile with the slightest shake.
If you want a B priority to become an A priority, it has to replace something.
Let's come back to exercise. Say you just cannot manage to fit exercise, plus cooking, plus cleaning into every evening after a long day of work. You may need to find a way to take cooking and dishes out of the evening. Perhaps bulk cooking on the weekends, or even hiring a meal service so that after exercise all you have to do is reheat a meal and clean minimal dishes.
It's never about a lack of motivation, it's about truly understanding where you are currently directing your motivation and why. How are you using up your time and energy?
Are there ways to free up more time and energy and redirect them towards different priorities?
Then there's actually managing your motivation resources.
Identify your motivation vacuums. Often there is a small element of a task that you want to avoid that makes you feel less motivated to do things. What are those barriers and how can you work around them?
Motivation is often fleeting, so what are the barriers that make you think "n'ah, not today" when you contemplate a B priority? How can you creatively work around those barriers?
Back to exercise. Let's say someone has a spark of "maybe I'll go workout" but then they have visions of a long session, feeling out of breath and uncomfortable, and it all feels like too much to fuss with. For them, I recommend having a 5 minute, easy routine that they can do any day they don't feel like exercising.
Why? Because the easy routine can bypass the motivation barriers and when are you more likely to do intense exercise? When you're sitting on the sofa or when you're already in the gym exercising?
I almost never feel like lifting weights, but I absolutely have to do 5-10 minutes of stationary bike every second day for my knee rehab. Well, 90% of the time, I end up lifting weights because I'm already in the gym and my blood is flowing and why not?
So I can add weightlifting to my day very easily without taxing my motivation resources. It takes virtually no motivation to go do 5-10 minutes of bike and then takes virtually no motivation to lift weights when I'm already there. But it would take ENORMOUS motivation to get up off the sofa and go to the gym to lift weights.
Now let's put those two concepts together.
You only have a limited supply of time, energy, and motivation.
You have to assess carefully how you are deploying your time and energy, because those are your real priorities. Assess if you are okay with those priorities.
Understand that motivation is also a limited resource. You only have so much *push* energy in you each given day. For example, if you have the kind of job that requires you to constantly push yourself to do boring shit you hate doing, you will likely eat up most of your push resources for that day and it will be hard to do anything other than what you feel absolutely has to be done outside of work.
To be clear, your work is not applying external push pressure, they are offering consequences. The push to do the work is still coming from inside you. It's important to understand that motivation is never external. Consequences and rewards are external, but it's still you choosing to make those consequences and rewards a priority and to allot *push* motivation energy towards them.
So if work is getting all of your motivation resources, that means work is your priority. So of course everything in your personal life will suffer.
For someone who is giving away ALL of their motivation resources to work, they should probably examine their work situation. Is *that much* push at work really necessary? If so, is there maybe a different job that would eat up less motivation resources?
Someone in this situation might shame themselves constantly for coming home and wasting 5+ hours on screen time and feel like "uh, I'm so lazy, why can't I just do the shit I want to do?" But they're tapped out on *push* motivation. That's it. They may have plenty of time and energy, but without any remaining *push* they're fucked for the evening.
You have to watch for what is eating up your motivation resources and see if there are more efficient ways of using them.
Now let's say you have a job/lifestyle that eats up all of your *push* motivation but there are still external consequences that need to be avoided. You want to flop on the sofa and doom scroll for 5 hours but you have childcare or other major responsibility with consequences too severe. What happens if you are out of *push* for the day? Oof, that's where you dog into your reserves, and if you do that too consistently, you burnout.
You cannot over run your motivation resources, your system will crash.
In summary:
Take a close look at what you ARE doing. Understand what your current priorities actually are. Conceptualize that anything you aren't consistently doing can't actually be considered a top priority because if it was, you would be doing it.
What are your A priorities? Are you okay with them?
What is driving your priorities? Are you okay with what it? Are your priorities aligned with what you want your life to be? Are these priorities getting you closer or further from how you want to live your life?
Identity your uses of time and energy. Are there any that aren't helping you that you could easily replace with a more beneficial priority?
Identify the uses of motivation that could be more efficient.
What can you do to the execution of a B priority to require less motivation resources to actually do it and make it an A priority?
