I don’t believe in New Years resolutions; promises to yourself that are destined to fail. I do however believe in re-organising yourself, a realignment if you will. For the last few years of being a full-time writer I have been struggling with time management and productivity. The move from a traditional desk job, where the boss tells you what they expect each day, to a job where you are at home by yourself with the ability to distract yourself with a thousand things, has been a bit of an adjustment.
Each year I have got alittle better at it, but this year I have set out to make a concerted effort to put the final screws on productivity.
- Keep a calendar and deadlines. Not just one on your computer, one on your wall. I got a laminated wall planner, this year, and have written on it, not only commitments, but my own deadlines. It gives you the bigger picture of how your year ahead is going to go. I have worked out (finally!) that I can write on one book while editing another—that’s it. Thanks to the calendar being laminated I can shift these plans around if something comes up.
- Keep your online time limited. Give yourself time to do that required online marketing, but make sure there is no bleed over. You don’t have any books to sell or market if you don’t write. I give myself an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening to deal with email, Facebook and all those other little things that nibble away at your time. Those of you who like the Pomodoro method…four per day pomodori should do the trick.
- Push Yourself. This is connected with point #2. Once you sit down to right, put yourself on the right track. At the recent writing retreat I attended I noticed a couple of ways people did this. Putting in the headphones and playing music to block out the world. Using a Pomodoro timer. Mine, is Write or Die. This is a program that makes you concentrate by punishing you if you don’t write. If you stop for too long the program screen turns red, then it starts making awful noises. If you are really bold, you can set it to kamikaze mode and it will eat your words. Yeah…that’s called motivation.
- Learn to love editing. I’ve found the way to get through writing, and put words on the page is not to care about how damn perfect they are. By using Write or Die I can achieve that. Only later do I come back to edit what I have written. It’s like making a wire frame, once you have that, you can hang other things on it, but without the frame you are truly stuck.
- Do research first. I am terrible at this. I start writing, then I need to find out the land speed of a swallow, and before I know it I am following the rabbit hole to camel wrestling. If I have an idea of what I am writing, I will now research before and then be prepared for what lies ahead.
What about you, do you have any hacks or tips for being productive? How do you avoid distraction and get things done?