The following is a guest post by author Sage Cohen. Her book, “The Productive Writer,” was released in December of 2011. Enjoy!
Happy New Year, writers! If you’d like to be even more productive in the new year, you can expedite success by making the most of every minute of writing time you have. Following are two strategies that can help.
Track your time carefully
To get a handle on how I spend (and waste) time, I use a daily time sheet, which is a table that I create in Word, print out, and fill out by hand. I keep one for each project, as well as one that illustrates the big picture every day. For each task, I record start time, finish time and total time taken. I also note its category, such as: writing; family; business; self-care.
This may seem daunting at first, but it’s actually quite easy to do; and very quickly it will become second nature. Once you have a clear picture of how you’ve spent every hour of every day for a week or two or three, you’ll know: how much time it takes you to do the work you’re doing, how much time you’re wasting, and how much time you’d like to reassign to your writing practice.
Schedule your time effectively
You may or may not be a “perform to a schedule” type of writer. Largely, this will depend on who you are, how you write, and what you’re writing. However, I believe that no matter what type of writing you’re doing, whether there is an external deadline or not, a schedule can help.
I have come to appreciate schedules as little maps of the possible to guide us in the deep and sometimes overwhelming waters of time. When I have a big project (let’s say a book) and a somewhat long-term timeline (let’s say six months) and some other significant work and family commitments (including a full-time freelance writing career, part-time teaching, a toddler, three cats, and two dogs) the fact of the matter is that I need to see––clear as a successful simile––where and how the writing time for the book is going to fit into my life. So I make a treasure map for arriving at the doorstep of this finished book on the date promised. When taken out of its romantic mood lighting, this map is simply a schedule.
What I mean by a schedule, for something like a book, is that I set both targets and timing. Let’s say the book has twenty chapters, and I plan to write one chapter per week over the course of twenty weeks, then spend the last four weeks revising. I’d block off in my computer calendar the hours I expect to spend writing that chapter each week. (Don’t know how much time it takes to write a chapter? No problem; use the time-tracking log suggested above to find out.) For me, the greatest value of this process is having hard proof that there are actually enough hours in my life to accomplish what I have set out to do.
When I see those orange blocks of “write book” time floating through the days and nights of my computer calendar, a sense of calm comes over me. I can see my path of progress; I can trust it will get done. And even if I don’t choose to stick to the schedule in a given week, or ever, I still have that visual map of how my current life could shift to accommodate something new – and a general sense of what will be required of me to make that happen. And that lends confidence and comfort as I enter the unknown.
If you have any questions about tracking or scheduling time – or about how to be more productive in any aspect of your writing life – please feel free to post them here. I’ll be stopping by throughout the day today and will be happy to answer them.
About Sage Cohen
Sage Cohen is the author of The Productive Writer (just released from Writer’s Digest Books); Writing the Life Poetic and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. She blogs about all that is possible in the writing life at pathofpossibility.com, where you can: Download a FREE “Productivity Power Tools” workbook companion to The Productive Writer. Get the FREE, 10-week email series, “10 Ways to Boost Writing Productivity” when you sign up to receive email updates. Sign up for the FREE, Writing the Life Poetic e-zine. Plus, check out the events page for the latest free teleclasses, scholarships and more.
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