You’re very smart, but you can’t rely on your brain to keep track of all the things you need or want to do. To stay organize and on track, you must get ideas out of your head and into writing. Your brain is full of creative ideas, and some of …
How to minimize distractions
Remember the “distractions” quadrant of the Urgent/Important grid? Distractions are the grains of sand in our rock jar. Usually they’re small, and they take time we’re unaware of. A time and motion study can help you identify them. Allowing other things to impinge on your writing time may seem practical …
Celebrate Your Small Wins
It’s good to have big hairy audacious goals. And writing a book certainly is one of those. The problem is, it takes a very long time to accomplish. If you only focus on the end goal and not on the incremental achievements, you’ll feel like you’re hiking up a mountain …
Decide How Much Time to Allocate for Writing
Francesco Cirillo, inventor of the Pomodoro technique, says break tasks into 25-minute increments. Tony Schwartz, author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, says you need a 90-minute working session to do great work on a high-intensity task. So which is it? How much time do you really need? It …
What Flow Is and How to Find It
Flow is the state where you are so totally immersed in and concentrated on your work that you don’t notice the passage of time. You’re aware of what you’re doing, but less aware of your surroundings and even your body, which is why although flow can be good for your …
Write into the gaps
One important obstacle many of us face is the feeling that we can only do creative work in big blocks. We think “oh, I can’t do anything now, I only have twenty minutes.” For a long time, I let this belief hamper my productivity. The objection is that in small …
Set Realistic Writing Goals
An important step in organizing your time is to set goals. Your goal could be time-based, e.g., spend an hour writing every day. Or it could be productivity based, e.g., edit 250 pages per week. Set goals not only for your writing, but for other aspects of life also, like …
Focus Your To-Dos by Tracking Your Time
When you’re faced with a long to-do list, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Narrow down your list by understanding that there are four choices for any task: do it now, delay it, delegate it, or drop it. If it will take less than a couple of minutes, like answering a …
Organization: Focus on Focus
I’m taking a break from my Time Management series because Randy Ingermanson just released this great article on the topic, and it meshes perfectly with what I said the other day about grouping like tasks together and scheduling them into your ideal day or week. If you’re writing fiction and …
How a hard out improves productivity
A time management coach gave a seminar. As a visual aid, he put a giant jar on the table. Then he filled it with rocks. Big rocks. As big as your fist. He stacked them in there until they reached the rim. “Is the jar full?” “Yes,” someone said, “you …