Regardless of your religious persuasion, I encourage you to take a sabbath. Give yourself one day off a week. Doesn’t really matter which day. In The Art of War for Writers, James Scott Bell recommends taking one day a week completely off and not writing at all: “Taking a day …
Category: Writing
Schedule Activities and Downtime
We talk a lot about scheduling time for writing. But here are some other things to consider building into your schedule so you can save time and increase productivity: Morning devotional or meditation. All my life I have risen regularly at four o’clock and have gone into the woods and …
Review Your Progress at the End of the Day
One time management practice I advocate is this: When you do a thing that wasn’t on your to-do list, write it down anyway and cross it off. This helps you assess what you actually did. Often when we get to the end of the day, we feel as if we …
Choose the Right Time Management Tools
The tricky thing about choosing the “right” time management tools is that the right tool for me may be the wrong tool for you. And the tool for one task may be inappropriate for another. So I’ll give you some options. Test them out and keep looking for others. Cal …
Get Your Info Out of Your Head
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 …