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 …
Category: Writing
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 …
Why time management is so hard for creative people
Everyone in every field complains about not having enough time, even though we all have the same amount. But creative types often struggle with time management more than others. That’s mainly because organizational systems are designed by analytical types. The J’s, if you’re familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. These …
Time management for creative professionals
I just returned from the PENCON Christian Editors conference in Austin, where I taught time management. I want to share with you a little of what I talked about, because time management is as important to writers as to editors, if not more so. For most PENCON attendees, editing is …
A must-listen podcast for novelists
Writing a novel is an incredibly complex task with so many moving parts it’s easy to lose track of them. That’s one reason editing is so important. You can’t—simply can’t, it’s physically and intellectually impossible—get it perfect in a single draft. Because the task is so complicated, multiple opinions about …
Finally, a writing guide for the 21st Century
Last time I taught my Edit Like a Pro: Elements of Fiction seminar, one of the students questioned the absence of The Elements of Style from my recommended reading list. “It’s a primer,” I said. “If you’re writing novels, you’re beyond Strunk and White.” That little book is such a …
How Novelists Can Blog
There are mixed opinions about whether blogging is any good for novelists. As Caprice Hokstad noted on my post “Why You Should Be Blogging,” this kind of writing is nonfiction and doesn’t come easily to fiction writers. I myself struggled to blog consistently over at my other blog before I …
Why You Need a Picture with Your Blog Post
You may have noticed that almost every blog post you read has at least one picture with it. Often, the picture isn’t strictly necessary to understanding the topic. In fact, sometimes the images have a tenuous connection to the actual content. Nevertheless, you are well advised to include one with …