Time Management for Writers

[lizvogel]

I've been contemplating time management lately. Or rather, I've been thinking that I need to contemplate time management, but I don't have time to do it.

Finding time to write is always a challenge for writers. The only way I've ever found to get significant writing done is to make writing the top priority, and let everything else go. All right, except feeding the cats. But everything else. This works. It works really well, as far as the writing goes. Then one day you wake up and you can't get out of bed because of the mountain of laundry, and you're in serious danger of having to bulldoze the house due to all the minor repairs that have been left to turn into major problems, and everything around you is chaos sheathed in dust. And you have to start digging yourself out, and it takes far longer than just keeping up on it all would have in the first place.

So I've compromised by taking some days and declaring them Writing Days, where nothing else is allowed to claim priority. (Except, of course, the cats.) And other days are House Project Days, or Day Job days, or whatever. This works... less well, though it staggers along. I've never met a house project that didn't extend far beyond the time allotted. The nascent organization I've ended up in charge of doesn't demand much time, except when it suddenly does, and then it can eat days without even a burp. And so on. And suddenly it's been a week since I've had a Writing Day, and that's no way to get writing done.

And it's not just that. If I take a day for writing, is it for actual writing? Or is it for querying, or submitting short stories? The actual writing is inarguably vital to this whole being-a-writer thing. But querying's important too; it doesn't matter how finished the novel is if nobody ever sees it. The same goes for short stories. Researching markets is a huge time-sink, and researching agents can demolish hours in what feels like seconds; it's like web-surfing with justification to keep going.

So I've been trying to time-share days. I can only write for so long; when I've wrung the word-reservoir dry, I can work on that house project, or mow the lawn, or maybe even clean something. (Or maybe not.) But some house projects need an all-day commitment. Or I'll try to tuck the other thing in first, for the sense of accomplishment or to get it out of the way so it doesn't loom distractingly, and suddenly the day's gone and I haven't even turned on the laptop yet. The Day Job has its merits, but it's physically exhausting; not a lot's going to happen after I get home from work. (I try to squeeze exercising in before work, and it sort of works, but it's not the greatest combination with a demanding shift and I'm perpetually running late.) Querying and writing require very different mind-sets, and I find it extremely difficult to switch from one to the other in the same day. And splitting days up like that courts the constant feeling that whatever I'm doing, I should be doing something else.

And that's just the current load. There are things I'd really like to do, but the idea of taking on another obligation has about as much appeal as grabbing a hot stove element. I keep plotting ideas for starting a writers group. I'd really like to get back to regular martial arts training. But I Don't. Have. Time.

So I'm looking for time management suggestions, though I know going in that nothing's going to give me the ten days a week I feel like I need. And it's 2:30 in the morning as I type this, so I'm going to save it to post later and FFS get some sleep.

Comments

[rj_anderson]

You won't believe this because it sounds like it can't possibly work, but --

In the morning either before or just after breakfast, set a timer for an hour, turn off the internet by any means necessary, and write. When the hour's up, get up and walk away from the computer. If it's time to go to Day Job, then do that. If it's a Home Day, then for the next 15-30 minutes, do something completely different -- make a cup of tea, put in a load of laundry, wash some dishes, get your tools out for one of those house projects. Then set the timer for another hour and go back to writing. When the timer rings, get up and do another chore or two, or go for a walk, or just take a relaxing break.

If I repeat this cycle 3-4 times, I can be done my entire writing day by early afternoon, have some useful chores done, and consistently get more work done than I EVER did when I used to sit down and doggedly try to write for as many hours as it took to get my 1000 words in, or whatever I was aiming for at the time. Even as a slow writer, I tend to average 350-400 words an hour; just three such sessions will give me 1200 words, which is a fabulous day for me.

But even if you don't have a full day free to play with, if you write for an hour before you go to work, you'll at least have a chunk of writing done every day.

I highly HIGHLY recommend Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's book REST: WHY YOU GET MORE DONE WHEN YOU WORK LESS, which talks about the science behind this kind of work schedule and gives some powerful historical examples of scientists, military leaders, and others who worked smarter and shorter, not harder and longer, and got much better quality work done as a result.

Hope this helps! It's taken me a long time to come around to believing this kind of thing could work for me, but now I swear by it. It's saved my sanity and kept me from quitting writing altogether.

[lizvogel]

Actually, that sounds like a great system, if your brain works to "manager's schedule" rather than maker's schedule. Which mine doesn't, but I will check out that book, and see if I can adapt parts of its system for my own use. Thanks for the rec!

[rj_anderson]

I would never have thought my brain would work to "manager's schedule" either, because I believed focused concentration for a prolonged period of time was the only way I could achieve creative "flow".

What I actually found, however, was that after more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted writing my brain gets tired and I start to be overly self-critical, prone to excessive editing and overworking of the text, and slow to generate new creative ideas. I may even start feeling blocked or at least stuck, and frustrated about the quality of the work I'm doing.

When I force myself to take a break every 60-90 minutes even when I feel like I'm on a roll (indeed, especially if I feel that way), and end mid-sentence or mid-paragraph rather than trying to complete a full scene or thought before pausing, my subconscious keeps ticking away on the writing even as I'm folding laundry or taking a walk. When I come back to my laptop for the next round, it's a lot easier to get back into the flow of writing, which is why I can write 1000-1200 words in 3-4 hours when I used to bang my head against the keyboard for 8 and still end up with significantly less (and worse) output as a result.

The other big plus for me is that keeping "office hours" with my writing, which for me means taking off at least one day a week and quitting no later than 4 pm each day even if I haven't written as many words as I'd like, pushes me to make better use of my writing time while I've got it -- but it also keeps me from feeling overworked and resentful about writing because I don't seem to have time for anything else.

Julia Morgenstern's book NEVER CHECK E-MAIL IN THE MORNING is another good book if you're interested -- she's the one who taught me to deliberately shorten my overall daily writing time so I'm forced to focus on it exclusively instead of trying to multi-task and frittering chunks of it away. She calls this technique "crunching your container", and it's definitely helped.

[lizvogel]

What I actually found, however, was that after more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted writing my brain gets tired and I start to be overly self-critical, prone to excessive editing and overworking of the text, and slow to generate new creative ideas. I may even start feeling blocked or at least stuck, and frustrated about the quality of the work I'm doing

If your brain does that, I can definitely see why multiple shorter sessions worked for you!

I have a rather different problem. Almost the opposite, in fact. Long sessions work well for me; I'm at my most productive when I can get three or four hours in a block. It's beating other things away long enough to get that block -- on a regular basis, without everything else going to hades around me -- that's the challenge.

And then add in something like querying, which also works better (for me) in 3-4 hour chunks... and I end up needing a lot of chunks.

(I spent much of Saturday with the chainsaw, and all of today in the yard, and consequently am feeling a bit better about the state of the homestead. But you'll notice there was no writing, or querying or submitting, in there. 'Cause the chainsaw also works better in large chunks, as well as on them. ;-) )

I do love hearing how other people's brains work -- it's so neat that there are so many different patterns, and that what's a brick wall for one person can be a godsend for another. (For example, I've tried the "stop in mid-sentence" thing before, and for me it was a disaster -- bad for the work and it made me miserable. But I know for some people it's just the ticket.) Of course, all this variation does make it difficult to find the tricks that work for each person, but I enjoy the poking around in processes. So thanks for telling me about yours!

[fjbryan]

My work requires lots of writing, and the job requires lots of email. How to balance? I learned a long time ago that email will swallow as much time as possible, so it must be pruned back. I spend morning-noon time on my main writing, and take breaks from that by doing small email tasks. Anything that requires research (online or in the library) happens after I have done all the productive writing I can. By mid-afternoon, I've blown through whatever words I had that seemed original, but for email, it's ephemeral and who cares? So I can continue to email or journal online until late (like now).

[lizvogel]

Starting the day with writing is definitely the way to go, though I am not by nature a morning person, and sometimes the "booting up" process is a bit... much. And if I'm serious about getting some writing done, I am not allowed to touch the internet at all. It's one of the reasons I prefer to write fiction on a very old laptop; being on a machine that cannot connect to the internet is a feature, not a bug.