Time Management:  Writing Around Your Life

Time.  We’ve all wished for more hours in the day at one point or another.  Whether published or pre-published, juggling life, job, family, and commitments can get hectic and overwhelming.  In this workshop, I will provide tips and secrets for organizing your life (whether you’re organized as a rule or not), taking advantage of every opportunity available, and squashing guilt – the number one time gremlin.

Set a Goal and Path

Setting a goal is important but it isn’t enough.  You need to visualize a way to achieve it.  One of the top reasons people fail to complete a task is because they don’t have a concrete idea of what steps are involved in accomplishing it.  Plotting a book, writing a synopsis, completing a work in progress, submitting to publishers or agents, sending your book out for reviews, developing marketing materials, following your book through the editorial process to publication.  Each of these tasks requires multiple steps in order to complete.  Knowing ahead of time what is involved will help you better organize your time and set aside the correct amount from the other obligations in your life.

Do the Math

Before you can effectively schedule your time and energy you must know what you’ll need in order to succeed.  Unfortunately, to do this you’re gonna have to do some math.  I can’t do this for you because each person and task will be a bit different and require different resources but we’ll look at a couple of examples so you get the idea.   

If your goal is to write a book in six months then you need to know how many words or pages you’ll need and how long it will take you to write those. 

For example, with a 75,000 word manuscript you’ll need 300 pages.  If you write 5 pages in one hour, how many hours will it take you to write the book? 

Answer:  60 hours.  Which means, you’ll need to devote ten hours a month for six months in order to complete the book or 20 minutes a day (30 days in a month). 

If you have a proposal due in thirty days, around 80 to 100 pages and you write 5 pages an hour, how many hours will it take you to write the proposal? 

Answer:  16 to 20 hours.  Which means you’ll need to devote 32 to 40 minutes a day.

Once you know what is required you can better plan for the time you need.  You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint and you shouldn’t set a goal without knowing what is required and how you’ll manage your resources in order to achieve it. 

Now What?

So you know what your goal is and you have a plan to achieve it.  What steps can we take to help ensure our plan doesn’t run off track?  The answer is going to be as individualized as each person.  But there are a couple of tips and ideas that might help.  Use whichever resonate with you and ignore those that don’t.

• Set aside a specific time of day that works best for you.  Perhaps you write better in the morning or at night.  Whatever that time, schedule your other obligations so that this is free.  You’ll not only help your creativity by setting up a schedule, and therefore notifying your muse when you expect he/she to work, but you’ll be training your family, co-workers, and friends with the routine.  You also set yourself up to capitalize on your creative time and help maximize your production.  This will help give you a feeling of accomplishment which will carry through to other aspects of your day and life.

• Multitask.  Identify those tasks that can be completed during other times without detracting from other obligations.  I’m sure we’ve all heard about other writers who edit pages in car line, put marketing materials together at ball practice, or organize the chapter luncheon during dance class.  If you can accomplish these things without making the other people in your life feel less important then do it.  You’ll move one step towards accomplishing your goal while leaving that golden ‘maximum output’ time for the more in depth requirements. 

• Plan for unexpected time.  If you suddenly find yourself with thirty minutes free during your lunch break then capitalizing on the lucky break will move you that much closer to accomplishing your goal.  Have a notebook, alphasmart, dana, laptop with you whenever possible.  So it might not be your ideal writing time and you might not get the 2 ½ pages that you probably would at another time.  If you get 1 or 1 ½ you’re that much closer to achieving your goal for the day and can then get ahead or devote extra time to the other areas of your life. 

• If writing during this time is just impossible for you to consider then look at what other obligations from your life you can take care of, freeing up more of your ‘maximum output’ time.  Do you need to buy cookies for that school party, run by the drycleaners, answer the fifty emails from adoring fans, update your webpage, write an article for your chapter newsletter.  If there’s something that might eat into your preferred time then cross that off your list instead.

• Plan for the eventual disaster.  Budget time in your projections for the unforeseen.  Sally rips her dress, the one she needs for Sunday’s concert and instead of writing after dinner you find yourself at the mall.  First thing, don’t yell at Sally and take your frustrations out on her.  If you’ve built into your schedule a few days for mishaps, and don’t waste them because you’re tired one evening or slept through the alarm in the morning, then you should be fine. 

• Reevaluate.  However, if the universe seems to be against you then it’s time to reevaluate.  You’re fifteen days into your thirty days and your proposal is due in another fifteen.  You’ve only reached 1/4 of your goal instead of 1/2.  Redo the math.  You’ll have to step up production, take a vacation from your day job, work out a deal with your husband and kids.  In short, reallocate your resources.  But in order to do that you need to know how much extra time you’ll need. 

But Mom, I really need your help!

Okay, so you’ve got your plan, you’ve identified what steps you can take to maximize your probability of reaching it.  Now enters the human factor. 

We all have lives.  Jobs, children, husbands/wives, other responsibilities.  It’s easy to begin to feel guilty, especially where our families are concerned, and let the plan slide in response. 

Don’t! 

This is your goal and dream.  It is beneficial to your children, your husband, your co-workers, even your boss to see you working towards achieving it. 

Guilt is counterproductive.  It eats away at our creativity and slows down our productivity.  If you’re worried that Johnny is going to be mad at you for not reading him his bedtime story tonight then you won’t be focused on your task of finishing this chapter/synopsis/scene/proposal.  Which means that instead of missing one night of reading to little Johnny you might end up missing two nights because you don’t achieve your goal for today and have to compensate tomorrow.  It won’t hurt Johnny or his daddy for them to read together every once in a while. 

But that brings up my next point.  If you set aside thirty minutes each day and promise your husband, children, family, co-workers, whoever that you’ll only need thirty minutes then only take thirty minutes.  If you go over that then they will start to resent the time you take and will rebel, which means more complications that you’ll have to deal with and less time for your scheduled tasks.

Of course this also works both ways.  When you’ve agreed to take Sally and Johnny to the park on Saturday morning don’t suddenly have a brainstorming moment, one that solves the pesky plot problem you’ve been stalled over, and beg off.  Jot down notes while the kids are getting dressed, enough that you’ll remember the threads, and then go enjoy your day in the sunshine with your kids.  It’s important to remember to recharge your batteries and devote an equal amount of time to the other endeavors of your life: your family, day job, emotional stability.  Without balance everything in your life has the potential to topple over.

Putting it all together

Following these simple steps will help you maximize your creativity and the time you have available to meeting your goal – and don’t require a single list.  By identifying what you want to accomplish, the steps necessary to achieving the goal and how to work smarter not harder you’ll be completing that book, passing out promotional material everyone envies, and building a stronger career. 

Editors prefer to work with people who meet deadlines and can produce the number of books they need a year.  Your family will appreciate the hard work you put into achieving your goal and will respect you for devoting an equal amount to them and their needs.

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