In the life of a parent writer, schedule is everything. You are taking care of your children and dealing with job responsibilities and taking care of the home responsibilities on the side. Where is the time to write?
And then, if your schedule opens up more, because you finally get to quit the day job and just work on your writing like you always dreamed, how do you ensure that you’re using your time wisely?
The secret is schedule.
My days are very well structured, from the morning to the evening. Our household runs on a tight schedule, because it leaves less room for other things, like 3-year-old twins tearing down the walls around us, and kids function better when there’s a predictable schedule in place. We know what time we’re going to eat and what time we’re going to have Silent Reading and what time we’re going to call for lights out. This makes some of us in the household (myself included) pretty dependent on this schedule and a little irritable when something unexpectedly knocks events out of whack (there are drawbacks to everything).
Our schedules can be more fluid, if that’s what works for us. But if we want to reach the goals we’ve set for ourselves, we’re going to have to carve out time in the schedule. Knowing when you’re going to work on what, whether today is a nonfiction or a fiction day (if you write both—and if you have a blog, you’re going to have to write both) gives our productivity a helpful boost. It’s beneficial to know when it’s time to create all that social media micro content and when it’s time to shift into an editing frame of mind. It helps to know when we’re going to work on that rough draft and when we’ll have the time to brainstorm some blog topics.
For my scheduling, I do a thing called batching. This means putting like things together. I write all my blogs for the week on one day. I write all my rough draft fiction on one day. I do all my editing on one day. I write finals on several days, but always together. I juggle several different projects at a time, shifting between fiction and nonfiction, producing content for a video show, creating all my social media content. I work much faster when I can knock it all out at once, instead of a little here and a little there.
I work hard on my schedule. I started the new year with a pretty rigorous one in place. When I realized I hadn’t built enough margin into that schedule, I adjusted.
[Tweet “Creating a writing schedule doesn’t mean we’re bound to it forever. It’s a framework.”]
A framework will make us more productive.
(Sound familiar? It’s the same with goals.)
My schedule happens in blocks of 90 minutes. I’ve found that I work best in 90-minute blocks, because I can focus for that 90 minutes, close out everything that will distract me, take a quick break and ease right into the next 90-minute block.
I schedule my blog posts, I schedule the topics I’m going to write about, I schedule which books I’ll be working on each week and their deadlines. I even schedule my reading.
Setting up a schedule helps our brain maximize the time it has. When we’re given only a small block of time to create, we don’t want to be wondering about what it is we’re going to create. That takes time. If those pieces are already in place, we can get right to work during the window where our kids are (hopefully) napping.
Creating a schedule isn’t rocket science, and it’s not something that will look the same from person to person. I spend time revising my schedule whenever it feels like it’s too aggressive or I’ve missed something somewhere. Some of it is trial and error, because I don’t know what it’s going to be like grouping two particular activities together, and if it doesn’t seem to work, I’ll revise the schedule, and then I’ll revise again, until I have it exactly right and I’m producing as much as I can with the time I have.
How to make your own schedule:
Step 1: Look at all the time you have.
Write out all the blocks of time you have. I try to work in 90-minute increments and then take a quick break for water, but not everybody has the kind of time I have to write. That’s okay. Write out the time you do have, and organize your time into blocks. Maybe it’s half an hour here or 45-minutes there or just 15 minutes somewhere else. Write them all down. Some of those small blocks we won’t be able to fill with work, of course, because maybe it’s the very time our kids come home from school and we always want to be available to greet them. But use all the blocks you have and write them all down.
Step 2: List everything you’d like to accomplish in a week.
This would be things like publishing blog posts or writing a particular number of words on a story you’re working on (consulting our goals will be helpful for this step.). It would also be things like writing and sending email newsletters and creating social media content for your business. All the tasks that you have in a week that are important for a writing business need to be listed out. The point of this is that sometimes our expectations don’t match our time. Writing everything out helps us prioritize when our time is short.
Step 3: Match what you’d like to accomplish with your blocks of time, as if you’re putting together a puzzle.
This is my favorite part. Sometimes we’ll end with a deficit of time. That means we have to take away some of the tasks until our time opens up a little. Sometimes we’ll end with a deficit of tasks, in which case we can either schedule more tasks for ourselves or we can do what every writer should be doing—read. Or we can choose to rest, which is just as powerful.
Step 4: Don’t be afraid to adjust the schedule.
Sure, it takes time to adjust, but we’re saving time in the long run, because we’ll have a detailed schedule that will help us be the most productive we can possibly be. It’s important that we understand that making a schedule (even if we do it in pen), doesn’t mean it’s an always-and-forever schedule. We can constantly adjust to accommodate what it is we’d really like to do in a week. We’re going to eventually finish that book. What then? Have a plan.
Sometimes life will demand more from us, and we’ll have to sacrifice a bit of work time. Sometimes our children will demand more from us. Sometimes our day job will demand more, and we’ll have to sit and create while our kids are participating in family movie night without us for a season, because someone’s waiting on revisions. Don’t be afraid to play around with the schedule and adjust to the seasons of life.
Having a schedule at all will positively affect your focus and your productivity. It’s one of the simplest things we can do to set our writing career in forward motion.
