Using time wisely is an important part of a writing career when it comes to being a parent writer who creates in all the margins. And it can seem almost impossible, because it’s hard to know what a day will hold in its hands until you’re actually there.
But it’s possible to use our time wisely.
We’ve talked about goal setting, and we’ve talked about making a daily schedule. Both of these will help us use our time more wisely, but there is one more step we must take before we will see the most efficient use of our time.
For me, that step looks like a hard-copy to-do list. I used to be a reporter, so I have all kinds of old reporter notebooks that I use to write down everything I need to do each day, in the order in which it should be done. For others this could look like a task app, where they can write down the steps that will get them to their goal.
It’s all well and good to make goals, but if we don’t separate the steps necessary to meet those goals, we’ll never reach them. It’s all well and good to make a schedule, but if we don’t know what to do with that schedule, we’re not going to use it the way it should be used.
So the next step in increasing our productivity is working backwards from our goals. What do we need to accomplish each month in order to reach our goals? What do we need to accomplish in each week? What do we need to accomplish each day?
I make a list of everything. I make a list of all the submissions I’ll make. I make a list of all the projects I want to work on. And then I assign each of those steps a particular day that makes sense.
Some people don’t like to divide out their days like this, because they think it’s too constrictive, but I would argue that if we don’t have our days scheduled with activities that will move us farther along toward our goals, then we’re not going to get anywhere. We’re just going to be spinning our wheels.
[Tweet “To-do lists might seem old-fashioned. But they keep me right on track to reach my goals.”]
When we wake in the morning without a plan for the day, we can feel aimless. We’ll most likely end up saying, “Well, I’ll just write on whatever today,” and then we’ll spend all our writing time trying to figure out what we “feel” like writing, and before we know it, we’ve wasted our 15 minutes on wondering and figuring instead of putting pen to paper. We have to first have the structure, the box of a day, to then deviate from that box if we so wish.
[Tweet “Using time wisely is more than just committing. It’s also about making the plan to facilitate it.”]
Every day, before I go about my day, I look at my to-do list. I don’t have it memorized, by any means. There are too many lines on it. I write everything: read this, write that, send an email here. I write my week’s daily to-do list on the Friday before, after a meeting with my husband about what might be happening that has the potential to change what I’m hoping to accomplish (it’s good to be prepared instead of blindsided, though, of course, we can’t be prepared for everything).
Using time wisely also means that we minimize the distractions. Those distractions can come from a variety of places. It can be our children bursting into our room when they think they want us and our sitter or partner didn’t catch them in time. It can be things like social media, where the pings of notifications will knock us out of flow. Some of my biggest distractions are when essays are picked up by Scary Mommy or Huff Post. I constantly check the shares to see how it’s doing and whether I have any comments. Using our time wisely means we are working to eliminate, or at least minimize, all the extraneous noise.
As parent writers, we don’t have as much time to work on our writing as our counterparts might, which means we have to be using our time wisely. We don’t have the luxury of messing around on the Internet for a little bit of the morning, because all our time is sacred and precious. We will learn to work better and more productively because of our time constraints, but for a while they can feel like impossible chains we need to break before we can bust out as a legitimate authors. If only we had more time. If only we had more freedom to play around a little. If only.
If only never gets us anywhere. Planning and minimizing distractions does.
How to use time wisely:
1. Know exactly what it is that you need to do when you sit down to do it.
Like I said, I keep a very detailed to-do list, and I schedule out all the tasks that need doing in my day. When I know exactly what I’m working on before I even sit down to work on it, I’m much more likely to get right to it, instead of caving to a distraction on the Internet.
2. Minimize distractions.
There are all kinds of apps out there that allow you to block the Internet and other distractions. Put your phone on do not disturb. Close out your browsers. Just sit down with your page and your story. Distracting ourselves can be a great way to procrastinate, but when we’re parent writers and don’t have a whole lot of time to work with in the first place, we’re not going to be able to afford procrastination. There is no I’ll-do-it-later for parent writers. It just doesn’t get done.
3. Re-evaluate goals.
When we set a goal to achieve, many times we’ll find that we’re much more likely to do the work necessary to achieve it if we’re constantly checking in with it. Don’t make goals and tuck them away until the end of the year. Bring them out periodically and see how you’re doing. Set your word counts by them. Schedule your projects on the calendar based on how much time you’d like to spend doing them. Evaluate.
4. Group like items together.
I’ve talked about this before. Keeping like items together helps us maximize the time we have. There is the business section of our writing career, which includes marketing and emails and submissions, and then there is the creative side of our writing career, and those aspects require different parts of our brain, for the most part (though everything about our business needs to be creative, too). It can feel jolting for a brain to go from writing a weekly newsletter to writing a fantasy series. If it’s possible to group like items together, we should try to do it. We’ll be able to get much more mileage out of our time. Look at your schedule as if it’s a giant puzzle, except with time, analyzing what might fit where, and then constantly experiment. If you notice you’re not logging as many words as you’d like to, see if something can be adjusted so that you are, in fact, writing enough words.
Using our time wisely is imperative as a parent writer. We will never be able to have the career we want to have if we don’t master the art of productivity. We must do this work.
