I’ve had some trouble getting a handle on my schedule lately.
Part of it is because my boys are al home for the summer, so the time I normally have to work while they’re in school is virtually nonexistent. I still have large chunks of writing time, because my husband and I trade off kid-watching shifts so both of us can do our creative work, but I haven’t been maximizing the time in the most efficient way.
I write a crazy amount of content for all my blogs every week. Most of the blogging takes a total of three days (or workable hours for those days—which is about four hours a day). That’s a huge amount of time.
But I’ve been breaking up those blog writings into all five days of available work time. Which didn’t seem very efficient.
When we’re parents, we’re not often given huge amounts of time to write, which means we need to do whatever it takes to maximize our time. I didn’t want to just be producing content for my weekly posts. I wanted to also be getting somewhere on a couple of the books I have in the works, and just having four hours at the end of the week was not cutting it.
So I decided to reevaluate my time.
I looked at where I was spending time and what all I was doing each week to see if I could group like things together (like a blog day and a newsletter day and a “pitching stories” day).
And then I tried an experiment.
Here’s a sample of what my schedule looked like:
12:30-1:45 p.m.: Write story roughs
1:45-2 p.m.: Post on social media (platform work)
2-2:30 p.m.: Write Messy Monday post
2:30-3 p.m.: Submit Huff Post blog
3-4 p.m.: Write/schedule This Writer Life blog
4-5 p.m.: Write/schedule Crash Test Parents blog
5-5:30 p.m.: Read.
I had the highest word count I’d ever logged in a week (nearly 25,000 words).
It was much more efficient than my old schedule.
I’m a proponent for working in whatever time you have, even the short bursts, which is what I used to do before my time opened up a little more. I believe we can train ourselves to work in those short bursts and in the margins of time we have as parents.
But when our time does open up, why wouldn’t we wan to reevaluate and see if we could streamline our time so it’s most efficient for the season we’re in?
Schedules are critically important to write, because if we don’t have writing time scheduled, chances are we aren’t going to get it done. So much can come in the way of our writing—kids who need something that’s not necessary right this minute, other people asking us to do things for them (especially if we work from home when a spouse is at home), phone calls or social media that could wait until later, when we’re not so pressed for time.
My old schedule also left little room for margin. So when something unexpected did happen—a boy interrupting and I’d get thrown off what I was saying in the final draft of an essay—I would run over the scheduled time for that particular writing. And because everything was lined back-to-back (to ensure the most efficient use of time), ending a task late meant I would start the next task late.
So I worked in some margin. (Generally it doesn’t take me a whole hour to write an essay. Maybe 50 minutes, which left an extra 10 minutes for the unexpected.)
When we find a schedule we like, reevaluation is not the first thing we think about doing. But it’s a practice we should work in, because every season of life changes. Our schedules need to be fluid to keep up with those ever-changing seasons.
When my boys go back to school, my time will feel a little more like mine, again, and the schedule will shift accordingly.
Here are some questions we can ask ourselves in the evaluating of our schedules:
1. Am I wasting any time?
Sometimes we don’t like to admit to this one. I know I don’t. But the truth is, sometimes a story feels really hard for now. Sometimes I need to take it back to the drawing board or let it sit. Evaluating those things help us assess where we might be pushing something that doesn’t want to be pushed just yet.
Other places we waste our time tends to be social media or the Internet. My husband likes to watch YouTube videos. The problem is, one video leads to another, and pretty soon you’ve wasted half an hour just watching videos.
The way I combat this tendency is to schedule “break” time and set a timer. The rest of the time, I focus only on work and close out all my Internet tabs.
My time is too precious to spend it clicking the next most interesting thing that comes along.
2. Is what I’m doing working?
This was the question I had to ask when I noticed how spread out my weekly blogs were. An hour here, an hour there, and I didn’t have any large chunks where I could just be writing my fiction stories. So I grouped all those blogs together, and now I have large chunks for fiction writing. I get to write my way into a state of flow and just stay there a while.
The thought behind my original disjointed schedule was that I didn’t want to become stale on those weekly blogs, so I needed to spread them out all on different days. But they’re all so different, written in different character and tone, that there wasn’t any danger that they would start sounding like each other.
It’s always important to reevaluate what’s working and what’s not. I do this at the end of every week, by comparing my word count and thinking back through the week to see where I could have been more efficient. If we want our writing to become more than just a hobby, it’s a good practice to have.
3. What could I do differently that might result in a larger word count?
I hadn’t really been paying attention to word counts until fairly recently. I usually write everything by hand, so I don’t tend to write all that fast when it comes to rough drafts.
I went back and calculated word counts for the week where my schedule was not as streamlined as it was this week, and the word count was about 7,000 words lower. That’s a pretty significant amount—enough to make me realize that I needed to do something to increase it.
Grouping like writings together had a significant impact on how many words I could turn out in a week, and that was helpful to see. I will continuously experiment to see what might result in the largest word counts (and not just word counts—but also the best kind of writing. Because large word counts doesn’t always mean good word counts.).
As parents with limited writing time, it’s necessary for us to continue streamlining our schedules and figuring out what works best for us in the season we’re in. Seasons change, and our schedules should, too.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Don’t be afraid to streamline and change things up just because it’s worked for you all this time. You might just find that changing things up significantly increases your production.
But you’ll never know until you evaluate.
