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August and September were rough months as far as time is concerned. (Yeah, aren't they all?) In addition to an increase in the elder care duties, I spent a couple of my workdays having a great time with family members who don't work in the summer and another couple with friends I only see once a year. One week I worked only Monday and Tuesday with five days going to other things. What I find happens in those situations is that I also lose my first day back at work, trying to get back up to speed. That was certainly the case in that instance.

I'd been trying to start a draft of the project I'd worked on during May Days and getting nowhere. When I could work,  there was always something else that needed to be done. So I decided to try sprinting, which I'd read about in a Query Tracker post by Ash Krafton. She described writing in 20- to 30-minute sprints throughout the day. As Krafton said in her post "sprints are tiny finite things," and you have to work intensely during them. Hey, for 20 minutes I can be intense. As she also said, "sprints aren't tiny finite things" because they do lead to sustained writing.

I used 20-minute sprints, only once a day, trying to squeeze one in every day to avoid those long breaks in the writing process for that particular project. The first time I did it, I was trying to work between the time a family member left after staying overnight and a commitment to be somewhere else. (I can't even remember now.) I only did 10 minutes. But I did work. For the most part, I've also been able to get a sprint in at least once a weekend.

On days when I can be here to work, I still do a WIP sprint in the morning. Then I do some units of time on other things I need to get done (a submission, for instance) and go back to the WIP later in the day. The morning sprint makes getting into the project in the afternoon much, much easier.

In fact, I managed to get two and a half chapters done working this way. Of course, I'm now working on revising them down to one chapter, which seems like going backwards. But that's an organic writing issue, not a time management issue. And, by the way, because I'm an organic writer, I'm not actually going backwards. That's off topic, but just saying.

Anyway, right now I'm loving sprinting. It doesn't just generate content. It keeps you in the world of your project, which has a big impact on managing time.

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Last week I caught the tail end of a Twitter chat at #kidlitchat. The discussion topic was "Work/life/family/job/other. How do you balance it all?" I immediately recognized a subject for Time Management Tuesday because balancing activities has a great deal to do with managing time. Over the last year and a half, we've hit upon a couple of topics here at Original Content, as part of the Time Management Tuesday project or not,  that definitely deal with the getting everything done issue.

Balance Is Easier When You're Trying To Juggle Fewer Things

Really think of the balancing metaphor. Think in terms of  carrying a number of things and having to carefully balance them in order to do so. There will always come a tipping point, when you have one item too many and the whole load ends on the ground. Yes, dealing with work and a personal life is like that.

Back in June, I addressed Shannon Hale's post on caregiving and writing. She has cut her life down to work and raising her kids. Only  two things. There are, of course, multitudes of tasks within those two activities, but she is limiting where her time and energy goes to two major efforts.

Balance for all of us is easier to approach (notice I'm not using the word  "achieve") if we consciously cut back on the number of things we're trying to balance. That could mean cutting back on professional projects as well as personal interests. There's been talk for years about housework not being a valuable use of time. But as a general rule accepting that we'll never have clean windows or a kitchen linoleum without holes (is that just me?) often doesn't begin to offset all the other things we need to do/balance. Therefore, we may have to assess how  much we're really getting professionally from the writers' group we attend and let that go, as well as putting away the hobbies that have nothing to do with our work. We may not be able to justify the weekly author visit  to a local school any more than we can justify the monthly hike with a local walking group.

Remember the old clutter advice about only buying something new if you throw something out? Trying for balance could mean only taking on a new project if we give another one up. If we want to volunteer with a writers' organization, maybe we'll have to sacrifice community volunteer work. 

There really isn't much hope of achieving anything like balance if we keep trying to carry more and more activities. What's more, we can give a better effort in terms of time and energy when we have fewer things to work on.

Situational Balance

Balancing activities in our lives is like managing time. We can't expect to come up with one way to balance things and be done with it for the rest of our lives, just as we can't expect to come up with a schedule that we can work with forever. Everything is situational.  We have to rebalance everything in our lives depending on our ever changing life situation, just as we have to change our schedules when our lives change.

I'm not talking different balances during different life phases, as in we have one kind of balance while we're writing as single working people, another balance if we're writing and  raising a family, another balance if we're writing, raising a family, and holding down a day job. I'm talking weekly, if not daily adjustments.

We have to keep juggling our tasks not just because all personal lives appear to exist in chaos but because our work situations are constantly changing, too. Sometimes we have to balance our creative work with reactive work--responding to inquiries for appearances or RFPs for conferences or submission deadlines. Sometimes we have to balance our creative work with marketing or research or study. We may be working on more than one creative project at a time and trying to balance that.

And then we have to factor in the personal chaos.

What we're talking about here is creating balance around situation instead of looking for a permanent, all-purpose solution. Situational balance means we are only able to create anything like balance by planning what's going to happen for the next month or the next week or even, sometimes, the next couple of days.

A Zenny Balance Scheme

There is a zenny aspect to the balance scheme I'm describing because it involves recognizing:

1. the desire to keep adding more and more professional and personal tasks to our workload may not lead to true unhappiness but it certainly won't lead to balance;
2. our situation at the present moment and planning to deal just with that.

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Early on in my time management study I became interested in discipline, how becoming disciplined can help us manage time. (It probably would help us manage just about everything else in our lives, but I only discuss time management at this blog.) What I didn't do when I was mulling over discipline was carefully define it. That is always a mistake in my experience. Discipline, as it turns out, involves training and maintaining behavior through control. That is a disturbing idea if you're applying it to others. Personally, I love it when applying it to myself. I love the whole idea of training. I'm shakier on the control part, as in self-control, but, hey, that's something I can train for, right?

Which brings us to The Willpower Instinct: How Self-control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More Of It by Kelly McGonigal. I mentioned McGonigal's name so frequently in the Situational Time Management Workshop I led earlier this month that I finally suggested we could use the name as the basis of a drinking game. The fact that I would even think of such a thing indicates that I need a whole lot more discipline and self-control.

McGonigal never actually writes about time management. She writes about goals of all kinds, especially those involving changing behavior, and using willpower to achieve them. Well, managing time is both goal and behavior.  There are a number of things she has to say that can apply to managing time, particularly for writers.

A few examples:

• People who are distracted have poor impulse control and are less likely to be able to stay on long-term goals. Many writers work out of their homes and have trouble maintaining a strong barrier between their professional and personal lives. Personal life distractions undermine our ability to stay on task.
• Thinking in terms of being "good" or "bad" relating to a goal undermines willpower. For instance, having been "good" and accomplishing a great deal this morning can be used as justification for being "bad" and not working this afternoon.
• We tend to think of the future as a wonderful place where we will accomplish great things. Thus, believing we'll feel more like working tomorrow or will get a lot done tomorrow justifies taking today off.
• Willpower failures and successes are contagious. A strong argument for writers' groups and group writing projects like NaNoWriMo.
• Giving in to the What-the-Hell-Effect when experiencing setbacks. We  actually lose valuable work time when that happens.

McGonigal even explains why meditating helps with self-control and attention, something I've been hearing about for years, though no one felt a need to explain why it would work. Meditating, it appears, develops the prefrontal cortex, the portion of the brain that deals with impulse control. Good impulse control helps people stay on task with goals. Find meditation difficult because your mind keeps wandering and you have to keep bringing it back to the breath? That's actually good, according to McGonigal. The effort to do that develops the brain just as physical effort develops muscles.

This book has masses of material that can be applied to managing writing time, even though it's not about managing writing time at all. It's a marvelous aid for those of us who are interested in training for self-control.

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Well, my May Days experience has not been all I'd hoped for.

The conference I attended at the beginning of the month didn't cut into my May Days project work time all that much, since I was home one day and worked on it during a three-hour workshop at the conference on Sunday as well. However, those five days I spent getting sicker and sicker last week were definitely not part of the plan. I did May Days work three of them, at least once with a laptop in bed, but then lost the rest of the week, any hope of squeezing some time in on the weekend, and yesterday, too. As our May Days leader pointed out yesterday at our Facebook page, we've reached the halfway point for this project.  I  think I have nearly four pages of intro and a number of pages of notes for characters and scenes. 

Back in February, I wrote here about the What-the-Hell Effect. My understanding of the phenomena suggests that guilt over willpower/discipline setbacks is the big instigator in the "What-the-Hell Effect"--individuals feel guilt and frustration, a little self-hate, maybe, over what they see as their lack of ability to stay on task and figure, What's the point? What the Hell, this initiative is shot, I might as well give in.

I'm not feeling guilty over picking up a bacterium. However, losing time for any reason is always a frustrating setback. In this case, the loss isn't just related to The May Days, but to every other work and personal task I needed to do these past six days. This May did not work out the way it was supposed to. Things are not the way they were supposed to be. Since The May Days can't be what I'd planned, should I accept that they're a lost cause?

Well, that's a pointless question for me, because I'm too obsessive to give up on a short-term project like this. I said I was going to do this for a month, and I'll do it for a month, if I have to finish it on my knees. Or in bed, as I did last week. But for those readers who want to make a more rational decision, consider this:.

I still have a half a month.

Yes, we can do some rah-rah talk here, get a little Zenny about putting last week into the past (which, you know, is where it is), but the hard fact is that giving in to the "What-the-Hell Effect" in this case means losing half a month of work. When we're talking about time management, giving in to the "What-the-Hell Effect" always means losing the time we would have worked if we had picked ourselves up off the mat after our discipline slip and kept going.

To make a long story short, I'll be working for a while on my May Days project today.

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In her book The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It, Kelly McGonigal (Cheers! My workshop participants will get that joke.) says, "Willpower failures may be contagious, but you can also catch self-control."

According to McGonigal, studies show that "behaviors we typically view as being under self-control are, in important ways, under social control as well." We are influenced by others in any particular group we are part of at any particular moment. Are you trying to control your eating or drinking? How does that work for you when you are out with a group of people who are really, really enjoying their food and drink? Trying to control your spending? You might want to be careful about whom you go shopping with. If you're with someone who either doesn't live with the same financial constraints you do, or just doesn't care, you can easily find yourself spending more than you wanted to because when you're with others who are doing it, it can seem like a great idea. But maybe not so much later when you're by yourself again.

This is one of the reasons obesity seems to "run" in families. In fact, McGonigal claims that a woman with an obese sister has a 67 percent increased risk of becoming obese herself. It's not so high for men with obese brothers--their risk is just 45 percent. (No, I do not know why.) Additionally, though, having a friend become obese increases an individual's risk of becoming obese, too. By a whopping 171 percent. Thus we're not just talking genetics here. It's the influence of a group. Willpower failure spreads among people.

We have mirror neurons in the brain that keep track of what others are doing. You can see why this would be a good survival mechanism for evolving humans who wanted to be part of a group to increase their chances of survival. Mirror neurons are part of the spread of willpower failure because they make us unintentionally mimic others who are not staying on task with their willpower goals, they mirror and spread emotion (poor moral in an office, for example--"Let's close up early and get out of this place."), and they mirror and spread temptation ("Everyone on Facebook is talking about that book. I should read that today to keep up instead of working.")

On the other hand, though, goals can spread from person to person, too. Yup, there's a term for this. "Goal Contagion." McGonigal says that research indicates that we can catch another person's goals and change our behavior by doing so. Some of this can come about just by reading or thinking about someone. Fortunately, goal contagion is limited to goals we already share somehow. We're unlikely to "catch"  goals to invest heavily in stocks or throw over our workaday lives and take a couple of years to travel the globe unless those were things we'd wanted to do somewhere at the back of our minds, anyway.

What does this have to do with managing time, particularly managing time for writers? The May Days, people! National Novel Writing Month! Your writers' groups. All these group initiatives involve setting aside time (a month, a meeting every week or two) and pulling people together with the hope that we will "catch" initiative, work ethic, etc., from each other. That we will catch each others' goals.

When the groups don't work, it's because not enough individuals were able to stay on their goals, giving others something to mirror. Remember, willpower/discipline failure spreads. But when they do work, it's because a big enough percentage of the group stayed on task--to any extent--and contributed to the discussion, and those people were able to provide something for others to catch. Because, remember, goals are contagious.

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On Friday, May 3, I taught a Situational Time Management workshop at the New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Conference. This post contains information related to the writers and people I referred to during the workshop and is here for the benefit of participants and anyone else who is interested. The author materials are listed in the order they appeared in during the workshop.

Francesco Cirillo,  The Pomodoro Technique

Ellen Sussman, A Writer's Daily Habit: Four Steps to Higher Productivity, Poets & Writers, Nov./Dec., 2011

Herbert Benson, The Breakout Principle  Article about: Oprah

Dorothy Duff Brown  Post about with links to videos: Original Content

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Kelly McGonigal, The Willpower Instinct  Articles and book excerpts  Psychology Today blog

Timothy Pychyl, The Procrastinator's Digest  Psychology Today blog

Alan Lakein, How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life  About the Swiss Cheese Method of Time Management

Susan K. Perry, Writing in Flow

Frank Gilbreth Lillian Gilbreth  Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Cheaper by the Dozen

Hersey Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory

Charles Duhigg,  The Power of Habit

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I am leaving in a few hours to attend the New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators regional conference, where I will be running a workshop this afternoon on situational time management. Sometime this weekend I'll be putting up a post dealing with references for the workshop. Beyond that, I don't expect to be active here.

I guess I'd better go finish getting ready.

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Last year, I took part in The May Days, a Facebook group in which members encouraged each other to write two pages a day. On May 8th, 2012, I explained why writers might actually need a push to get them writing--a lot of the work writers do isn't actually writing. After I finished my month, I decided I liked what I called this set-aside time for specific projects, or binge writing.

What I liked about The May Days was the way it appealed to my own joy in obsessing on a project or topic. I don't have the endurance to obsess indefinitely, but a set-aside time--Oh, I'm there. Seriously, I once did one of those week-with-no-TV things. I made two kids do it with me. I love this stuff.

Since last May, though, I've been reading The Willpower Instinct  by Kelly McConigal. She talks about willpower (and lack thereof) spreading through groups. I'll do more on that next week  In the meantime, I will just say that there appears to be some support for group writing initiatives like The May Days helping writers stay disciplined.

Well, tomorrow is May 1st, and our group is starting another May Days project or binge. Last year I didn't even hear about this until the day before, so I had done no preparation at all. This year as part of my New Year's planning I actually had a May Days goal and objectives:

"Goal 6. Work on an outline for "mummy book" during May Days (I wasn't prepared for May Days last year. I hope to be this year.)

Objectives:

1. Finish reading Wired for Story because I think we organic writers often don't know what our story is prior to writing, which makes plotting difficult.
2. At least skim The Plot Whisperer for same reason
3. Go over old research for this project and continue with more."

I did finish Wired for Story, though I've only read a few pages of The Plot Whisperer. (This is not a comment on the quality of the book. I just haven't been able to get to it.) I didn't go over the old research I've collected over the years that I've been thinking about this book. What I did do:

1. Visit UVM's Fleming Museum, because right now a college museum figures into the setting/story
2. Read half of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for character development research
3. Register for a 3-hour plot workshop this Sunday at the New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Conference
4. Realize I can use the find-the-story posts from OC's Weekend Writer series to help with early find-the-story work
5. Make a few journal notes over the past year for this project

While it can be argued that I am better prepared for May Days this year than last, I am still not in great shape. For one thing, I'm going to have a lot of trouble writing on May 2 through 4 because of family and conference commitments. That's really early on in the project to be veering from the program. The plotting workshop on May 5 seems like a great idea, particularly since it comes early in the set-aside period. However, the workshop description asks participants to bring a work-in-progress to which they can apply the information we'll be taking in. I am going to be scrambling the rest of today and in whatever time I can find tomorrow to scratch up enough material to be able to say I have a work-in-progress.

Hey, a work-in-progress is in the eye of the beholder, n'est-ce pas?

Stay tuned to learn what Gail has to show for her May Days experience at the end of the month.

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I have to take a break from my quest for discipline because my next step on that search is reading Kelly McGonigal's The Willpower Instinct, which I just picked up today. I haven't learned to manage time so well that I can have it read by midnight, forget about giving it any thought.

So while we're waiting for me to see if there's anything in The Willpower Instinct that we can use, I'm going to refer you to one of last year's posts about transition time. Why? Because if I ever become self-disciplined, it's one of the things I hope to get control of. I'm not doing much better with it now than I was when I wrote about it back in July of last year.

I  find it interesting that I  see so little written about transition time. This post from Attack Your Day is the best thing I found today, and it's what I found last year, too. I sometimes see a bit written about it in reference to groups needing to spend time moving from one activity another, but there's not much out there on individuals losing time while they're making transitions from morning routine to work, work to evening routine, etc.

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Last week I wrote about my confusion over how to form work habits that would support managing time. I understand the cue and routine that Charles Duhigg writes about in The Power Habit, but I don't know what reward writers get for working--just for working, itself--that will make us want to loop back to that cue that will send us to the routine that will lead us to...what reward?--and keep us working habitually.

Kelly McGonigal, who designed the Yoga Journal willpower program  we all took part in this past January (We did all do that, right?), has reservations about habits. In a talk she gave to a habit formation group, she says that habitual, nonthinking behavior works best for small tasks like brushing your teeth or taking medication--tasks that don't require a whole lot of us in the first place. She doesn't believe forming habits   works well for making what she calls "really freakin' hard changes," such as those necessary to overcome addiction or achieve weight loss.

Where managing time comes in here, I can't say. Is managing time more complex than remembering to brush and floss every morning? Is managing time a self-regulation/self-control issue and it's appropriate for me to be obsessing on how to better regulate it...or ourselves? Or is it merely a self-regulation/self-control issue for me?

In either case, here are some of McGonigal's thoughts on behavior that supports difficult change. Will it also support managing time?

"Want Power"--Remember what you actually want. (A goal?  I understand goals!) Also, be mindful of your choices and whether or not they address your goal.

Automatic Goal Pursuit--This is different from habit. You're trying to keep goals in mind instead of relying on automatic habits. You are always focusing on the goal, instead of behavior.

Distress Tolerance--Work on becoming comfortable with uncomfortable situations, the distress of wanting. For time management for writers, this could mean becoming comfortable with working alone, which could go a long way to control the "craving" or desire to keep checking your e-mail/Facebook wall hoping for some human contact.

Implementatons--We've already talked about implementations in relation to procrastination. Essentially, you're planning what you will do in certain situations. When I want to go to Facebook, I will check my timer to see how much time is left in my 45-minute work unit and work until the unit is done. If I still want to go to Facebook, I can go then. That is an implementation intention, my little lads and lasses.

Commitments--When faced with a challenge to our goal, have a rule we can rely on rather than habit. I have been invited to hike tomorrow. Tomorrow is a work day. Hiking won't get me closer to my goal, working will. Personally, I can see where a commitment would work better in the case of a real challenge than a habit.

As I listened to McGonigal, I wondered if a lot of what she was talking about would relate to discipline, which was what I was interested in pursuing last year but couldn't find any information about--at least in relation to time management.

She describes mindfulness, which she teaches, as being the opposite of habit. My thinking now is that habit may not be as good a way of creating a disciplined writer as some of these mindfulness-related techniques that McGonigal talks about. Yes, now I've got to read her book.

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I'm interested in work habits, hoping that I can use them--good ones, anyway--as an external support for willpower. We all want something that will help us to stay on task. What I've liked about habits/routines (when I've had them) in my own life, is that I find them time and energy saving in an additional way because I'm not wasting time and energy on making decisions about what I'm going to do, when I'm going to do something, etc.  Thus, I am dragging you into this habit obse--arc.

I've been reading The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg and have spent much of the past week confused. The Power of Habit definitely isn't a self-help book that will aid individuals (this individual, anyway) in managing their own behavior. It's more of a big picture type of thing. In fact, it reminds me of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, using narrative nonfiction bits to illustrate factual material relating to general concepts. In the case of The Power of Habit, there's a lot of information on how habits impact businesses and social interactions/societies. Not great amounts of material that we can apply to the issue of work habits. And, as I said, what I did find and tried to apply, ended up confusing me.

 Duhigg writes about "habit loops." A habit, as he describes it, is triggered by a cue (often a time of day), we go through a routine (the activity of the habit), and receive some kind of reward for it. Because we were rewarded, the cue sets off the routine again.

You can see how a habit loop forms with physical habits--eating in front of the TV, feeling uncomfortable if you haven't done your morning workout, for instance. The reward in those cases is physical, the way your body feels. You can also see the loop clearly in any habit that involves a reward you can actually observe or even touch. If, say, you are twelve-years-old and you have fallen into the habit of spending your allowance on comic books as soon as you receive it or you are a nineteenth century laborer and you have fallen into the habit of stopping at a bar on the way home on pay day, it's pretty obvious how those actions came to be repeated until they became the habit.

Work habits, particularly for writers, seem different to me because the reward doesn't come immediately, and that's what threw me this past week. Isn't the obvious work reward payment or advancement in your field of work? They don't come all that frequently, so how does a worker form habits around them?

And for writers, payment can come very rarely, indeed. Royalty checks only come a couple of times a year, and many writers don't receive them. They get their one-time advance, and since many books never sell enough to earn back that advance, that will be it. If I'm trying to use habits to help me manage my work time, how is that going to happen when my reward--payment--comes so rarely?

Now Duhigg writes about monkeys who will maintain a habit after their reward is no longer coming, because they've come to crave the reward. He talks about the "power of cravings in creating habits." But, once again, is the occasional advance going to happen frequently enough for us to get used to it and crave more? Crave it enough to keep us working regularly?

Perhaps money isn't the cue, I decided. Maybe it's just publication, because many of us publish work at journals that don't pay. Publication can come more frequently than payment, so maybe publication is the reward that creates a craving. Again, though, it doesn't come very often compared to the amount of work we have to do to get it. Is it really enough of a reward to help us form a work habit?

I decided that maybe I was being too literal  with the whole reward thing. Maybe I needed to be more mindful in terms of work, stay focused on the work itself, instead of something that may or may not happen (publication and payment) somewhere in the future. A fantasy future, the zenny ones might say. Maybe, for writers, at least, the work has to be the reward. Can the knowledge that work is being done  be satisfying enough to be the reward for a work behavior? Is that how we form work habits?

I suspect that that reward may be enough for some workers, but not all. And that may explain why not everyone has so-called "good" work habits.
 
Duhigg provides a flow chart at his blog on changing a habit. He said he was going to post one on creating a habit as well. Unfortunately, he never created a blogging habit and hasn't updated in four months.

Next week: We consider whether or not I've been going down the wrong road with this whole habit thing.

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I spent Sunday in bed getting over something, which I'm mentioning here because Sundays have a big impact on my work life. Sundays are when I try to get a lot of personal things done and out of the way, making it possible to attend to my work life on weekdays. We have to manage all our time in order to have some in which we can work. A loss of a Sunday is a big deal to me, especially with Easter coming up next Sunday. It's a social event for my family, so I won't be doing my usual work then, though prepping for it was some of the work I was supposed to have done this past Sunday and didn't because I was in bed. Personal work is piling up. So, originally, I was going to do a woe-is-us kind of post all about how do we recover from the blow of losing time? As if I had an answer for that.

Then I realized that on Sunday evening, when I was finally able to stay awake for four hours, I posted my Weekend Links post here at OC and even got started writing a big part of yesterday's. I did it because I always do the Weekend Links post on Sunday nights. Yesterday, while I still wasn't feeling normal, I used my starting work transitional time (I've needed to do another transitional time post for a while) to work on clearing out my e-mail in-box. Because that's what I always do before I start work. I managed to get a few things done during a rough time because I always did them. They were habits.

Last fall I wrote about the difficulty in forming habits when your routine/work situation is always changing, as it does for many of us. But evidently I've managed to form a few, anyway.

As luck would have it, I happen to have a copy of  The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg in the house, and I started to read it this morning during my morning transitional time. (Not to be confused with my work transitional time, which I mentioned a few paras ago. Yes, it is definitely time for another transitional time post.) In fact, it was the intro to that book that made me realize what had been happening with me over the past weekend--that habits I hadn't realized I'd formed were kicking in.

So, I've got the book, I'm going to be reading it, and I'll be posting here about what Duhigg has to say about habit that can be applied to the Situational Time Management program I've been discussing here. I may find that there's not a lot because it appears that only a third of the book is about the habits of individuals. Fortunately, it's the first third, so we should know soon.

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 I ended last week's post with the question "Does creativity lead to creativity?"  I think it's a significant question (I would. I asked it.) because it relates to the whole writing every day issue. Writing every day does make it easier to stay in a project, as Sussman said in the article I quoted last year. It encourages break-out experiences, which are creative acts. But does doing creative work regularly actually make people more creative? Is it like working a muscle that gets stronger with use? Because if it does, then maybe those of us who aren't able to write every day really ought to be making a bigger effort to find time to do so.

Perhaps we should first consider what creativity actually is. Over the years, I've heard many people limit the term to the arts. Only writers, artists, and musicians could be creative. However, many people create things where a thing didn't exist before. And coming up with a solution to a specific problem when no solution existed before is a creative act. Evidently PBS did something on creativity and flow as part of series called This Emotional Life. That program's definition of creativity is "the ability to generate new ideas and new connections between ideas, and ways to solve problems in any field or realm of our lives."

But can we get better at generating new ideas and new connections between ideas by spending time generating new ideas and new connections between ideas? You can find lots of tip-type advice on how to become more creative--things along the lines of listen to classical music and don't watch TV. (Lots of people are down on TV as being a creative act, by the way, which is intriguing because the material on TV was created by somebody. Even programming that strikes us as uncreative, such as the multitude of real housewife programs and the twenty-somethingeth home design show, was created by somebody. We have to remember that the first creepy little girl beauty pageant show was a new idea. I'm not saying it was a good one. Also, the whole classical music  is good and TV is bad thing is not a new idea. Not a creative suggestion, I would suggest.) But the closest thing I'm finding that might be said to address my question about time spent creating influencing creativity is the 10,000 hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers.

Gladwell wrote that it took 10,000 hours of work to achieve mastery in a field. (Some argue that he was talking about mastery at an extreme level, so most of us wouldn't need to practice quite that much.) Lisa Cron in Wired for Story refers to the late Herbert Simon's estimate that it takes 10 years to master a subject, by which point a person would have absorbed around 50,000 pieces of information. (Kind of makes you wish you'd started keeping track of all that learning, doesn't it?) But weren't both these people talking about skill and knowledge rather than creativity? Is there an impact of all that work on a person's ability to generate new ideas?

If you've been around here much, you will realize that I'm not done with this. But I've accepted that I will need to move on to a new time management topic next week while I'm continuing to obsess on this creativity business.

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Writers are often advised to write every day. In fact, we've discussed that issue here, when I brought up the points that writing every day means, presumably, generating more work, as well as encouraging flow and break-out experiences.

Personally, I have never been able to maintain a daily writing practice. On weekends, it's difficult for me to even maintain an exercise practice because of the extra people I need to and actually often even want to deal with, forget about getting away to write. And for many years now, I haven't been able to work five days a week during the workweek because of various family commitments.

Last week was not one of those weeks.

For reasons that are beside the point, I was able to work five days last week. I was here, anyway, for five days. I was home, working every day of the week. My guess is that this was the first time since 2009. Last summer I was often down to two days a week, and I'd been doing only three, at best, since the beginning of last December.

My week of work was somewhat disappointing. I didn't realize until last Thursday that last week was going to turn out the way it did, so I didn't have anything specific planned. I might have used last week as its own unit of time and planned something special to accomplish during it, if I had known it was coming up. On top of that, I had no electricity for nearly two hours on Wednesday, I wasn't feeling well late Wednesday afternoon and most of Thursday morning, and I lost another two hours on Friday to shoveling snow. By Friday evening, I was feeling I'd lost a great opportunity.

Then things started getting interesting on Saturday.

All I had time for that morning was a shortened stint on the treadmill where I tuned in to a panel discussion on MSNBC. But while walking and watching I came up with an idea I could use in the workshop presentation I'd been working on last week. On my way to visit an elder just a couple of hours later, I came up with some ideas for a response to an appearance request I'd received Friday afternoon. While talking with a family member on Sunday, I came up with still another idea I might be able to use in the workshop.

Three ideas in less than forty-eight hours when I wasn't working at all. (Well, I did run from the treadmill to the word processor to jot down that first bit for the workshop.) But I had been working previously. And I had been working what was for me a lot.

All those ideas could be described as break-out experiences, since they dealt with work I was already involved in, and break-out experiences are described in The Break-out Principle a method of  maximizing creativity. I've had other experiences when managing to do even a little work on a weekend had a positive impact on the next week's work. And I've also had vacations when I've been able to do more journal work and found myself coming up with far more material than I usually do. And that would be new material, not solutions to problems, as with the break-out experiences.

On the subject of creativity, John Cleese has talked about the need for time to ponder and believes that taking more time to ponder leads to more creative work. I wasn't clear on how much time he was talking about or what kind of pondering. So what I'm wondering is, will just putting in more time on creative work, pondering one particular issue or not, lead to more creativity?

Does creativity lead to creativity?

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Once  upon a time, long, long, long ago, I worked in an office for three extension professors. I was their lackey, to be perfectly honest, and I always had way more lackey work to do than I had time.

We would have meetings in which one professor or another, or sometimes all three, would get all excited about this project or that, and one professor or another, or sometimes all three, would say things like, "Why don't you get started on that, Gail." We'd all go our separate ways, I'd "get started on that" and never hear about it again.

I've never made any claims to be brilliant, but I'm not stupid, either. Eventually, I learned to guess which projects they were asking me to work on that they would never follow through on, and I just didn't do them. Not because I was a layabout, but because I just couldn't. I had to do all the things that they were going to follow through on, and there was too much of that, as it was. I cannot recall ever running into any problems because I've my decision-making. In fact, I even told one of the professors I did it. What upset him was not that I was doing it, but that I could do it--that they were coming up with plans they weren't following through on and doing so in such a way that I could predict what they weren't going to do.

Predicting what we're not going to do is something we should be doing for ourselves.

A case in point: Last year I had this exciting plan to start an environmental blog to help market the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook. It was going to be set-up as if it were the official blog of The Earth's Wife, the environmental  magazine in the book, and it was going to be written in the voice of Walt Marcello, one of the characters. He is not a stereotypical environmentalist, and he has a strong voice with a push-the-envelope sense of humor. I was going to have him comment on environmentally-related news stories and there would be a blog roll of environmental websites. It would be easy, I thought, because I wouldn't update more than once a week or so, and, because I would be using recent news stories for content, I wouldn't have to do much research. It was going to be marvelous. People would love it. I would have lots of readers, and, as a result, sell lots of eBooks.

Well, fortunately it took us longer than expected to publish STP&S, giving me time to become more rational about that plan. First off, the likelihood of any new blog getting much attention these days isn't very great, forget about it developing a big following. Just as there are more books being published than the market can bear, there are more blogs being published than blog readers can read. There's way, way too much competition now in almost every subject. So that would be a big strike against that project. In addition, I already spend a lot of time on this blog, more than most writers do. (I don't consider myself a writer who has a blog. I am a writer and a blogger.) Updating nearly every day with sometimes short essay-length material is a lot. In addition, I'm already maintaining a second blog at Goodreads. (I just discovered I can link to my individual blog posts there from outside, though you may have to belong to Goodreads to read them. Don't know about that.) That blog is only updated 2 or 3 times a month, but still, I am already maintaining two blogs.

A third blog would take up valuable time and energy without providing me with much benefit, since I couldn't seriously expect many more readers. This was definitely a case where I could predict that I either wasn't going to follow through with this project, or I was going to follow through in a poor manner. I decided not to do it.

However, some of what I wanted to do with that new blog I can do here, which is why you can now see an Environmental Sites & Author Blogs section on my blog roll. Once a week I'll be doing environmental posts that fit in in some way with writing and/or reading. We'll see if this has much impact on the marketing of Saving the Planet & Stuff.  At the very least, it will be far, far more time and energy efficient for me than starting and maintaining an entirely separate blog.

So maybe what this Time Management Tuesday post should have been called is Know What You're Just Not Going To Do, Don't Do It, And Do Something Else Instead.

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Remember those New Year's Goals and Objectives we created on New Year's Day instead of making resolutions? Mine are printed out and pinned up in the office. They were weighing on me a bit these last few weeks because it was taking so much time to publish Saving the Planet & Stuff. With that out of the way this past weekend, I knew I'd knocked off one goal with its accompanying objectives and decided to see how I was doing on the others. This is another example of recapitulation, which I wrote about at the end of 2012.

Goal 1. Publish Saving the Planet Done, done, done. Donedidy done.

Goal 2. Publicize Saving the Planet throughout the year I've been planning for this goal for months and have been moving ahead with various objectives. In fact, I did some on-line announcements and sent out a press release this morning and will be doing similar work this afternoon.

Goal 3. Maintain Time Management Tuesday Project Yup. Here I am, working on that. I have been working on Objective 3, planning the NESCBWI time management workshop for a couple of weeks, using three or four units of time each week.

Goal 4. Submission Binge That's coming next month, and I do have some places in mind to submit to. The fact that I overhauled my files (that will be a later TMT post) will make this easier.

Goal 5. Write and submit an essay on blogging I did research a magazine market for this one. While I still think the essay idea is valid, I may try submitting other things first.

Goal 6. Write an outline for "mummy book" during May Days. Terrific. I'd forgotten that I was only talking an outline. I have been prepping for the May Days effort with some character and situation planning. I'll try to get more intently into that during the March Madness Submission Binge.  I have been working on Objective 1. Reading Wired for Story. I do sometimes find reading writing books helpful while getting started on a writing project. Not in any kind of logical way, but helpful nonetheless.

Goal 7. Continue with community building. I've completed the first three objectives for this goal, as well as Objectives 5 and 7.

Goal 8. Publish a free Hannah and Brandon e-short story to support the Hannah and Brandon eBooks published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. I'm changing this goal. If I do write a Hannah and Brandon short story, I'm going to try to sell it to a magazine. For one thing, I'd like to generate some income. For another, I don't think the Hannah and Brandon age group will be a big market for e-short stories, even if they're free. A traditional magazine might be a better way of reaching those readers.

Goal 9. Plan publication of My Life Among the Aliens and Club Earth eBooks for winter, 2014. I'd be willing to drop this goal altogether and replace it with the one I'm going to mention in the next paragraph because right now, I'm burned out on self-publishing. Working out the cover illustrations for two more books, hunting for ways to promote them while I'm still trying to promote Saving the Planet...I'm having trouble getting pumped for this. On top of all that, I've been getting a sense from my reading that middle grade isn't a big market for eBooks. My publishing partner is a masochist, though, and he's interested in getting started formatting these books. Have a blast, Computer Guy! I'm not feeling this one right now.

A New Goal (Actually a goal I forgot about in January): Last June I revised a children's manuscript, working it into an adult book. I want to work on that more this year and submit it to agents. I'm much more psyched about that, at this point, then I am about hammering out another self-publishing project.

Hmm. Maybe the first chapter of that book I'm revising would make a short story submission next month. That could be an objective toward the goal of getting that book published.

Right now I'm feeling better about how well I'm staying on task. I've also done a little shifting around of goals, which is a good idea. That will have an impact on my planning from here on.

The point is, folks, check out your goals. Are you using your time working toward them? Do you want to make changes in what you plan to do?

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Really? After four weeks, she has more to say about about the Yoga Journal Boost Your Willpower program? Yes, I do.

The program included several e-mails on the impact stress has on willpower, which I wasn't able to work into my four TMTuesday posts. But since it seems a significant factor when talking about willpower and self-discipline, which have a connection to time management, I wanted to mention it.

Stress, YJ claims, actually "drains willpower." It causes the ol' fight-or-flight response to kick in. We want to flee the workstation. Stress can also shove us into "a reward-seeking state by increasing the excitability of your dopamine neurons." (Science!) We want to feel better right away. The most obvious example of this is stress eating, but leaving the file we're working on to run to our "friends" on Facebook or to dive into any pleasurable reading experience would be others.

YJ's suggestions for relieving stress include yoga and meditation, of course, because it is Yoga Journal. Exercise, spiritual practices, and simply getting outside for a walk also make the list. My own thought is maintaining some kind of regular practice involving any of these activities could help contain stress in the first place.

When stress is upon us? The Ten-minute Timeout/unit system plans we discussed last week could help us delay the gratification we think we're going to get by stopping work. YJ also suggests training ourselves to slow our breathing. "When we slow the breath, studies show, we activate the prefrontal cortex and shift the body from stress to self-control mode." Slow breathing in front of the computer screen for a few minutes could calm the stress and keep us from moving away.

Boost Your Willpower conclusion: My takeaway from this program is using "I will" statements, using the unit system to keep me from giving in to the What the Hell Effect, and using the unit system to keep me from giving in to the desire to do something other than work right this minute. And  I'll be paying even more attention to my breathing during yoga practice.

Next week we will be on to some other aspect of time management.

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Week 1 of the Yoga Journal Boost Your Willpower program: choosing a focus/goal; Week 2: committing to the goal and choosing something to do that will remind you of the goal. Week 3: dealing with setbacks. Week 4 is about "transcending self-improvement," finding your place in the world, connecting with something bigger than yourself, etc. This is the first time with this program that I'm not finding the daily e-mails all that helpful with the week's theme. There's some good stuff in the e-mails, but except for one that advises that we use the self-reflection questions for Week 4 to help us take what we've gained in the program and help others, I'm not seeing a lot to assist with the connect with others thing. I must admit, though, I'm pretty sure I lost one of the e-mails before I read it, and there's one final one coming tomorrow.

Here's something we can use as individuals, though:

Mere desire/anticipation of the happiness we will get from something like, say, visiting our blog reader or Facebook right this minute, or, better yet, checking out Salon or Slate's (Salon AND Slate's) Monday morning recap of Downton Abbey creates a rush in the brain that can act like a stressor. ("Those recaps are fast reads. I just won't look at any of the comments.") We actually feel pressured by the anticipation of how great we're going to feel if we just give in right this minute.

What Yoga Journal calls the 10-minute Time-out can help us deal with that pressure. A 10-minute delay is supposed to be enough to undermine anticipation stress. (I've actually read this before in relation to eating.) If we can divert ourselves for 10 minutes, our minds may let us off the hook. If we can stick with writing that essay/chapter/letter for 10 minutes instead of giving in right away to whatever was threatening to distract us, we may become so involved with the job that we'll no longer be experiencing the stress and can just keep working.

If you know me at all, you know what I'm going to tell you now: What is 10 minutes? It's a unit of time! Once again, the unit system can come into play here. Say you've been working with the 45-minute units of time that the unit system traditionally deals with, but you cannot stick with work for the 30-minutes you have left. You must have your Facebook or Downton Abbey treat. Before giving in to that instant gratification, reset your timer for 10 minutes, leading your brain to think it will get what it wants very soon, and continue working. If the desire/anticipation has relaxed its grip on you when the timer goes off, it may be happy to let you continue working. If the desire to do something else is still there, try setting the timer for ten minutes again. And again. By then you will have worked the 30 minutes that was left in your original 45-minute unit of time.

Then go read the Downton Abbey recaps during your 15 minute break between work sessions. I believe this is what's called having your cake and eating it, too.

Next week I'll do a Boost Your Willpower wrap-up. Then it will be time to dwell on some other aspect of time management for a while.

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Okay, so Week 1 of the Yoga Journal Boost Your Willpower program was about choosing a focus/goal. I chose staying on task while working. Week 2 was about making a commitment to that focus/goal and choosing one thing to do that will remind you of said focus/goal. I chose "I will" statements. Week 3 is about self-compassion.

Now, self-compassion is going to sound a little squishy and New Ageish to many people, but what Week 3 is really about is dealing with setbacks. In a Week 3 Yoga Journal Chat with Kelly McGonigal, who designed the Boost Your Willpower program for YJ, McGonigal says that success with using willpower to meet a goal has less to do with how enthusiastic people are when setting out ("I'm going to write 7 hours a day!") then it does with how they respond to the first setback. ("Oops. I talked on the phone for half an hour this morning.")  And the second ("I spent forty-minutes analyzing last week's episode of Downtown Abby in an e-mail I sent my sister during work time.") And maybe the third or fourth.

Because I tend to think in metaphor a lot of the time, I often compare managing the time for my writing practice to managing eating. What happens when we've been trying to control our eating and we eat something we feel we shouldn't have?  We give in to what Yoga Journal called in one of its Boost Your Willpower e-mails "The What-the-Hell Effect." What the Hell? We might as well eat some more because we've ruined the eating plan, anyway. In for a dime, in for a dollar. And the same is true while trying to stay on task with work. If we are diverted from the task for a while, we can feel that the morning, the afternoon, even a big chunk of a day is shot. What the Hell? We might as well give in and continue to wander mentally.  "This cycle--of indulgence leading to regret leading to greater indulgence--is one of the most dangerous to willpower," the Boost Your Willpower people state.

Think of competitive ice skaters who fall during competition, get up, and continue with their programs. Writers who have wandered from the task have to come up with a way to pick themselves up off the metaphorical ice and continue with their writing practice. How? I, of course, have a couple of suggestions.

1. That was then, this is now. The Zenny business about not dwelling on the past--even the very recent past of this morning or an hour ago--could be helpful here. That moment of slipping away from the task at hand is over, and I'm living in another moment in which I have an opportunity to stay on task. So I will. (Oh, I just made another "I will" statement.)

2. The unit system. Yes, I know. I'm treating the unit system as a freaking cure-all, but that's because it has the potential to be one. If we are accustomed to thinking of a work day as a unit of time that's broken into more, smaller units of time, then we are used to starting over again, over and over, during the day. So, if we've blown off some time, and we're able to put that behind us, we can then see that we have X units of time left in our workday--just as we would have had if we hadn't wasted some of them just an hour or so ago. Something changed in our very, very recent past because we didn't work as we'd planned to. But nothing has changed in our immediate future. The time we had planned for working is still there.

I actually used the unit system to get me back on task yesterday afternoon. While posting a link to the  NESCBWI spring conference schedule in a blog post, I became distracted and spent what seemed like a considerable amount of time perusing said schedule, trying to determine which days I wanted to go and whether or not my computer guy should go for a day, too. My indulgence led to regret, because I'd had a good work morning and I believed I'd destroyed the whole day in the afternoon by doing something I hadn't planned to do, something I could have done in the evening after my workday was over. I was teetering on the brink of succumbing to greater indulgence. But I happened to look at the clock and realized I could do another 45-minute unit on the specific writing project I'd planned for that day. Because I am now used to thinking of 45 minutes as a significant work period, I went ahead and used it to work.

From this experience--and this week's Boost Your Willpower material--I'm led to wonder if learning how to get back on task is as important as staying there in the first place.

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On Friday, May 3rd, I'll be leading a time management workshop at the New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators spring conference in Springfield, Massachusetts.

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Everybody taking part in Week 2 of Yoga Journal's Boost Your Willpower? Yes? No?

Week 1, I'm sure you all recall, was about choosing a focus, as in choosing what aspect of your life you want to improve your willpower for, what you need the willpower to achieve. Think of it as a goal. I chose staying on task.

Week 2, was about making a commitment to that focus and choosing one small thing to do to do that will remind you of your focus/goal. In the daily e-mails, I found three things of particular interest.

1. Meditation. Again, we discussed using meditation for concentration a year ago. One of the Boost Your Willpower e-mails indicated that there is science to back up the use of meditation as a way to improve self-control skills such as "attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness." Meditation, it claims, is like exercise for the brain.

I am not successful at meditation and have so many "practice" type things I do each day that it's too stressful to try to add another one. However, one of those practices is yoga, and I have just recently started extending my home practice because I haven't been holding poses long enough to build up strength and endurance. Holding the poses longer requires me to be careful about counting breathing. The mindfulness I have to practice in order to maintain breathing may be as close to meditation as I'll be able to get.

2. Recognizing that we actually do use willpower regularly. Those of us who are interested in improving our willpower and self-discipline tend to believe we need to do that because we don't have much. However, we're making decisions each day that involve exerting our will. Doing a brief recapitulation at the end of the day (a unit of time!) can assure us that we are, indeed, exerting some willpower and lead us to build upon it.

3. "I will" instead of "I won't." As I've said before, a lot of willpower and discipline writing involves changing behavior we don't want to engage in (overeating, gambling, drinking, procrastinating, etc.) and not changing behavior we want to do more of or even just developing some vaguely defined thing called discipline. The Boost Your Willpower folks suggest that always thinking in terms of "I won't" keeps calling the behavior you don't want to do to mind, and dwelling on what you don't want to do can often lead to no good. They suggest looking for "I will" statements.

Writers who are trying to develop self-discipline are trying to do something, they're not trying to not do something.  So "I will" statements are particularly useful for us because they tell us what we're trying to do. For example:

I will plan next week's work.

I will plan my day around the unit system.

I will use transitional time.

So there you have three ideas for improving willpower. Two more weeks to go on this program. I'm hoping that just persevering and sticking with it for a month will do something for my self-discipline.

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Managing time when your situation is constantly changing is all about planning. Traditional New Year's resolutions set the resolvers up for failure because there is no plan. There is nothing to guide people making resolutions as to what they actually need to do. Often times the so-called resolution, itself, is incredibly vague.

Consider "I'm going to write more!" as a resolution. Well, write more than what? How much is more? Just what is a person supposed to do with a resolution like that?

Don't waste your time making New Year's resolutions. Instead, use your time more efficiently by creating goals and objectives for this next unit of time that we call a year.

First off, let's be clear on what goals and objectives are. Many people (in the past, my computer guy was among them) believe the terms are interchangeable. They are not. A goal is what you want to achieve. An objective is a step you must take, a task you must complete, to achieve the goal. For any one goal, there can be  multiple objectives. With a goal and objectives you have a plan. Time management requires a plan.

Now, if you did some recapitulation regarding last year's work you can use what you learned to more carefully craft your objectives  for next year.

My goals and objectives for this year:

Goal 1. Publish the Saving the Planet e-book at the end of January.

Objectives:

1. Final copy editing of text
2. Assign ISBNs
3. Amazon/B&N product description
4. Work with Computer Guy regarding the uploading of final copy to Amazon and B&N
5. Deal with any problems that turn up when uploading of final copy 
6. Make sure website update is completed and posted
7. Upload book trailer to YouTube
8. Check press releases
9. Contact first bloggers I'll be working with  and work with them regarding material they need from me
10. Do a number of Original Content and Facebook posts building up to publication

Goal 2. Publicize Saving the Planet throughout the year
Objectives:
I have a multitude of objectives for this and will be doing a blog post on the subject later.

Goal 3. Maintain Time Management Tuesday Project (Last year's project went so well that it led to a workshop that I'll be leading at a writers' conference this spring.) 
Objectives: 

1. Continue Tuesday posts at least twice a month during this second year
2. Read The Power of Habit
3. Plan NESCBWI time management workshop for May
4. Look for opportunities to write on the subject

Goal 4. Submission Binge (Last year's submission binge resulted in a short story acceptance and 2 excellent rejections, so I want to do another)  

Objectives:

1. Plan a month or two period to do revisions and submit, probably September and October
2. Look for markets in the months leading up to that point
3. By July have one or two old stories selected and be working on them to make use of "archived" material.

Goal 5. Write and submit an essay on blogging (Idea came about as a result of the NESCBWI Blog Tour I did earlier this year) 

Objectives:

1. Seek out possible markets to determine whether or not this is a worthwhile project
2. Write essay

Goal 6. Work on an outline for "mummy book" during May Days (I wasn't prepared for May Days last year. I hope to be this year.)

Objectives:

1. Finish reading Wired for Story because I think we organic writers often don't know what our story is prior to writing, which makes plotting difficult.
2. At least skim The Plot Whisperer for same reason
3. Go over old research for this project and continue with more.

Goal  7. Continue with community building   
Objectives:

1. Next week--The Next Big Thing post here at OC
2. Next Big Thing round-up post later in the month
3. Support Cybils with a round up post of my reading of nominees; also post to Goodreads
4. Continue with Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar and try to make a real calendar template accessible in the sidebar so the calendar can always be found and isn't buried in each month's posts.
5. Continue looking for ways to publicize Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar
6. Look for short,  local writers' workshops/retreats/events to attend
7. Continue with the weekend roundup of blog and Internet  reading to help build community with other bloggers
8. Consider the possibility of creating some kind of networking group for published writers, either on-line or some kind of local gathering. (This is a very low level objective because I suspect I won't find much support for it)

Goal 8. Publish a free Hannah and Brandon e-short story to support the Hannah and Brandon e-books published by G. P. Putnam's Sons.   
Objectives:

1. Determine just how much publishing a free anything will cost me
2. Reread the Hannah and Brandon books
3. Check journal and files for story ideas
4. Read other short stories for younger children
5. Write the short story
6. Decide how we will handle the cover
7. Work with Computer Guy on the technical publishing work

Goal 9. Plan publication of My Life Among the Aliens and Club Earth e-books for winter, 2014 (I want to publish them together hoping to cut down on the time spent planning the marketing, which was very time consuming this year for Saving the Planet & Stuff)
Objectives:

1. Wait for the return of rights for Club Earth (I already have the rights to My Life Among the Aliens, and the request for Club Earth has already been submitted.)
2. Wait to see how Saving the Planet & Stuff sells before deciding whether to go with professional covers or look for a cheaper type
3. Look into companies that prepare texts for e-book publication
4. Discuss with Computer Guy whether I should go with a company for these books or have him prepare them as he prepared Saving the Planet
5. Wait to see how Saving the Planet sells before deciding how to market these books--whether to buy advertising right away or start with promotion through blogs and websites
6. Plan at least one book trailer 

It appears that I'm planning to do a great many things this year. There are well over 42 objectives, counting the Saving the Planet marketing I didn't bore you with. In reality, though, I'm only talking 9 goals, with each goal essentially being a specific project, over the course of the entire year. If an unexpected opportunity should drop in my lap, I can simply cut out a goal or two. Goals Four and Five could easily be put aside for another year. I can also limit some of my objectives, if I have to. For Goal Three, I really don't need that third objective, for instance.

Oh, by the way, goals should be specific. You need to know exactly what it is you're working to achieve. Objectives should be measurable, at least in the sense that you can tell when you've completed them. Even with Goal 9 where I have to wait around for a while to see how Saving the Planet sells before deciding how to proceed with the next e-books, there will come a point where I know, yes, I can make back the investment for a professional cover or, no, I can't.

Goals and objectives are incredibly valuable because they tell you what you're going to do. In addition, I like them because even if you don't achieve a goal, the work you've done on the objectives for that goal enhance you professionally and can help you in some way you haven't foreseen.

Try getting that out of a New Year's resolution.

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Jo Knowles has done an excellent recapitulation post, Goals, Dreams, And Themes, at her blog, Jo Knowles. She didn't call it a recapitulation post, but we know one when we see one, right?  Twenty-seven goals was rather ambitious, at least by my standards, and I don't dream, myself. I think in terms of goals and objectives, as you'll see in tomorrow's post. But this was great reading for a writer, and Jo's Goal 23 is going to figure in my thinking for my goals and objectives post for Time Management Tuesday. (That's tomorrow, folks.)

Know of other author recapitulation posts? Let me know in the comments.

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Earlier this year, I wrote about the significance of the beginnings and endings of units of time. I was interested then in how easy it is to waste time when a unit is coming to an end. A year is one massive unit of time, and today, Christmas Day (I did notice), is  very close to the end of this one. When you're talking about a year, it's very difficult to maintain a work schedule, anyway, because the end of that unit of time is heavy with holidays in Judeo-Christian cultures. Then you've got the ending issue coming on top of that.  "Doing absolutely anything work-related during those lost hours at the end of a unit of time would be better than just blowing them off," I suggested back in the summer, long before I was giving any thought to merry making.

One work-related "anything" we can be doing at the end of any unit of time is assessing what we did. Kind of late in the day to be doing that, you say? But the end of a unit of time means another one should be starting soon. Assessing how did with your old work time should help determine what you're going to do with the next one.

The December issue of Yoga Journal included an article called Out With the Old by Sally Kempton. This being Yoga Journal, the article is a little long on things like "vibrant energy." The ritual of "recapitulation" that the article describes as "a process of recalling a charged event, bringing it to consciousness, feeling remorse if appropriate, and then letting it go" probably requires more intensity than most of us need when thinking back over how well we did with carrying out our work plans. I also don't think we necessarily need to be creating a list of negative thoughts so we can tear it up. However, Kempton  talks about recalling "things we'd accomplished," "changes," and "conflict," all of which could be very useful to consider when working out the plan for the next unit of time.

What worked? What didn't work? How can we use what we did in the last unit of time in an upcoming unit? Next week begins a new year. Traditionally, people get very excited about the beginning of new years, making resolutions relating to what they're going to do over the next twelve months. They might do much better to make an actual plan. And an actual plan will come together better if you assess what you've done so you're building on the good and not repeating the bad.

Before next Tuesday, I'll try to do some sort of recapitulation on this past year, with a lot of focus on my time management study.

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For the last few months, I've been interested in community building, by which I mean a creative, professional community related to writing. You will recall, I am sure, that what got me started on this was the Crafting a Public Identity Workshop I attended in September. Artist Sharon Butler discussed her commitment to becoming part of an arts community that was apart from her own art career. The experience of being part of the community was valuable in and of itself, but it also ended up helping her professionally.

Butler talked about how the Internet and social media helped with her community building. She was talking primarily about her blog, Two Coats of Paint. This blog can be found plenty of places on-line, but the "reviews, commentary, news, and background information about painting and related subjects" that Butler says Two Coats of Paint is about, seem to all be generated at the blog. The blog is the center of her creative community building.

So I've been working on building a writers' community here at Original Content. I got started with The Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, which is all about building professional community here in this state. The various weekend reading roundups (which I should provide with a consistent name) are about rebuilding the on-line community I was part of years ago. My portion of the Next Big Thing Author Meme, which I'm still pulling together, is about writers helping writers and building professional community in that way.

Here's the thing with community building--it is hugely time consuming. It takes a lot of time to do it, and it takes a long while for the work to pay off, either in terms of becoming part of a community or in terms of the community providing any kind of help for a career.

In my experience, community needs to be more than just joining Facebook or a few other "people pools." I don't see a lot of "professional" interaction at Facebook. Writers network their blog posts or make announcements regarding their work, but lots of that just drops with no response. There's not a lot of the "commentary, news, and background information" that Butler describes in the "About" section of her blog. Goodreads, my other social media spot, is primarily lists of books read by members. Not much discussion of those. Writers on Goodreads will often network the same blog posts they've put up everywhere else. Again, not that much reaction. So while joining places like that is easy and posting doesn't take much time (especially if you're not putting up much besides your blog posts), I don't see how anyone can get a real feeling of community there.

There also may not be a lot of interest in real community building among some types of professionals, writers in particular. Artists like Butler have a very public face. Their work has to be shown somehow in order for people to see it. Artists have to get the work out there somehow, have to click with the galleries and groups that show art. They have to meet with people. That is less of an issue with writers. Yes, we have to market, and we have to spend more and more time doing that. But because in publishing there's what I call the "opening weekend" model for new books, writers sort of binge market when a book comes out and then disappear.

A lot of what we do is hit and run. Marketing is hit and run. Submitting is hit and run. Getting a first draft done is hit and run. Community needs to be maintained regularly. We don't work at anything regularly.

I'm a bit obsessive and recognize that there are no short cuts for most things in life, so I'll continue working on community for... mmm...maybe another half year? But any kind of community I manage to create is going to have to be one that can be managed in a time efficient way.

I've already started working on next month's Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar.

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