A professor of mine used to say that if we wanted to get ahead in the world, all we had to do was work a full eight-hour day and we’d be light-years ahead of everyone in terms of productivity. The cynicism buried in his comment was his belief that most people in publishing squander their work days on meetings that accomplish nothing, phone calls that go nowhere, and personal tasks that rob your employer blind.

And when I worked in an office I found that it was indeed difficult to do the very job my employer hired me for in the first place: to write and edit. In my freelance life, I’m much better but I could still stand to focus on The Most Important Thing: writing.

At the speed I write, I could theoretically churn out 72,000 words a week, or 3.7 million words a year.

But I don’t. Because there are always other things to do. I will always need to interrupt my writing life for phone conferences with editors, runs to the grocery store, bills that must be paid, irritating phone errands that must be taken care of now, and other bullshit that has nothing to do with writing.

But eight hours a day are still a powerful number of hours. I use this six-to-nine block grid to organize my day. Each block stands for one hour. At the end of the day I download my brain and jot down all the things I’d like to get done the following day. Then I indicate the priorities by simply numbering them.

Above shows what I thought I’d get done today. I wrote my morning 250 words on a future personal project (in this case, a series of short stories I’d like to publish soon.) That task is marked as No. 1, and I’ve been doing it every morning since January 9. At this point I’ve produced about 22,000 words. (I don’t work on weekends.)

Up next today, I needed to revise a nonfiction article for an editor, indicated as No. 2 “TOH,” which refers to This Old House magazines, a publication I often write for. I did this shortly after getting the morning 250 out of the way.

But then the day got away from me. A couple of calls, some internet frittering, lunch...and here I am about one hour from my supposed quitting time with the vast majority of my projects untouched. As my first-ever boss said to me when I was in my twenties, “Hey, you’re gonna have days like that.”

That’s not good enough for me right now. I was going to tinker with the book I just wrote (No. #3, the ghostwriting project), then march through a series of self-publishing projects, devoting no more than an hour to each of them. Then close out the day with the some admin tasks. But now I’m writing a blog post...

The point is, if I want to get stuff done, I must have a plan. If I wake in the AM and devote myself to one thing entirely, I’ll make huge progress on one project and feel bad about not advancing on the all the others. But I have to give myself credit for trying. I got two writing tasks done so far today, and I have just enough time to do another before I shut down.

Unless I work through the night. That’s a story for another time.