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So you'll recall that I'm working on a manuscript as part of my May Days effort and experimenting with upping my daily word count. That's doing more with the time you have, folks. When I was finally able to get started on my project, I was getting numbers like 534 and 209 a day. Yeah. I actually went down. I don't know what happened the third day. I forgot to record my numbers.

But yesterday I went up to 1,400 words and today to 1,800. That's not the 10,000 words Rachel Aaron talks about in the book I read to prep for this month. I haven't even gotten to the 2,000 words that was her starting point when she started pumping up her own word count. But what a jump for me.

This week's improvement was due, I think, to Aaron's contention that knowing what you're going to write is necessary for a good word count. I was able to do a lot of planning for the last two day's work. I've got plans for the next chapter, too. After that I don't know.  

I've had times when I've been able to get the word count up before. When it has happened, I think it was due to my being able to immerse myself in a project and stay there. Staying in a project, in my experience, is the best way to come up with those plans that allow you to know what you're going to write. The more you work on something, the more you're able to work.

I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that I have a speaking engagement next month that I really ought to start preparing for. It takes me forever to do that sort of thing. Working on that will keep me from the immersion I seem to need to develop some work speed. The good news is that I picked up something from Aaron's book that I think is helping me and might offset a little appearance preparation time.

Next week: scenes and chapters.

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My May Days Project got off to a really bad start.

The Plan

You will recall that I was planning to generate work on a project that I'd set aside last year and, at the same time, work on increasing my word count as a way to do more with less time. So I've been using 2,000 to 10,000: How to Write Faster, etc. by Rachel Aaron to help me do this. Aaron writes that a key element in writing faster is knowing what you're going to write before you get started. So in addition to bringing myself up to speed with this project by revising the few chapters I'd already written, I was going through my materials on characters, historical elements, timing, etc., to help me plan some scenes, which as far as this organic writer is concerned, would be knowing what I was going to write.

Last Tuesday, two days before the beginning of May, I took a look at the scene file I'd started last year. Yikes! It was a mess. I had made a list of scenes, but the beginning scenes didn't entirely match what I'd actually written (not a problem, it's the result that matters) and later scene plans weren't all that helpful, in part because of how the story now started. Well, I said, you will spend tomorrow, Wednesday, cleaning this stuff up and getting some scene plans in order.

What Could Go Wrong?

However, Tuesday evening I received a request for chapters and a synopsis for another manuscript that I had submitted to someone. Yikes again! This was good news, right? Of course, it was.  Someone was interested in one of my projects. But I didn't have a synopsis ready to go. As I told you this past weekend, I spent five days writing it. That included the Wednesday I was going to spend on scene planning and the Friday I was going to spend writing. (Thursday is family/runaround day at Chez Gauthier, and I've given up pretending I work on weekends.)

We have talked about these time management issues here before. That synopsis was what is known as reactive work. I needed to drop the creative work I was doing to react to an incoming request. It was also an example of situational time management. I had to adapt very rapidly to a new situation.

What The Hell, Right? No.

The synopsis went out Sunday, so my situation has changed again. What should I do now? I wasn't able to finish my planning and I wasn't able to get started with writing. What the Hell. I might as well do something else.

That is what's known in self-discipline circles as the What-the-Hell Effect. It's a major reason for self-discipline failures. Instead of staying on task with a diet, people say what the hell at ten in the morning because they ate two doughnuts at nine and figure they might as well give up and start again tomorrow. In reality, they've got many hours left in the day during which they can stay with their program. The same is true with managing time, whether you're talking about a day or a week or a month. I have a lot of time left in this month that I can use for my planned project, even though I've lost some of it early on.

Fighting The What-the-Hell Effect Leads To Results You Can See

Last week was then, this is now, and now is an entirely different situation to work within. Additionally, I don't need to feel bad about myself for not working on my May Days project last week. (Feeling bad is the big reason for giving into the What-the-Hell Effect.) I was working and working on something significant, just not the significant something I planned to work on. Yesterday I continued with the last of the revising of the early chapters of my May Days manuscript, and I have the next few scenes planned. Since I'm an organic writer, just knowing what I'm going to be doing a few scenes ahead may be the best I can expect. We'll have to see how the rest of the month goes.

Oddly enough, I had What-the-Hell issues with last year's May Days project, too. And, yet, the work I ended up doing that month led to more work later in the year, and I'm back on the same manuscript now.  That, lads and lasses, is an example of why fighting the What-the-Hell Effect is so important.

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Last week I wrote about my plan to try to up my word count during my May Days project. My idea is that one way to manage time is to do more with the time you have, rather than to try to create more time. This past week I read 2,000 to 10,000 How to Write Faster, Write Better, and Write More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron to help me get prepped for writing faster.

First off, I'd just like to say that this is a self-published eBook. In my experience, self-publishing, particularly of eBooks, has made it possible for writers and bloggers to toss together any kind of thoughts relating to a subject and publish them as if they're some kind of authority, when, once you've read a chapter or two, you realize they most definitely are not. That is not the case with 2,000 to 10,000! This is a very good book, and it only costs ninety-nine cents! Seriously, when I can find the time, I'm going to throw away some of the stodgy, academic writing books I've picked up here and there because the author was a well-known professor or a family member had to buy them for a college course and they made their way to me. I can see them on the shelf above my computer.

My only reservation about this book is that it might be more useful to writers with some experience, people who have struggled with writing, recognize problems, and can see how Aaron's solutions can help them. A total newbie might not be as taken with 2,000 to 10,000 as I am.

Aaron says there are three elements to increasing word count.  The one I'm going to dwell on today is knowing what you're going to write before you get started. Over the course of my career, I cannot tell you how many times I've sat down to start a book with only the vaguest idea of what I was going to say. With my last two books (which, I must admit, I haven't sold) I stumbled upon some of Aaron's suggestions on my own because I was hunting for ways to plot ahead of time and cut down on the number of drafts I have to write.

Some of her suggestions, and what I've done with them in the past:

• Write down what you already know about the idea you've chosen to write about.
• A problem I've had in the past is that I didn't know enough about my idea. It was a situation, not a story idea in which something happens to somebody. Perhaps if I'd tried this step, I would have realized I didn't have a story to tell. Or the act of writing what I did know down would have helped generate a story.

• Do some work on characters, plot, and setting.
• For characters this can involve any kind of character chart. These things are all over the Internet. I have used them, and I think you can go overboard and overwhelm yourself with too much info. Nonetheless, I have found them helpful because when you've worked out info about your characters, you get ideas for things they could end up doing and that's plot, something I've already admitted I have a lot of trouble with. Character has been a sort of back door into plot for me.
• For plot this can involve listing the scenes you're going to write. Aaron can do this for the entire book. I am happy if I can come up with a list of what's known as candy bar scenes and can get them in order. Aaron also talks about knowing your ending before you start. For the first time, I do have an ending in mind for the book I'm going to be working on next month.
• For setting this could involve creating maps. I have sketched out the floor plans of buildings. I find knowing about setting early on useful because setting has helped me with plot. Certain things can happen in some places that can't happen in others.

Over the next month, I'll discuss more about what Aaron has to say in her book and how I'm using that information.

Some more points I want to make:

1. Aaron talks about spending a couple of days on the kind of planning she writes about. I've spent weeks or months doing this kind of thing.
2. I believe it's a rare day when I've written 2,000 words, so I'm not starting at the same baseline she's talking about. We'll figure out my baseline next week.

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In case you didn't notice, that's a Time Management Tuesday logo on the left at the top of the page. We're into logos here right now.

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My May Days Facebook group is getting ready for what I call another month-long set-aside project. The idea behind the May Days group, itself, is to encourage one another to complete two pages of writing a day. That may sound like a modest goal, but it gives you some idea of how much writers do that's not writing. Some of us need support to help us find the time to get two pages written. I use the month as a unit of time to which I've assigned a particular task. Maybe I'll wring two pages a day out of it, maybe I'll do something else. This year I really am hoping for some new material and try out a new time management process.

I've been spending a lot of time working these last couple of years on projects that didn't involve generating a lot of writing. Instead I was revising completed projects to resubmit, dealing with the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook publication, planning a workshop for a conference, and other such things that take up time. They may even require some new writing, but not a lot of it. For this May Days I'm going to do two things:

• New writing for the mummy project I started outlining during last year's May Days.
• Working on increasing my word count using Rachel Aaron's book, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, as a guide.

My theory is that there are two ways to manage time.

1. Find more time
2. Work more efficiently with the time you have

I've been writing about finding more time for a year and a half or so. Increasing word count could be a way to work more efficiently.

Aaron's fiction is traditionally published with Orbit. However, her topics with Writing Faster, speed and high word counts, are often associated these days with self-publishing authors who support themselves with sales spread over a number of titles available rather than massive sales of just a few. Thus, they need to keep cranking out books. Does that mean that writing faster and producing more won't be of benefit to other types of writers. I'm thinking, no. Writing faster and producing more simply means doing more with the time I have available to me. That's a lot like managing time.

Some points I need to make about my May Days project for this year:

• I did start the planning last May, and I started writing (and rewriting the first few chapters over and over again) later in the year. So I'm not starting from scratch.
• Aaron describes herself as a hardcore plotter. I'm an obsessive organic writer. But I'm already getting ideas for ways I can modify some of the suggestions in Writing Faster to fit my writing style. Otherwise, I will be heading for some kind of breakdown next month, which I would, of course, document here. You don't want any part of that.

Next week I'll bring you up on what I'm doing to prepare for working more efficiently with the month of May.
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This is your last day to comment so you'll be in the running to win a copy of the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook. The drawing will be tomorrow. Happy Earth Day.

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Work is piling up, as it often does.

• It will be time soon to pull May's Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar together.
• I have some more Saving the Planet/Earth Day promotion to do this month, and it's coming up soon. Tomorrow for some of it, in fact.
• I've been working on an essay I'd like to finish, and then I should be looking for markets to submit it to. (I have a couple in mind, so I'm not writing this thing blind.)
• Speaking of submitting, I've been working on submissions for weeks. What about that?
• Last weekend I realized that another May Days opportunity is coming up and that I have a two-fer project I'd like to work on then, one that involves producing new work and time management. I need to do some prep for that, if I want to make any real progress. 
• World Book Night is next week, and I have to pick up the books I'm giving out. I think there may have been a glitch in the order, and I've been hunting for e-mails related to it today.
• In June, I'll be speaking on Ethan Allen at the Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington, Vermont, and I want to start bringing myself up to speed on that starting in May. We're taking a long weekend up north for that, so I'll have to find us a place to stay soon.
• I have Computer Guy working on some logos for Original Content, and I need to do something about starting to use them.

Then a few days ago I remembered that Easter is next Sunday, a holiday I try to observe with a family event. In addition to all the work that entails, I've been having trouble getting a count on the number of people who will be here. Oh, I'm also supposed to be planning a multi-week trip for September.

That's when I started to panic about time. It was the pile on of personal work onto work work that did it. During this mini-crisis I started thinking about Charles Finch's point about amateur writers spreading themselves too thin. Pick some things to work on, Gail, and stick with them.

And, better yet, give them some units of time when they have you all to themselves.

• I'll start using evening units for the CCLC next week. There's a whole week and a half after Easter. Huzzah!
• Tomorrow a unit will be devoted to getting the Saving the Planet & Stuff giveaway started for Earth Day. Before the weekend, another unit will be used to go over again what I have to do to lower the  STP&S price for next week and deciding when this weekend I should do it.
• The essay I've been working on for over a month I've been writing in sprints. It's quite far along, and by giving it some forty-five minute units over the next week, I should be able to finish it by the end of the month easily. And maybe spend some time determining the best submission plan. 
• That submission project is pretty much done, too. I just have to wait, which I can easily do while working on something else.
• I used a couple of units of time yesterday prepping for May Days. I just have to do something on it as many days as I can. Some reading is involved, and I might be able to work on that on weekends.
• I'm stopping at the bookstore to try to pick up my World Book Night books on my way home from tai chi tonight. (No special trip out.) I may find that there are no books, in which case, this is done!!!
• The Ethan Allen talk can wait until into next month. Once I have some of these other things done, assigning it units will be easier. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
• Logos--That's not critical. Yeah. Let's save that for next week at the earliest.
• And Easter, well, you don't want to hear about that. But that's started.

The old unit system helps with panic because it at least makes you feel that you've broken an overwhelming job into doing bits. In addition, planning units is a lot like creating objectives to meet a goal.

In this case, the goal is getting through the next week.

And now, if you will excuse me, I just took a break and am about to start another work unit. This one will involve that May Days project I want to get ready for.

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Did you read Procrastination Is In Your Genes at CNN Health and everywhere else on the Internet today? Did you even see it? Not to worry. I did.

A recent study (using those favorite study subjects, twins) "concluded that procrastination can indeed be genetic, and that it seems to have some genetic overlap with impulsivity." We've covered here at OC the impact of lack of impulse control on self-discipline. Yeah, it leads us to choose to chase after shiny stories about celebrities who haven't aged well instead of knocking off a thousand words a day. And that sounds a lot like procrastination.

The CNN article makes two interesting points. Impulsiveness gave the people of the past who possessed it an evolutionary advantage, presumably because those who could impulsively take off when they saw a wild animal coming for them had the best chance of getting away. Procrastination, the article says, "may be more of a modern phenomenon, since we now focus on long-term goals..."

We can focus on long-term goals because basic survival isn't as big an issue as it was centuries ago. Long-term goals are a luxury of a modern day life that doesn't require racing from wild beasts or rushing to get our share of food from a limited pool of the stuff. But most of us are descended from people who were impulsive, which is why they survived to reproduce. We don't need to run from wild beasts on a daily basis, so we use our impulsiveness to grab at Internet stories, home improvement shows, baking projects, shopping, and whatever else our hearts desire.

Writers, by the way, are modern people who particularly need to focus on long-term goals. But we're as likely as anyone else to have inherited impulsiveness from our ancestors. Check out your relatives to see if anyone else in your family has an impulsiveness/procrastination thing going on. If it looks as if it's in your genes, turn to  The Procrastinator's Digest for help.

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Earth Day is coming up on April 22, and I'll be observing it off and on all month. Yeah. Earth Day Month. Today I'll begin by stretching the meaning of environment and pondering whether our immediate environment, and lack of order within it, can have an impact on how we use time.

First off, I'd argue that without a doubt lack of order in our immediate environment will be a time buster just because it makes it difficult for us to keep track of things. Time gets sucked up hunting for things in the office or even going out to buy more of what we can't find. That's a practical matter.

But last month in a Chicago Tribune article, Self-control, Smells, and Spending, Gregory Karp wrote about some recent studies that concluded that our immediate environment has a less obvious impact, as well. The studies, he says, indicate that a "disorganized environment can leave you feeling out of control, which drains your reserves for future self-control, leading to poor decisions including impulse spending." What does impulse spending have to do with time management? It's not the spending we should be concerned with, it's the draining self-control or discipline. If a disorganized environment makes people feel out of control enough to impulse shop, won't it make us feel out of control enough to shake up our work schedules? In fact, according to ScienceDaily, the researchers on one of the studies Karp refers to, Environmental Disorder Leads to Self-Regulatory Failure, were "looking for changes in behavior like impulse spending as well as poor mental performance or reduced stamina on tasks that require advanced thinking skills."

"Reduced stamina on tasks that require advanced thinking skills"--that's what we're concerned with.

Environmental Disorder (Boyoun (Grace) Chae of the University of British Columbia and Rui (Juliet) Zhu of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in China) is quoted all over the Internet. A blog at The Harvard Business Review picked up this point in the study: "...people who sat by a messy desk that was scattered with papers felt more frustrated and weary and took nearly 10% longer to answer questions in a color-and-word-matching task, in comparison with those who were seated by a neatly arranged desk."

The irony here for those of us interested in managing time is that maintaining order takes time. I have set up a new work station for my new(ish) laptop without ever really organizing the spot where I put it. Doing that would eat into my work time. But things are closing in on me, as you can probably see from the pictures accompanying this article. At some point, the disorder will reach some kind of tipping point, and I'll have to do something about it in order to continue working. Last year I had a system set up by which I spent 15 minutes in the morning doing some filing and pick-up so this kind of thing wouldn't happen. That fell apart when I had a health issue earlier this year and wasn't working regularly. I need to get some kind of clean-up routine back into my life to address this kind of problem in an efficient, timely way. (You can bet that will become another Time Management Tuesday post.)

Another issue relating to disorder in our immediate environment is that many writers work in their homes. How "immediate" does "immediate work environment" mean in that case? Not many of us have someone coming in to do laundry or clean bathrooms or...Well, anyone who works at home in any way knows where I'm going with this. "...disorganized environment can leave you feeling out of control, which drains your reserves for future self-control." Everyone's tolerance for disorder is different, but I will admit that sometimes having to walk through my kitchen on my way to the office drains my reserves.

I'd also like to point out that over the last few decades the value of homemaking has taken a few hits. Letting housework go and not being a perfectionist about it are the center pieces of many articles on how to manage time and stress. How often is the traditional suburban housewife some kind of heavy/bad guy on TV shows or at least a laughable cliche? (Not Alison on Orphan Black, by the way. I love her.) And, yet, without the order they once maintained many of us find ourselves in a disorganized environment that often drains our reserves of self-control.

Well, I've used up a couple of units of time writing this blog post, and now I need to use my break to fold the towels I washed yesterday. They're up in my living room. Talk about disorder.

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The Best Time to Write and Get Ideas, According to Science by Kevan Lee at Buffer suggests that when considering managing time we might want to keep in mind when we do things. Some times are better than others for particular activities.

Creative vs. Analytical Work

 

We've discussed here that willpower can be depleted. Our biggest store of self-discipline is early in the day. We try to duplicate that morning boost of willpower experience by breaking our day into units, so that we keep starting over again. The Unit System! Lee suggests that that early period of the day is best for creative work because that's when the prefrontal cortex of the brain is most active. A "study looked at morning and evening MRI scans and observed that mornings showed more connections in the brain—a key element to the creative process." He says this study also indicated that "analytical parts of the brain (the editing and proofreading parts) become more active as the day goes on."

Conclusion? Writers who have a number of projects underway may want to work on the ones that involve generating new material earlier in the day and the ones that require revision-like activities later.

Don't Care For Mornings? Try A Routine During Another Part Of The Day.

 

What about those of us who don't see ourselves as morning people? Set your time and stick with it. "Routine," Lee says, "reinforces neural circuitry, and the more you work at the same routine, the stronger those connections become." So you can compensate for not using what scientists consider the best creative time by maintaining a routine.

As For Me

 

I like to do a sprint in the morning before I actually get started working. Stopping after a short, intense burst of work gives my mind something to dwell on while I'm doing the less challenging activities involved with getting ready for the day. After reading The Best Time to Write and Get Ideas, According to Science, I'm going to be sure that that sprint involves new writing and not editing, research, or formatting manuscripts. I can do that much later in the day.

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Last week I wrote about trying to find ways to manage time and work while recovering from health problems. That's definitely an example of situational time management. With any luck, for most of us health problems are a temporary situation that we have to work through like so many other changing situations in our work lives.

This past week at Writer Unboxed, Lydia Sharp described another situation to work through, one that occurs with more frequency, writing with seasonal affective disorder. There are times of the year--situations--when she is able to work better than at others. For her, the year is broken into quarters. She has a quarter when she is most likely to be able to generate new work and a quarter when it's best to revise.

If you read Sharp's post and the comments that follow it, you'll see that she and some others manage their writing time by recognizing that their situation will change over the course of the year and planning what they'll do during the different seasonal situations. One writer even determines whether she'll work on fiction or nonfiction by time of year.

Notice, also, the impact of the "write-every-day" and "Butt in Chair" philosophies on people who are trying to manage writing time while dealing with this type of situation. Not only are they not helpful, they often lead writers who just can't work that way to feel guilty.

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Last week was my sixth week post-op on that surgery I've been whining about here for more than a month. Last week I finally began to feel energy returning to normal. The soreness that had been subsiding very slowly suddenly seemed to be far less noticeable. It began to appear that I was going to achieve some kind of normal, sooner rather than later.

All these issues had been keeping me from working at peak efficiency. Or any kind of efficiency. I was working. You can see above the elaborate revision project I just finished yesterday. But I started that damn thing last November after getting back from Whispering Pines. No, it shouldn't have taken this long. My inability to put in much daily time since the end of January, even though I work sitting down, was hugely frustrating. Part of it was physical issues, but a lot of it was mental. I just could not find a way to get my mind into work mode while feeling the way I was. I was late getting started in the morning and was usually lying down by mid-afternoon.
 
Is there a way to manage time under these kinds of circumstances? I'm not suggesting surgical patients be able to put in regular eight-hour shifts. But how about finding ways to do enough to satisfy us?

I hunted on-line for material on working while recovering from surgery or even illness. I found a lot on "working out" after surgery (which, truthfully, is of interest to me, too, but doesn't relate to today's subject). I also found information for employers and information on job discrimination. But anything on how to keep your head in the game? No.

Now this is one of those privilege problems. If I worked a traditional job and couldn't take six weeks off, you can be sure I would have been back in the office, at least part-time, a couple of weeks earlier than I was. Or if this house was crawling with kids, I would have found a way to stay on my feet more than I did.

As it was, I just started doing my weekly planning (see left) this past Sunday. I couldn't even get myself to do that.

Oh, wait! Planning may have been my downfall. Or, rather, not planning. Perhaps having a variety of small jobs planned for a recovery period--catching up on reading professional journals, some children's books (I read masses of adult mystery serials), small promotional tasks--would not only mean getting something real done, but feeling that something real was getting done. Which could have an impact on the ability to do more. As it was, I did do small tasks, but not in any kind of organized, planned way. So I never had a sense that I was making progress, becoming more powerful and competent, and ready to move on.

Hmm. Maybe I'm on to a way to manage time for the ill and injured. Can I elaborate on this and then put it in a bottle and sell it?

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I was wandering around last week's IndieReCon (I still haven't finished browsing the offerings there), when I came upon what was called on the schedule How to Write Fast: 2k to 10k, 2 Years Later by Rachel Aaron. (It's called something different when you follow the link.) Write fast! I thought. If I could do that, wouldn't it have a big, big impact on how I spend my time?

I also recalled hearing about other writers who do use word count to help them manage time. They set themselves a word limit that they must do each day and don't stop working until they've met it. Word count for time management isn't something we've discussed here, so I checked out this IndieReCon offering.

I am not going to address quality and the issue of whether more is less or less is more. Is it better to write a few brilliant passages or crank out some serious volume of whatever quality that you can at least edit in the future? I'm going to try to stick to word count with no value judgement.

Author Rachel Aaron got started writing about word count back in 2011 with a post at her blog called How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day. In it she says there are three elements to increasing word count. The first two I found particularly interesting.

• Know what you're going to write before you get started. This means doing some planning at the beginning of each writing session. Serious plotters/outliners may say they've already done this. Organic writers, such as myself, might want to create a daily pre-writing planning routine. I'm still revising right now, so it will be a while before I can try it.
• Analyze how you're using your writing time. Over a period of a couple of months, keep track of your word count and determine what time of the day it is highest. Then try to make sure that you're able to work then.
• Try to find something to excite you about every scene you have to write. Word count goes up when you're writing the fun scenes. (Sometimes known as candy bar scenes.)

Aaron says in her IndieReCon piece that after two years she isn't writing at the 10,000 word rate she'd first hit when she came up with her system. That would produce 5 to 6 books a year. She's writing at a rate that produces 3 to 4. That's still fast writing.

I don't know how well relying heavily on word count for managing time will work, given the situational problems writers often find themselves dealing with. Word count for a WIP goes out the window if you have to plan a presentation or revise for an editor. Plus Aaron is a self-published writer. Being able to write multiple books a year is important to many self-pubs, particularly the more entrepreneurial ones who are truly trying to make a living with just writing. Other types of writers who have income sources through teaching and making appearances or just a regular day job won't  feel a need to produce as much that quickly. But given all the demands on writers' time, doesn't being able to write more quickly sound very attractive?

Aaron has written a book about writing faster, which I just bought. I'll check it out and be posting on anything new I find there.

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What does planning goals and objectives for a year have to do with time management? Goals and objectives help us to determine what we're going to do with our time. They keep us from doing random things.We can check in on the goals and objectives now and again to determine what we should be doing. At the end of the unit of time we've planned the goals and objectives for (a year, say) we can do an assessment to determine how much the goals and objectives helped us achieve with our time. And with that knowledge, we can plan the goals and objectives for a next unit of time (a year, say), which will determine how we spend our time going forward.

The Goals and Objectives

So the following goals and objectives describe how I plan to use my time in 2014. Notice that I only have six goals. All the objectives are steps toward achieving the goals.

Goal 1. Finish the revision of The Fletcher Farm Body

Objectives:

• Continue revising to enhance the brothers' relationship to support the control theme
• Continue revising to eliminate as much material that doesn't relate to plot, character, or theme as possible
  

Goal 2. Write a number of short pieces

Possible Objectives:

• Statics and Dynamics for Writers essay. This was originally a workshop proposal. The proposal wasn't accepted, but the organization running the conference required such an extensive outline that I think I can flip it into an essay.
• Walking for Writers essay
• The Northeast Children's Literature Collection essay
• Promoting eBooks for Traditionally Published Writers essay
• Relic Hoarding essay
• Becoming Part of Blog Culture essay
• The Value in Becoming Part of a Local Writing Community essay
• Hannah and Brandon short story (held over from last year)
• Your On-line Friend short story
• How to Make Friends and Live Longer short story

Goal 3. Complete a draft of the so-called mummy book

Objectives:

• By February get back up to speed with this project
• By February start assigning a few 45-minute units a week to this project 

Goal 4. Make submissions

Objectives:

• Submit The Fletcher Farm Body to a specific editor
• New agent research
• Research markets for short works
• Submit short works

Goal 5. Continue to work on community building

Objectives:

• Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar
• Attend other authors' marketing events
• Attend a few professional events
• Prepare a new workshop to offer at libraries and bookstores
• Try to find a writers' group

Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook

Objectives:

• Check out the blogs and sites I've been collecting for possible contacts
• Start researching blogs to contact again
• Continue the Environmental Book Club at Original Content whenever possible
• Get trailer up at Twitter page
• Consider a price reduction for a limited time and promoting same
• Consider pulling eBook from Barnes & Noble and Kobo to take advantage of Kindle marketing for books exclusive to that company

What Goals and Objectives Should Be

Goals should be achievable, which all these goals are. Notice that Goal 4 is "Make submissions" and not "Publish essays and short stories." I cannot control what editors will do or choose to publish, so "Publish essays and short stories" is not an achievable goal. I have no real impact on what happens. But I can make submissions, so that is an achievable goal.

Goals and objectives should also be measurable. We should be able to determine whether or not we've met our goals. We can easily tell if we've completed an objective. Completing enough of the objectives should mean we've at least approached meeting our goals.

What Was the Impact of 2013's Goals and Objectives On 2014's?

If you compare my goals and objectives from last year with my goals and objectives for this year, you'll see a big switch in the placement of the Saving the Planet eBook. Last year the publication and promotion of that book were my number one and two goals. This year I have only one goal related to it, and it has dropped to number six. Publishing and marketing Saving the Planet was hugely time and energy consuming and didn't provide much return for my effort in 2013. I can clearly see from the goals and objectives I worked on last year that writing time suffered. So I'm using goals and objectives to refocus how I spend my time in 2014.

One Final Goal For This Year 

 

This year I'm going to make an effort to check up on myself each week to make sure that a good chunk of my time went toward objectives to meet my goals, an idea I got from Peter Bregman's 18 Minutes.

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Last year I started doing recapitulation posts, an opportunity to assess what I had done during a unit of time, a year in this case. At the beginning of this year, instead of making New Year's resolutions, I created goals and objectives for 2013. That's going to make this year's recapitulation easy. Assessing how I did with last year's goals and objectives will have a big impact on my planning of goals and objectives for 2014.

Remember, goals are what people plan to do, objectives are the steps they will take to meet the goal.

Goal 1. Publish the Saving the Planet eBook 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

Assessment: Met goal in February instead of January

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.

Assessment: I spent an enormous amount of time on this goal, managing coverage for the book at the following sites:

Alison Pearce Stevens Marketing Monday

Dude, Sustainable! 

Green Bean Teen Queen

Finding Wonderland: Review

Finding Wonderland: Interview

Little Hyuts

The Bibliophilic Book Blog

Word Spelunking

I was also able to promote the book at a high school book fair, the NESCBWI conference,  and the NESCBWI New Media Day. However, things began to fall apart for this goal in August when I had a disruption in my personal/professional boundary and had to spend some more time on the personal side of things. I let promotion slide in order to use my work time for writing and never got back into the heavy research I needed to do to continue promotion.

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

Assessment:  I did Tuesday posts almost every week, read The Power of Habit, and planned and ran the NESCBWI time management workshop in May. I did not spend much time looking for opportunities to write about time management for writers.

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.

Assessment: I did make seven submissions this year, one piece being brand new work, but I wasn't able to do it in a binge-like month-long period. I haven't been able to spend as much time researching markets as I'd like, though I did do some.

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

Assessment: I have some notes for this essay. That's as far as I got.

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.

Assessment:  Did read Wired for Story and The Plot Whisperer. I also went over all my old research and did some more. I worked with the May Days Facebook group in May and again in October to plan out a series of scenes for this project, which for this organic writer is like an outline. I even put in quite a bit of time on starting the first few chapters.

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)

Assessment:  I met many of these objectives with varying degrees of success. The Next Big Thing--not at all successful. I supported Cybils early in the year and tried to support it this fall, but couldn't give enough time to it. Instead of a calendar template for the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, we created a link in my sidebar so it can be accessed immediately. I joined a Connecticut bloggers Facebook community to help publicize the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar. I attended a writers' retreat and a couple of events at UConn. The weekend roundup hasn't been working well lately. I did make one feeble effort to get a networking writers' group started on Google+. It came to nothing. However, I joined Twitter this year, which I think could be argued falls under community building. Not one of my objectives, but a step toward the goal.

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

Assessment: I dropped this goal early on, deciding that if I go to the work of writing a Hannah and Brandon short story, I'll try to sell it to a traditional magazine. Didn't even begin a story.

Goal 9. Plan publication of My Life Among the Aliens and Club Earth eBooks 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 

Assessment: I do have the rights back to all my books that G. P. Putnam's Sons didn't do eBook editions for. However, my experience with the Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook suggests that putting effort into creating more eBooks isn't a good use of my time. I gave this goal up mid-year in favor of getting back to more writing.

Next week I'll do my first Time Management Tuesday post of the new year. It will be my goals and objectives post for 2014. You'll see some carry over from this year, but you'll also see a big shift in where I'm going to be putting my time.

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Last week I began writing about 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bregman. But I hadn't arrived at the point in my reading at which he describes what the 18 minutes in the title relates to.

It comes in Chapter 28 (Wait! It should have been Chapter 18!), "An 18-Minute Plan for Managing Your Day." Bregman suggests:

1. Spending 5 minutes in the morning planning your day, working with a to-do list and calendar. Dwell on what you can do that will relate to one of your plans for the year.
2. Then set a timer and at the end of every hour, take 1 minute to assess how you used your last hour and think about the next one.
3. At the end of the day, spend another 5 minutes evaluating how you spent the day.

Thus you have your 18 minutes spread over the workday. 

First off, note that he breaks the day into hour units, though he doesn't discuss the logic behind working in short units of time beyond using it to stay focused. So that relates to time management strategies we've discussed here.

As far as using a time/focus program that requires management ten times a day, once an hour for eight hours and then again morning and evening, I know from my knowledge of myself that that's going to overwhelm me. That's actually a lot of work, even though it doesn't require a lot of time. I prefer planning my week once at the beginning, keeping track of what I've knocked off my daily plans, and  adapting as I go along, if I need to. I don't want what I need to do to manage my work to become as much effort as my work.

However, I like very much his point about being careful to make sure your short-term work plans include working on some of your yearly goals. I'll want to include that in my planning next year.

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I stumbled upon 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done by Peter Bergman at my local library last week. 18 Minutes! A unit of time! Yes, I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. So since it's December, and I have nothing to do, I picked it up.

It's hard to say just what 18 Minutes is. It definitely doesn't deal specifically with managing time. There's lots in the first half of the book about things like finding ways to make your weaknesses work for you and ways to pursue your passion. I'm a little past the halfway point, and I haven't hit on anything about 18 minutes. I will admit, though, that I'm doing a lot of skimming. The short chapters with a carefully written summary at the end make that easy to do. Still, I haven't seen a lot that's new here.

Bergman does write about using a year as a unit of time and planning for same. That's appropriate for my purposes because on New Year's Eve I'll be doing a recapitulation post for this year and early in January I'll be doing one on goals and objectives for next year. One twist Bergman brings to the yearly discussion is making sure your daily plan relates to items on the yearly plan. That's something I could be more conscientious about with my situational planning.  He also writes about deciding what you're not going to do. We've talked about this a bit here in relation to recognizing the things we aren't likely to do, accepting that, and not wasting time and energy on them. Again, this is something to be thinking about while pulling together goals and objectives for next year.

Next week I hope to be able to report on what the 18 minutes in the book title refers to. In the meantime, here's what we need to be doing this month:

Sprinting to keep our heads in our projects 
Doing some recapitulating
Putting together some goals and objectives for next year 

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Last year on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I asked the question Will The Unit System Get Me Through The Holidays? The answer, at least for Thanksgiving, was, "No." Four days later, all the only work-related activity I'd done was an e-mail. The next day I was still writing about oozing back into a writing practice.

Things went a lot better this past Thanksgiving weekend. This year I used a smaller unit of time to keep me at work--a twenty minute sprint. With that I was able to squeeze in a little writing every day except Thanksgiving, itself.

Why Was I Able To Work More On Thanksgiving Weekend This Year?

I think sprinting worked for a number of reasons:

• Yes, twenty minutes is less time than the forty-five minute blocks I usually work in, so it's easier to find that short a chunk of time and stick with it.
• I'd been sprinting once a day on workdays for a month or two in addition to my other work, so I had some practice with it.
• I'd been trying to sprint on weekends for a month or two, so I had some practice with it.
• I use a laptop now, which means I'm not tied to one spot in the house for work. My laptop is often wandering around the house with me, so grabbing it for a twenty-minute sprint on the couch or at the dining room table or even the kitchen counter is incredibly easy. There is no thinking about when I can force myself to the office.

What A Twenty-Minute Sprint Does For An Organic Writer

I am not wracking up a big word count with sprints, especially since I'm revising right now. But what sprinting during periods when you wouldn't normally work at all does is keep writers in their projects. For organic writers, that's a huge benefit. We can't plan out an entire book or even portions of it. Instead, writing generates more writing for us. Working on an idea generates the next idea. We depend on continuing to "work" with break-out experiences when we're not actually hammering out words to a greater extent than plotting writers probably do. Working for twenty minutes early Friday evening could mean that an hour or so later some ideas will suddenly spring into mind, ideas that will become part of our writing at some point, if not the very next day.

But without working on an idea, we're unlikely to generate the next one. The longer we go without working on the work in progress, the less likely it is new material will just break out of our minds relating to it. The longer we go without working on a project, the more difficult it is to get started on working again when we finally can.

Yesterday was the Monday after a holiday weekend. Getting back into work was incredibly easy. I suspect I can thank the sprinting I did on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for that.

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I've written here frequently about situational time management and the need to constantly adapt how we manage time to the new situations writers (and all people who work for themselves) are always finding themselves in. Last week author Laurie Calkhoven wrote at Smack Dab in the Middle
about authors who work regularly for hire and their need to set criteria for the jobs they'll take on.  But I think her post also was a case study in how a writer's work situation can change and how rapidly it can change.

During a period when Laurie was working on a book of her own, she was offered a freelance job with a deadline that was only a month away. She accepted the job on a Friday, meaning her work situation for the next four weeks had suddenly changed dramatically. Then on Saturday she became ill. On Monday she had to quit the job she had accepted only three days before. Suddenly, her work situation had changed again.

I usually write here about more modest situational changes for writers: dropping everything to respond to a request for a proposal or an appearance inquiry or having to dedicate time to promotion, for instance, instead of generating new work. (Reactive vs. creative time.) But authors who do work for hire face these more extreme situational changes. Early this fall a Facebook friend posted about having just accepted a writing project with a Thanksgiving deadline and last spring I met an author/illustrator who had accepted a job that meant her next two years would be tied up illustrating another person's books. These are changes in work situation that can be sudden and intense, and the use of the author's time while in those situations has a big impact on their work output.

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1. Last week I covered my concerns about committing an entire weekend to a writers' retreat. Would it be worth the use of that time? I think it's pretty clear from my last two posts that I think Falling Leaves was a valuable experience and well worth the two days I spent there. Specifically, I did meet my three goals. 

1. Weekend Writing. All of Saturday afternoon was committed to free time for writing with one twenty-five minute critique with an editor, and there were plenty of other ways to snatch twenty or thirty minutes here or there to work.
2. Escape. I most definitely got away from Gail Universe.
3. Community Building. I did meet a number of people I'd be happy to stay in touch with, but I suspect that community building is one of those things you have to wait a while to assess how things went. Will we become part of a writers' community? I can't make that judgement at this point.

An Impact On My Time Now

What I didn't expect was that the retreat would have an impact on my time after it was over.

• I'm struggling with re-entry, in large part because I keep a pretty tight schedule working in units of time and planning my week. I broke training for 3 days and have been wandering around with a cold for 2 more. I am definitely having trouble getting up to speed. If I went to more retreats, I'd probably know about re-entry problems and be able to plan some way to deal with this time issue. Live and learn, as they say.
• I brought two manuscripts to Falling Leaves with me. One was critiqued by the editor, one was critiqued by a critique group. Now I feel a need to work on both of them. As an organic writer, that could be a problem. No, it most certainly is going to be a problem. One of the ways organic writers generate material and plot is by immersing ourselves in the world we're working on. I have a plan for flipping back and forth between both my worlds, with most of my time going to one rather than the other, but this is another thing I didn't foresee. Bringing two manuscripts to a retreat is probably a mistake. Again, live and learn.
• The big post-retreat time impact, however, is that as a result of my weekend experience I'm now interested in finding a critique group because Saturday morning's went so well. To be truthful, I have been thinking about this a bit since the NESCBWI event in May, when a workshop leader gave us some critique time. I haven't been in a critique group for 6 or 7 years, finally quitting the one I was in because it was an enormous time drain. We prepared our critiques on our own time, meaning that in addition to the two evenings a month we met, we could end up using 4 or 5 hours of our work time each month on reading and critiquing other members' work. It was also an open group at a bookstore, so we weren't necessarily working with experienced writers or writers who had writing training through workshops or course work, even if they hadn't been published themselves, as happened with both the one-stop critique groups I was part of at SCBWI events this year. Just finding a critique group could be time consuming, and then working with one on a regular basis could cost me a lot of time.This is a big risk that I wasn't that keen on taking before this past weekend.

A Retreat  Should Have An Impact On Your Post-Retreat Time 

If any kind of short, intensive learning experience (as we used to call retreat-type events back when I worked for consultants) is worthwhile, it  should have an impact on what you do after you're back at work. That's the point of going, to improve yourself in some way. I forgot about that because I was so fixated on what was going to happen during the retreat, itself. Once again, live and learn.

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This weekend I'm off to the Falling Leaves Master Class for Novels Retreat that I told you about back in September. This takes place over a weekend, a weekend is a unit of time, what am I going to do with that time? For that matter, all retreats take place over a unit of time, a unit of time that writers could use for anything, the retreat being just one of their options. There is an opportunity cost involved with our choices on how to use our time. Do we gain enough from a retreat to justify the time cost?

What Is a Writers' Retreat, Anyway?

I tend to have a very formal, traditional writers' retreat fantasy that involves going some place remote and working away from the distractions of family, home, and day jobs. My fantasy does include getting together with other writers for meals and doing some exercising and reading. Okay, it pretty much involves doing only what I want to do.

That isn't necessarily what other writers think of as retreats, though. A writer friend once told me she didn't see the point of going away to be with other people and then work and not be with them. I've also heard a writer discussing a  retreat she attended at which writers worked together on a couch while either instant messaging or tweeting each other. The writer telling this story had a good time.

Additionally, many writers' retreats have programs and events scheduled for most of the day. They're like mini-conferences for limited numbers of people often in a remote, scenic area. My guess is that the big difference between a conference and these kinds of retreats is the size and the number of programs offered each hour--one at a retreat versus multiple at a conference. At any rate, many retreats appear to be about something other than actually working.

How To Get The Best Bang For Your Time

 

Choose Carefully.  I contacted the Falling Leaves staff to see if there would be any writing time during the weekend before applying. In addition, this is a master class retreat. While there are four presentations from editors, those presentations are related to the manuscripts we submitted in order to be accepted, and we've had to prepare for them. This could end up being like some kind of monastic study experience. I'll actually be bringing two projects to work on.

Create Objectives. I had three original objectives for the retreat when applying.

• Community-building.
• Writing
• Getting away from Gail Universe and enter another for a couple of days. 

I've been prepping for over a week for the editors' presentations, and now that I'm back into this project I would switch the writing and community-building objectives. I'd really like to get more work done, even if it's not traditional writing but some kind of revision or planning.

Now, I have far more experience obsessing about time and how I'm using it than I do with writers' retreats, but the way I feel right now, it's unlikely I would take the time to go to a writers' retreat that is primarily presentations without a specific work project involved.

But we will see how I feel about the time involved for writers' retreats next week. At the very least, I'm expecting to meet my objective of getting away from Gail Universe for a couple of days.

 

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This is National Novel Writing Month, which I'm not taking part in this year, though I did back in 2004 when I said...wait for it...wait for it..." I see this as an opportunity to force me to structure my time better." (I'm telling you, the time thing has always hung over my head.) However, I did just finish a month-long writing unit with the May Day folks. I didn't finish a novel during that time, though we don't try to in that group. We try to use these month long "set asides," as I sometimes call them, to generate some work or do something specific.

The Original Plan

As I'm sure you all recall, I planned to do four things:

1. Sprint at least five days a week
2. Generate two pages of material as many days of the week as possible
3. Allow the two pages of new material to include new scene planning, if need be
4. Learn to do what I'm going to call skim writing, meaning I'm going to try not to stop to get obsessive about perfecting factual bits, names, etc. I want to leave ______ or bold placeholders, which I hope will help me move ahead generating material that will provide the solutions for those blank spaces and placeholders that I can then go back and correct. I get bogged down much, much too often with those types of things for my taste.

That may have been too many objectives for a one-month writing goal, but I did pretty well with the first two, and made an effort, at least, with the third and fourth ones.

The Best Results

1. Sprinting, or doing a quick, intense writing session, has been great, and I'm hoping it is becoming part of my writing process. I've been doing a twenty minute sprint in the midst of my workout period because I've been walking outside for a half an hour after whatever else I do in the morning. The sprint comes before the walk, and walking after the sprint can often lead to breakout experiences related to the work done during the sprint. Just this morning, for example, I realized while out in the street that I needed to change the house one of my main characters lives in in order to make it do more to define him.
2. I started a new book, which I haven't done in a year or so. I'm three and a half chapters in as a result of the October set aside, and didn't get further, even though I'd started before October, because a lot of my new work involved rewriting chapters one and two.

What Next?

 I can't continue working on this project several hours a day because I'm preparing to attend a master class retreat in less than two weeks, and that involves another, completed novel that I need to bring myself back up to speed on. But part of what you gain from working intently on a writing project, as we did last month, is the involvement with the world of the book. That's particularly important for organic writers like myself who don't have a plot outline to anchor us and bring us back to that world, if we've been away. Even with an overall, big picture idea of what's going to happen, a lot of our plot evolves as we're working, as we're deeply into the project. Walk away and when you come back you'll find yourself having to make a big effort to figure out where you were going with this thing.

What I'm trying to do to prevent that is continue with those sprints. I'm doing what I call "mummy sprints" (the book was originally about a mummy; not so much now) as many days of the week as I can. No, I'm not suggesting I'm going to write a book in twenty minutes a day, though I imagine a person far more patient than I am could. What I'm hoping to do is to stay in this project mentally so that when I can get back to it, maybe at the end of this month, I can simply continue working.

And, yes, I should have finished chapter four by then.

Regarding NaNoWriMo

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, as I was in my first sentence, oddly enough, I got some ideas just this past Saturday for my 2004 NaNoWriMo project, which I've barely touched since then. I'm trying to get some notes down on that.

And Facebook Friend Kimberly Sabatini is doing NaNoWriMo this year and has shared a little news of how she's doing. I'm hoping to hear more about how she's using this time.

 

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I've written here before about the amount of time published writers spend on marketing/reactive  activities versus the time they spend on actual writing/creative activities. A few days ago, author Lionel Shriver published an essay, How to Succeed as an Author: Give Up on Writing,
that deals with the same subject  in the New Republic. (I question, myself, whether she is responsible for the subheading "The Rancid Smell of 21st Century Literary Success." She wasn't that embittered in the essay, and it sounds an awful lot like clickbait.)

Now Shriver has achieved a high level of international success, and the average published writer isn't going to have to worry about being overwhelmed with invitations to lit festivals all over the world or two-week tours in foreign countries. But published writers of all levels do lose valuable writing time to prepping for both income and nonincome generating appearances, getting our names onto blogs and websites by pumping out content for them, and coming up with marketing schemes to make ourselves better known so that we can hit some of those faraway literary festivals. Shriver is writing about a very real time demand that many, many writers understand.

Unfortunately, many of her commentors focused less on the universality of the experience Shriver is describing and more on the fact that she is very successful and has no business complaining. In hindsight, including information from a few other writers with similar time constraints might have been a good idea, so the essay would have been less about her and more about the situation she's describing. In hindsight, she might have also played up these points that she did make:

"...with the exception of a few select luminaries whose reputations are assured, in this business you’re only as good as your last book. My livelihood started out shaky; it is still shaky."

"A frenzied calendar is my fault. It is the natural consequence of a profound insecurity that, during a dozen long years when I lived a hair’s breadth from having no publisher at all, worked its way into my very bones. That insecurity, some of which is economic, seems to have induced a permanent terror of turning anything down—anything that will make money, fortify my name recognition, or support book sales."

"Sure, there’s no precise requirement that authors put themselves in the way of all that froufrou. But this is a high-anxiety occupation. With publishers’ recent hanky-twisting over whether there will even be a publishing industry in ten years, that anxiety has gone into overdrive. Could we authors learn to “just say no”? Perhaps. Still, how many names that the public has learned to recognize will it soon forget? More than by ambition, “just say yes” is powered by fear."

With those excerpts, I think Shriver does an excellent job of explaining how writers end up spending  a huge chunk of their time not writing. I sure saw the anxiety and fear behind this essay. Other readers, though, only saw that Shriver's going to Bali. 

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Have I mentioned my new laptop? I don't think so. I will be talking about its splendors sometime in the future, but today I'm going to drone on a bit about how technology is wonderful, absolutely wonderful, for managing time and getting things done. But technology is always changing, which means learning curves, over and over and over again. And do they ever take time.

Very few people can afford the time to just stop working and learn how to use, say, a new word processing program or make the jump from a standard cellphone to a smartphone. We have to work while we learn, we have to use that phone while we learn. I think of this as a martial arts model. In the schools I've attended, you're thrown in with all the other students of all different levels of experience and knowledge. You follow along as best you can, and then step out to work on the skills for your level. Then you jump back in with the others, going back and forth like that. It works for them, but they take the long view. Everything will come with time.

That's how things work with new technology to a great extent but for a different reason. We jump right in and work with the new, not because we take the long view but because we don't. We can't stop to study because we have to keep producing. But there's no getting around the fact that we're not producing at peak efficiency and speed, because we're struggling to learn the new technology as we go along.

A case in point

My laptop arrived two weeks ago loaded with Word 2013. I haven't had to acclimate myself to a new word processing program for some time, because I've been using Word 2003. For the very standard straight manuscript typing I do, it has worked very well, and I haven't had to lose any time learning the new bells and whistles of all the versions that came between 2003 and 2013. Now, my computer guy could find a way to get 2003 onto this laptop because he's kind of a rogue and that's how he rolls. But we have another computer guy in the family, and Computer Guy II pointed out that at some point Microsoft will stop supporting earlier versions of Word, and then what do I do? Computer Guy I, being a rogue, as I mentioned, would take the attitude that we fight it! We do not give in to the man! Computer Guy II, on the other hand, is more of a make-love-not-war tech person. Since I've got this maintain-the-mind-of-a-beginner thing going on, and I'm willing to concede that maybe Word 2013 has something positive to offer me, beyond the fact that it is simply on my computer, I decided to go with Computer Guy II on this one.

This morning, after having used Word 2013 for two weeks, I spent fourteen minutes getting a header with numbering onto a new chapter file. That is a good thing. On the last two chapters, I spent around forty to forty-five minutes on headers and numbering pages. I am making progress.

But I've also lost work time. In my case, I'm hoping that the time I lose now will be made up for in the future because of the splendors of this laptop.

Do We Get Everything New Devices Have To Offer Learning This Way?

In my case, the answer to that question is, "No." I'm on my second digital camera. I never learned all the options on the first one, and I use only a fraction of what I could on the new one. I've even carried the manual in my camera case, hoping that I'd find time while traveling to sit down and browse. That rarely happens, mainly because I can take a good enough picture and let it go at that. My iPhone is my favorite material possession right now. One of the reasons I got it was to listen to podcasts. I do do that, but directly from the site that originally produced them. I haven't figured out how to download podcasts to my iPhone. In fact, the Apple store won't let me purchase podcast apps from my phone because of some password problem I haven't had time to even try to resolve. I always take the easy option that provides a lesser result because I don't have time to go another way.

The irony here, folks, is that the technological device that could be a major factor in managing our time requires time to learn to use properly.

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Okay, the first thing we need to do here is remember what we were talking about last week, which was:

1. When, in the course of our lives, are we actively taught self-control, which we need to practice self-discipline?
2. Those of us who don't learn self-control when we're young have the additional issue of remembering that self-discipline is something we want to practice because the whole self-control/self-discipline business is not a natural part of our lives.

And why do we writers want to become self-disciplined? Because self-discipline relates directly to being able to stay on task and manage our time.

Yeah, I Really Want To Remember To Do That

Part of being self-disciplined involves remembering that you're going to do it. How so? Think of any new behavior you want to engage in. Say I want to look over the entire buffet for healthier choices before I start filling my plate. Or I decide to exercise before I have breakfast. I also want to write 20 minutes on weekends and holidays when the family is here. In any of these cases, willpower failure can be due to a number of things, but I would like to add just plain forgetting what we'd planned to do to that list. We walk into a restaurant and truly just forget that we had a plan for dealing with the buffet because we'd never had a plan before, so it's not something we naturally do. We get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and go "oops" when we realize that we forgot the exercise plan.

Please, Gail, how about a writing-related example. Okay. Here's one. I didn't do my 20 minute writing sprint on Saturday. I could easily have done it in the morning, but I spent several hours cooking random things instead. In thinking about it afterward, I realized there was no reason in the world why I had to cook all those things. I could easily have squeezed 20 minutes of writing in, which would have kept me in the world of my WIP. I really just forgot that I had a plan. Maintaining self-discipline isn't something I'm accustomed to doing, at least, not with that particular task.

So Now We Have To Work On Improving Memory, Too?

Well, it certainly can't hurt anything, can it? So how are we going to do it?

1. We can try creating habits, which are like self-discipline without any thinking. Muscle-memory for the memory. Presumably with a habit, we would simply do something we wanted to do. However, Kelly McGonigal, my personal self-discipline guru, isn't a fan of habit. She believes habits work best for small behaviors that don't require a lot of us, which explains why I'm now flossing my teeth regularly. It's not brain surgery. She talks about using things like automatic goal pursuit, implementations, and commitments instead of habit. But you have to remember the goal you're pursuing automatically, you have to remember the plan you're going to implement in certain situations, you have to remember your commitments.
2. We can try meditating, because it appears to be a cure-all for what ails you. Now that we have ways to study the brain and the impact of various activities upon it, there is some science to back up its use. Again, my friend Kelly McGonigal says that meditating helps with self-control and attention because it develops the prefontal cortex, the portion of the brain that deals with impulse control. The effort to keep your mind from wandering actually develops the brain.

Memory, Gail, memory. Remember we're talking about memory. I do remember that. Maybe because I started a short meditation practice in June, one that I'm only able to keep up with 3 or 4 days a week. I didn't notice any revolutionary gains in concentration, but I did wonder if my memory was improving. It wasn't that I wasn't forgetting things. What I was noticing was that I "recovered" from the forgetfulness faster. Meaning I remembered where my cell phone was as soon as I realized I didn't have it. I remembered I hadn't turned the timer on while baking as I was leaving the kitchen. Sure enough, a little time on the Internet turned up a very recent article on a study that indicates that meditation does, indeed, improve memory.

What Will Memory Do For Us?

My theory is that improving memory will lead to improved self-discipline will lead to improved time management. Because absolutely everything is tied in with time.

   

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Kelly McGonigal tweeted a post on Activities for Practicing Self-Control. It's a kindergarten teacher's description of things he does to teach self-control to his students. He says, "I often hear teachers complain (including myself) about kids lack of self-control but what are we doing to help kids learn about it?" Good point. I would argue that self-control/self-discipline is a big part of managing time. It seems to be the kind of thing most of us pick up or we don't. It isn't specifically taught the way, say, addition is. Those of us who find ourselves undisciplined adults are going to have to muddle along on our own.

The Piece of Cake

 

Matt Gomez, the teacher who wrote the post on self-control activities for kindergarten students, writes about modeling self-control for his class. "I give examples often of adults that have to have self-control so they know we all have to make choices. For example: “guess what class, I saw a piece of chocolate cake in the staff refrigerator. I could have eaten it but I chose not to because it wasn’t mine.”" I found this interesting for several reasons.

1. Gomez is interested in self-control in relation to people getting along with one another. He says he didn't eat the cake because it wasn't his, not because it wasn't good for him, a reason many people exercise self-control around food. I'm interested in self-control in relation to staying on task with my work and getting more done faster, not because it will improve my relations with others. However, according to Kelly McGonigal's book, The Willpower Instinct, working on improving willpower in one area of life often leads to improvement with other areas that require willpower. It doesn't appear to be a spot specific strength. Therefore, the children learning to control themselves so they can get along within a group, may find themselves better able to control themselves when needing to stay on a task. If I am able to improve my control with my work, I may find myself getting along better with others.
2. Unless we've been receiving some kind of self-control instruction or are undergoing some kind of training in it, how often are we actually aware that we are practicing self-control or need to? For instance, take the example of seeing a piece of cake in the refrigerator. How often do we see something like that and consciously think, Time to exert a little control here and walk away from that thing? I think it's probably much more common for us to realize we've experienced a self-discipline success or failure after the fact (I knocked off a chapter today! I lost half the day to phone calls!) than while we're in a position to do something about it. Is this because that's the nature of humans or because we simply haven't learned a particular behavior or skill?
3. Gomez's description of modeling self-control for his students raised this point for me--I would have to remember I was looking for self-control examples, particularly if I wanted to find any coming from me, before I would recognize that not eating that cake was a golden opportunity to create one. And that brought up the whole issue of memory and self-control.

Now you know what I'll be writing about next week.

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My May Days buddies like to make another month-long group binge-writing effort in the fall. This year I'm working with them during the month of October. The plan, once again, is to write two pages a day, and report how we're doing each Monday.

I have probably discussed the issue of whether or not two pages is all that difficult a daily task. It's not. The issue is that writing has become something writers do less of than in days of old. That bugaboo marketing, in all its many, many manifestations, takes up a lot of time, but so does teaching for many writers, workshop planning, public appearances, and submissions. Finding time for the real creative work involved with writing can be an effort, even if you don't have problems with staying on task. It's particularly difficult if you're trying to get started on a new, book-length project.

My plan for my own personal Octoberfest, as I'm calling this month's unit of time, is to:

• Sprint at least five days a week
• Generate two pages of material as many days of the week as possible
• Allow the two pages of new material to include new scene planning, if need be
• Learn to do what I'm going to call skim writing, meaning I'm going to try not to stop to get obsessive about perfecting factual bits, names, etc. I want to leave ______ or bold placeholders, which I hope will help me move ahead generating material that will provide the solutions for those blank spaces and placeholders that I can then go back and correct. I get bogged down much, much too often with those types of things for my taste.

And, of course, I hope to be able to wring another blog post or two from this experience.

I have already done today's two pages. Now I need to go off to do some marketing/networking types of things.

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