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I haven't done a time management reading project in a while, so I'm psyched for this one.

I stumbled upon The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin at the library and picked it up because it has a chapter called Organizing Our Time. I was reading that when I decided I'd better go back and look at some of the earlier chapters. So I'll be seeing what I can pick up from this book that could relate to writers managing their time.

Cognitive Psychology? What's That?

Levitin is a cognitive psychologist. He describes cognitive psychology as "the scientific study of how humans (and animals and, in some cases, computers) process information." Among the areas of study cognitive psychology covers are memory and attention. Attention relates to staying on task, an issue for managing time. I'm wondering if memory won't be a factor for organic writers, which, I know, veers off from the time management topic. I may be addressing that more later as I'm reading and thinking about this book.

In his introduction Levitin says that "successful members of society" have "learned to maximize their creativity, and efficiency, by organizing their lives so that they spend less time on the mundane, and more time on the inspiring, comforting, and rewarding things in life." Yes! Get me some of that!

An Evolutionary Theory For Writing Process

He has another interesting line in the intro: "Evolution doesn't design things and it doesn't build systems--it settles on systems that, historically, conveyed a survival benefit (and if a better way comes along, it will adopt that.)" This sounds to me like a way to think of writing process and managing time.

There is no grand design or system we can learn in graduate school or at conference workshops. Instead, individuals have to settle on a system that has, within their personal history, worked for them. And if they're smart, they'll maintain that zenny mind of a beginner I'm so fond of and adopt any new, better systems they happen upon, too.

Writing process and managing time evolve over the course of our work lives.

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I am using my May Days to put a lot of time into one project, something I've done the last two May Days. The same project, I'm sorry to say. But, once again during this May Days I am experiencing the value of trying to write every day on the same project. It's incredibly helpful for organic writers like myself. We have trouble isolating plot and planning out what we're going to do for an entire story. We deal with stories as a whole organism. If we have to stay away from that organism too long, it takes us a while to come back up to speed, because while we have a feel for our whole story, we aren't good on the details that are coming up. It's hard for us to pick up where we left off.

The May Days project forces us to write every day. For me, this meant spending some time at my laptop in a motel room between biking excursions this past weekend. Writing every day increases chances of having a breakout experience (at least it increases my chances), and I had one on a bike the next day. This led to taking notes on it while having lunch in a sandwich shop (my work for the day) and that led to a much easier transition back to work on Monday.


Whenever I find myself in a situation where I'm writing every day, even a tiny amount, I think, I've got to keep this up! Not because I accomplish so much (I did mention that I've been working on the same May Days project three years in a row, right?) but because it keeps my head in the game.

That is a huge plus for time management.

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My May Days Facebook group is powering up again. You remember May Days? I've been talking about it here since 2012. Part of what I like about taking part in this event, as I've said before, is that it gives me an opportunity to indulge in obsession. Sort of the way I did this past month with the Annotated Saving the Planet & Stuff. I think of these blocks of time as set-aside time to work on specific projects. Like the An--you know.

I've written here before about the significance of the beginnings and endings of units of time. I'm really feeling that significance right now. I've been worn out from this STP&S promo month for a while. How much have I been looking forward to the end of this project? A little more than a week ago, I thought the month ended this past weekend, because it was the first weekend I didn't have any family commitments. Commitments done, month done, right? Imagine my disappointment when I realized I had another four days to go.

So while I'm anxious for this April set-aside time to end, I'm also looking forward to the beginning of the next set-aside time, May Days. As far as new work is concerned, this month I've mainly done revising. I'd really like to move forward. That's my plan for May Days.

What I want to move forward with is the mummy book that I worked on last May. And the May before.  I'm not foolish enough to think I can finish it next month. (Though I did meet a writer this weekend who can do a rough draft in six weeks, and I already have five chapters.) But it would be terrific to get it done by fall. Making some serious progress in the next few weeks would go a long way toward getting there.

Note that with both these monthly projects, the Annotated Saving the Planet & Stuff Earth Day Promo and  Mummy for May Days (a name!!), involve two of my six  goals for this year.  I am staying on task!

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Last week's Time Management Tuesday post dealt with an article from the Coaching Positive Performance website. So I went back to take a look at what other time management bits I could find over there and, lo, I came upon this post on decision-making. I promised back in August, 2012 that decision-making would be a long-term study topic here. And, look! I'm carrying through with that!

Why Is Decision-making Part of Time Management?

Decision-making takes time. And it's time when you're not doing anything except thinking about what you're going to do. It's time that doesn't produce much.

You want to spend as little time deciding what you're going to do as possible, so you can spend more time on real work. How to do that?

How To Decide What To Do?

 

The CPP folks talk about knowing which of the tasks you have to do will give you the biggest payoff. That means knowing your goals and objectives. You have to have those in mind all the time. I like to make them at the beginning of the year and check in with them regularly. I've been doing it weekly this year.

The CPP people also talk about figuring out what you can do and how much time you have available. That's always going to change. And why? Because everything is situational. Our situations are always changing, so we always have to work out what we can do with the time we have available.

A case in point? Last week's Time Management Tuesday was about managing sick time. With that we're definitely dealing with a specific situation, different from the situation we were dealing with before we got sick, and different from the situation we'll be dealing with after we're back to what passes for normal. Getting anything done in that particular situation requires making some decisions.

If All Else Fails...

Do something. Anything. Again as the CPP writer says, the only way you can fail is to do nothing at all.

Remember, that's the reason decision-making is an important part of time management. You don't want to spend too much of your available time thinking about what you're going to do instead of doing something.

I decided what I was going to do this week yesterday morning. So now I'm off to do it.

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Last week I had a I'm-coming-down-with-something-hysteria day and spent the morning in bed with my laptop in order to deal with that situation. So you can understand why How to Enjoy a Productive Day When You Feel Bad grabbed my attention when I stumbled upon it at Coaching Positive Performance.

The CPP blogger says, "One of the most important aspects of improving your time management is to enjoy a productive day even when you don’t feel like it. That does not mean that you have to complete a massive workload; it simply means that you have to complete some important work which takes you closer to your goals and objectives."

There's great stuff here: 

1. How to get started on a sick workday: Identify the three most important tasks you need to get done. These tasks relate to your most important goals. Then choose the three next most important tasks. After you identify that second group, you're not going to even think about them again that day. That's kind of brilliant. It eliminates a major distraction. You won't be overwhelmed by all the things you have to do.
2. How to choose what to do first among your three chosen tasks: Do you choose the hardest task? Do you choose the easiest? You choose the one that is most important to your goal!
3. How to work: In units!

One of the big negatives about being sick, besides being, you know, sick, is the stress of seeing work pile up. Thinking of sick days as another situation we can learn to manage is a huge help.

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I've written about the busyness issue here before. Being busy, which is often different from working hard, is a common condition that, oddly enough, can keep us from actually doing things.

Well, I'm going to write about it again.

Finding Your Sweet Spot: How to be Happier and More Productive--By Doing Less appeared in The Globe and Mail earlier this year. It's an interview with Christine Carter, a sociologist at UC Berkely who has written The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and at Work. According to the article, "the sweet spot" is a sports reference, the "ideal place where power and ease meet." Carter suggests that people identify the minimum they need to do in order to be effective, presumably their sweet spot. More is not necessarily better.

Carter uses the terms “maximizers” and "satsificers".  She says maximizers are people who collect all the information they can find before making a decision. Satsificers are people who determine criteria for success and then  stop looking for information once they meet it. If I end up reading this book, I'd like to see how these two ideas can be applied to writing.

I tend to become interested in concepts I've already dabbled with myself. A couple of years ago, I had to determine a baseline of home maintenance I could live with and just work to that, because I had only one day a week that I wasn't working or doing elder care. I couldn't do my share of house and yard maintenance in one day and have any kind of a personal/recreational life. Last fall when I came back from vacation I was in better physical shape than I'd been in before I left because of all the biking and walking I'd done while I was away. Since I was stronger and had better endurance, I tried to exercise harder so I could exercise for a shorter period of time each day.

So you can see that the concepts Carter writes about grab my attention.

She is a supporter of the unit system, too. Like Tony Schwartz, she advocates 90-minute units.

Finding Your Sweet Spot could be a good summer time management read for me.

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The Myth of 9-to-5 Writing: Why Butt in the Chair May Not Work by Nikki Stern at Talking Writing describes Stern's experience with managing writing time. After having to start getting up and moving every hour because of osteoarthritis, she noticed that she was coming back to work sharper after the breaks, sharper than when she was "pushing through" and putting her butt in a chair for the 9 to 5 hours she'd expected to put in writing.

Stern refers to Tony Schwartz. "Schwartz believes the focused ninety-minute approach is the optimal way to work productively. He cites classic studies by sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman—particularly Kleitman’s 1960s observations of the basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC)—as the biological basis for recommending that workers take a break to rest and refresh every ninety minutes." We've talked about Schwartz's ninety-minute thing before here.

Ninety minutes, folks. That's a unit of time.

One of the interesting things about breaking your work time into units, whether they are ninety minutes long, forty-five minutes, twenty minutes, or something else, is that there is research, such as that cited above, to support it. I haven't seen any research about butt in chair.

An unrelated interesting note from Stern's essay: She says that a C. Northcote Parkinson came up with the expression “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” in the 1950s. Betty Friedan said that about housework in The Feminine Mystique at a later period, something I've never forgotten.  Presumably she was paraphrasing Parkinson and so I have been, too, all this time?

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You know how I'm always talking about how we can't set hardcore schedules, we must adapt to the ever changing situations that are our lives. Well, I am. For me, this week is a case in point.

A family member made a quick and successful trip to the ER this weekend. While he is well on the road to recovery, he is recovering, and I'll be helping out with some of his elder care responsibilities and other life chores. This week just happens to be one in which I had appointments digging into my work time, anyway.

1. I know I can't do everything I normally do in this particular situation, and I don't enjoy trying and failing to do so as much as I used to. Feeling busy and overwhelmed doesn't really attract me much.
2. I think I might be better off focusing on just a couple of work-related things this week so I can try to make some real progress on them instead of struggling with a number of things and not getting too far with any of them. Practically speaking, I think it's a better move. Emotionally it will be, too. Or not.
3. I've decided that in this type of situation, blogging may not be the best use of my time.  Even though I do most of my blogging in the evening, I have a promotional plan for next month that I could be working on then that might be a better work choice.

Thus, I will be back on Friday to report how things went. 

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Procrastinating on a Writing Project? Use the 300-Words Trick by Charlie Gilkey is short and sweet. He suggests a reason writers may procrastinate and gives three methods for dealing with it, so they can get right to work.

Reason for Procrastinating

Gilkey thinks many writers put off getting started with work because they don't think they'll be able to finish. I think procrastinating for writers comes about when they don't know what they're going to write next. (Maybe that's just me.) But we may be talking about the same thing. If you don't know what you're going to write next, you're sure going to have some questions about whether or not you're going to be able to finish.

The Gilkey Method of Dealing with Procrastination

1. Make yourself write 300 words. This sounds similar to the old Swiss Cheese Method of time management. It's a way to get started, and no law says you have to stop.
2. If you can't write 300 words of straight narrative, you can write something about your narrative. I would add that you can also make lists of things that could happen somewhere in your narrative. A list of dialogue, actions, and reactions, for instance. Why, I did that just this afternoon.
3. And if you can't write 300 words of narrative or lists, you can write some commentary on the structure of what you're working on. Hmm. I think that would have to be 300 words on how I've put things together wrong and how I can fix it.

The reason techniques like this help? Procrastination is about not being able to start. Three hundred words is starting.

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Someone, I won't mention any names but he knows who he is, suggested that the What Did You Do This Week, Gail? posts I've been doing once a week lately are not his favorite part of Original Content. They're becoming a favorite of mine. I've been staying on my goals and objectives this past month and a half or so, and those check-in posts are the reason why.

The last few years I've been checking on my goals and objectives quarterly or, once, not until the six-month point. I sometimes found myself rushing around in the fall to try to catch up on goals, and particularly objectives, that I'd forgotten about. I'm spreading the work around to a much greater extent this year by checking so much more frequently.

I got the idea for this from 18 Minutes by Peter Bregman. He suggests doing this goal evaluation daily. Weekly is all I can manage right now, and even that is helping.

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Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach In One by Ryan Boudinot received quite a bit of attention, of one kind or another, from two different groups on my Facebook wall this past week. I have never been part of a MFA program, so I can't even pretend to address what he has to say about them. I will, however, address what he had to say about time.

Yeah, That Was Harsh

"If you complain about not having time to write," Boudinot said in bold, "please do us both a favor and drop out." While expanding on that thought, he said, "My experience tells me this: Students who ask a lot of questions about time management, blow deadlines, and whine about how complicated their lives are should just give up and do something else. Their complaints are an insult to the writers who managed to produce great work under far more difficult conditions than the 21st-century MFA student."

Talk about insulting.

I have heard others disparage people with, shall we say, "time management issues." They seem to believe that those who can't manage their time suffer from some kind of moral failing. Certainly, they are "other," not like the people who perceive themselves as being time masters.

Why Time Shaming Is So Very Odd

 

What I find particularly interesting about this situation is that there are so many workable time management techniques. Psychologists have studied procrastination and impulse control problems it is related to. There is even writing process related to writing faster, which has a definite impact on how much writers can do with the time they have. Why, then, do people in positions to help writers treat those who wonder how they can find the time to write as if they just lost some kind of life lottery by merely asking the question?

I can only speculate, of course.

1. We are a very them-or-us type of culture.  "I write at the drop of a hat, you don't. I know I'm good, so you must be bad." See also: Organic vs. plotting writers. Lots of arguments over whether or not one writing method is better than the other.
2. The shamers simply don't know anything about time management. Not knowing something makes them uncomfortable, knocking down someone else makes them feel better.

One final speculative question:  Why not teach writers how to manage their time?

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For the last two weeks I've been writing about physical and temporal space, the connection between where we write and when we write. This whole thing was inspired by an LA Times essay called Susan Straight On Learning to Write Without a Room of One's Own. The A Room of One's Own part of that title is a reference to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, a lengthy essay (I still have two sections to read) about women and fiction. A Room of One's Own has a closer connection to another recent essay, "Sponsored" By My Husband: Why it’s a Problem That Writers Never Talk About Where Their Money Comes From by Ann Bauer in Salon than it does with Straight's.

Why? Woolf may have used "room of one's own" in her title, but what she actually said in her essay was "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." It's quite a terrific essay, if you can get past her streaming away to discuss eating in restaurants. What she writes about is male privilege throughout history and how it kept women from even being able to put pen to paper. (She does a great sort of historical evolution of women's writing.)

Bauer talks about privilege and writing in our own time, meaning writers of both sexes who have financial support, usually through family. They, or I should say, we, don't have to generate income to provide for ourselves or others. We have the money Woolf said we needed.

Now writers have managed to produce good work without the privilege of possessing money and a room. We need a Room of One's Own type of essay about them. But putting them aside, what, exactly, does privilege do for writers who do possess it?

It buys us time.

Woolf recognized lack of privilege as the problem for women writers that it was in the past and often still is in the present. Bauer recognizes that denying that there are privileged writers today does a disservice to all the writers struggling without it.

I have a new obsession, now. This one is with Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

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Last week I wrote about the relationship between place and time. "Where we work," I said, "is often related to when we work." Sometimes we don't choose the places we work. Sometimes we work in them because we just happen to be in them when we have time to work.

I have been obsessing about this all week. You're not surprised, you say? Oh. You find me obsessive.

Yeah, well, here's the thing. If we can recognize that we don't have to have a "room of our own" as Susan Straight said in the essay that inspired last week's post, time opens up for us. If you can work on your lunch hour, in waiting rooms, in front of the TV (which I'm doing right now), on vacation, while the baby is sleeping, during your commute, you'll have a lot more time than you will if you can only work in that room of your own.

By the way, the whole "room of your own" thing is a reference to Virginia Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own, which appears (I've finished reading half of it) to be about feminism and privilege rather than physical space. Next week I'll be writing about privilege and time because the obsession continues.

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The LA Times recenly carried Susan Straight's essay On Learning To Write Without A Room Of One's Own. In it, Straight explains that she's written on rocks while on vacation, at card tables in student housing, and in various vehicles while waiting for her children at one practice or another. Allison Williams picks up on the topic of where she writes in a short piece at Brevity. She makes the connection between "physical and temporal spaces." Temporal. Time.

Where we work is often related to when we work. For instance, writing in a car because you have to wait for your kid to finish soccer has far more to do to with when than where. You aren't working in your car because you like working in your car. You're working in your car because you have some time to use while you're in your car. The car is kind of beside the point. Working in doctors' waiting rooms (as I wish I had this morning--I ended up with forty minutes in one), in the evening in a vacation motel room, or on your sister's couch after you get her kids to sleep all happen because that's where we happen to be when we find ourselves with time for work. We didn't seek out those places. We were just in them.

Which leads me to wonder, which is more important? Place or time?

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Last week I forgot to bring a book with me to the Laundromat. What to do so I wasn't wasting that precious wash time looking at old magazines? Why I whipped out my trusty iPhone and looked up one of my favorite will power people, Kelly McGonigal. iPhones are wonderful, by the way. So is the Internet. Don't let anybody make you feel guilty about loving those things.

Anyway, it turns out that McGonigal was interviewed at Life Hacker for a series called How I Work. One of the things she was asked was "What everyday thing are you better at than anyone else?" Her response was, "Productive procrastination. Often when I should be writing a chapter or preparing a talk, I decide instead to do a deep dive on some random scientific topic..." And that topic may led to her writing articles or starting some sort of project.

I looked at Ira Glass's How I Work interview and saw something similar.  At one point, he says, "I procrastinate by working." By which he means he'll look over contracts or make business calls that aren't as important as the writing he needs to be doing.

If I had all the time in the world (ha-ha), I'd skim all the How I Work interviews to see how many of these people talk about productive procrastination.

Now, when you have a big job with a deadline, you have to find a way to stay on task and get through it. However, we're not always on deadline. When McGonigal and Glass are off task, they still manage to crank out a lot of work. What I find interesting is that when they procrastinate, they are not checking out Kate Middleton's maternity clothes or trying to figure out who the actress was who had a nonrecurring role in the TV show they were watching the night before. They are, in McGonigal's case, researching something like "What’s the latest animal research on the brain’s default mode network?" or, in Glass's, doing some other type of work, work that does need to be done. They are both working when they procrastinate. They do something with their procrastination.

The trick here, I think, is to train yourself to work when you just have to take a break from the main event. Writers, particularly published writers who have to market themselves, have plenty of work they can be doing. The problem is making sure that "other" work doesn't then become the main event. You don't want productive procrastination to become an excuse to avoid a major project.

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As of 7:45 AM, we still have power. Some significant snow is coming down right now, and it looks as if we've had 8 inches or more. So far so good.

Today I'm directing you to my guest post Ditch Resolutions for the New Year and Create Some Goals and Objectives for Your Writing at 10-Minute Novelists. I go over the difference between goals and objectives and why they're both better than New Year's resolutions.

The post appeared on January 8th.

I'll be shoveling snow soon.

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My sister subscribes to numerous magazines that get passed on to me. Oprah is included. I find Oprah odd because it carries articles on how to be your best you along with others promoting purchasing quite expensive things. I feel there's a mixed message in there. Pricie stuff is inspiring? You can ignore that part, though, and just read the multiple pages on books the mag carries every month.

While I was making my way to the book section in the January issue, my eye was caught by some  lengthy material that seemed to be about dieting. Dieting is not managing time. However, remember that procrastination, a major aspect of time management, is a self-regulation issue and similar to overeating (as well as gambling and trouble with managing money). I've found that a lot that's written about these other problems with self-regulation can be used to address managing time.

Say, for instance, the shortie Oprah article Bad Habits? They're Actually Solutions. (Sorry, the Oprah Magazine website doesn't carry a lot of its print content, so no link for you.) Deborah Grayson Reigel is referred to in it. Grayson Riegel argues that bad habits are solutions we come up with for dealing with some other problem. They're just not very good ones. "Diet Coke provides energy when you're tired; fast food saves time when you're too overscheduled to plan, prepare, and cook a meal;" The trick is to identify the problem your bad habit is solving and then come up with something better to replace it.

A True Life Example From My True Life

Don't think this bad-habits-as-solutions-to-problems business can possibly relate to time management? When I read that article, I immediately recognized a former bad habit in myself. And, of course, I'm about to tell you all about it.

I used to spend an hour to an hour and a half in the morning going to a couple of news sites and Salon and then playing several hands of on-line solitaire before I started to work. I would often play solitaire until I won. A couple of times. This was pre-Facebook and Twitter, by the way. I rationalized this by describing it as being part of my pre-writing process. I needed this to relax. Then I would work, work, work.

I was unable to shake that behavior until I was working on the Time Management Tuesday project and started reading about transitional time. Transitional time is that time we need to move from one project/activity to another, especially if it requires a big mental shift. Spots of transitional time occur off and on all day. If you work outside the home, you need to transition to the workplace once you get there and then transition again when you get back home after work. If you've ever dealt with kids getting home from school, you've probably seen big transition issues with either unpleasant behavior or exhaustion.

In my particular case, that bad morning work habit wasn't so much about procrastination as it was about difficulty making the transition to work. I was able to replace all that on-line reading and game playing with fifteen minutes of office clean-up each day. I seem to like that and appreciate the benefit. It got something positive done, and I was able to slip into work afterward.

This past year, I tried replacing the fifteen minutes of office clean-up with a twenty-minute writing sprint. Disaster. Everything fell apart, and I was back to a troubled transition. I'm doing office administration again now and much happier with it.

I still need to come up with a new behavior for the end of the work day, when I tend to blow off time checking out various sites on-line. This month I'm trying to "reward" myself for the end of the workday with a short yoga practice. I've been having trouble fitting that into my life, anyway, and I find transition time to be one of the few ways we really "find" time that we can do something with. Jumping up from the computer to get onto the yoga mat may take care of my afternoon transition.

So, think about your bad work habits. You know you have at least one. What is it actually doing for you and how can you replace it with something better that will do the same job?
 

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It is the first Tuesday of 2015, an appropriate time, in my mind, to be talking about this year's goals and objectives. If it feels as if I'm late to this topic, it's because I've seen more talk about goals from writers this last month than I think I ever have before. Go! Go! Goaaaaals!

One year's goals should be influenced by what happened the year before. Even though my first three goals last year involved generating new writing, I am not pleased with how successful I was with reaching them. I'm going to be more careful about creating objectives for those writing goals this year. I'm far more specific about how many things I'm going to do and when I'm going to do them and even when I'm going to work on them.

Notice also that I have six goals, as I did last year. Half of those goals don't involve writing but, rather, the business of writing. This is a big issue for writers. A writer can be very busy while doing little writing.

And, finally, I cannot say this too often: Goals are what you want to do. Objectives are the tasks you undertake to meet those goals.

Goal 1. Generate New Work: Complete a draft of the so-called mummy book

Objectives:

• Commit the bulk of each week's work to this project for the first quarter of the year.
• Revise the first nine chapters that I completed last year in order to bring myself up to speed with this project.
• Plan scenes and chapters ahead in order to speed up the work and make it generally easier.
• Plan scenes around action, character, theme, revealing new information, and moving story forward.
• Bring pages of this project to my monthly writers' group.

Goal 2. Generate New Work: Complete two to three short pieces

Objectives:

• Set aside a few days a month specifically for this type of writing
• January--Go through files and journals and pick a few pieces to work on 

Goal 3. Generate New Work: Do another revision of adult Becoming Greg and Emma

Objectives: 

• Shoot for starting this in June. A summer unit.

Goal 4. Make submissions

Objectives:

• Submit The Fletcher Farm Body to a specific editor by the end of January.
• Commit a few units of time every Friday (limiting this kind of work to Fridays) to researching short story/essay markets.
• Maintain a Friday Marketing Research file in journal to speed up work on preceding objective.
• Submit a short work every month to avoid binge research/submissions. (Binging takes time away from writing and requires a big effort to bring myself back up to speed with the writing projects I've put aside in order to binge.)
• Follow short story writers and essayists on Twitter to note where they are publishing.
• Begin agent search for Becoming Greg and Emma.

Goal 5. Continue to work on community building

Objectives:

• Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar
• Get Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar newsletter going by March.
• Attend Marketing Your Brand (NESCBWI) program on March 7.
• As part of Friday promotional work, find new ways to promote workshops I offer. (I try to limit promo work to Fridays.)
• Continue activities with 10-Minute Novelists groups
• Continue building Twitter presence.
• Now that the Facebook Author page is gone, be more proactive with blog, content and promotion.
• Improve my skills as writers' group member.

Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook

Objectives:

• Use Twitter to make a presence for myself with groups with environmental interests.
• Continue the Environmental Book Club whenever possible.
• Look into taking book down from Barnes & Noble and Kobo to take advantage of Kindle. marketing for books exclusive to that company.
• Look into the expense involved with printing a paper edition. (This would involved negotiating with the cover artist, since our contract only involves a digital edition.)
• Check out 10 Tips for Selling Your Book on Amazon 
• Contact more bloggers/sites for promotional opportunities when appropriate.

So that's pretty much what I expect to be doing this year. Oh, wait. But not next week. Next week I'll be on retreat.

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For the last couple of years, I've been doing recapitulation posts at the end of December. I got the idea from an article in Yoga Journal. These posts are opportunities to go over the goals and objectives I created at the beginning of the year and to determine how far I got in reaching them. This is not a beat-yourself-up opportunity. It's all about time. Assessing what we've achieved during a particular unit of time (say, a year) is useful in helping to plan what we're going to do in another unit of time (say, next year).

Remember, the goals you'll see here are what I wanted to do. The objectives were the actual tasks I planned to do that would lead to achieving the goals. Notice I only had six goals. How hard could it be to do six lousy things?

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

Assessment: I met this goal. I think I met it twice. I believe I did a second revision halfway through the year relating specifically to scenes and chapters. I've revised this thing a lot. It's kind of a blur.

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

Assessment: I was dreading assessing this goal, but the results may not be as bad as I thought. I did write the Statics and Dynamics for Writers essay and even submitted it a couple of places, for what good it did me. I also spent way too much time on a piece of flash fiction and wrote a guest post for another blog. I just didn't pick up on many of these possible objectives that I had in mind last year. Quite honestly, I don't even remember what my thinking was regarding the Your On-line Friend short story. I hope I made some notes for that somewhere. Did I meet this goal? Define "number of short pieces."

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  

Assessment: I got nine chapters into a draft for this one. Didn't meet the goal, but made progress. And since I'm working on this project again now, I'm feeling warm and fuzzy about it.

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

Assessment: I did seventeen submissions this year, which wasn't bad for me. This included submitting The Fletcher Farm Body to agents, at least two of whom asked to see more of the project, and submissions of short work to journals. I really went on a submission binge in November. For my efforts I have one guest post coming up next month. I'm going to say this goal was met, though I'd like to spread submissions out more over the course of the year and do less binging.

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 

Assessment:  This one I made some real progress on, though not necessarily with the objectives I have here. I didn't make it to any other authors' marketing events or any professional events (that I recall), but I prepared two new presentations, one that was prepared for and given at a library this past summer and one on preparing for NaNoWriMo that I gave at an elementary school in November. I also found and joined an incredible writers' group. I joined the 10-Minute Novelist Facebook group and was invited to join  The Connecticut Women Writers Facebook group. I make use of Google+ communities whenever I can and am kind of into Twitter. Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar continues, so let's call this one done.

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

Assessment:  Well, I hit all but the last objective. My blog contacts resulted in coverage for Saving the Planet & Stuff at Connecticut GreenScene and Reduce Footprints. There's a possibility of a third blog giving it some attention. I'm using Twitter to network with environmental groups. And I ended up making two appearances this summer that were all about promoting STP&S. So while there isn't a lot of movement with this book, I'm going to call this goal met, too.

An Overall Assessment Of My Year

I did a lot but not that much generating of new work. I struggled with time early in the year because of health issues, then I had an opportunity to make an appearance that required a lot of preparation. And then I had another. And then a workshop I proposed got picked up, so I had to actually plan and prepare it. Those appearances could lead to more work, but they still took time away from writing. I was on vacation for nearly three weeks in September. I came up with a few ideas that could lead to writing in the future, but I wasn't writing while I was on the road.

This assessment of how I spent my time last year will have an impact on the plans I make next week for how I spend my time next year.

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Two years ago, I wondered if the unit system would get me through the holidays. My concern was "Losing time to the holidays, in and of itself, is a problem. What also happens, though, is that we can damage our work habits while not working and lose any carry-over flow we might have been experiencing." A week later I was reporting a major failure of will, self-discipline that had gone down in flames. Last year I wondered if sprinting and a new laptop would enable me to stay on task through the December holidays. It looks as if I never addressed how I did with this issue here at OC, probably because I was engulfed in a moderate health care crisis from the middle of December until the end of January.

So, two points:

• I have major problems dealing with the demands of end of the year holidays
• I'm still trying to deal with those problems with small units of work time again this year

My Major Problems With The End Of The Year Holidays

My control of my time is so tenuous that anything new that enters the playing field, like a holiday that requires hours and days and weeks of preparation, like two of them coming a month apart, is overwhelming. December/the Christmas season packs a double whammy, because in addition to being very time consuming, it involves an emotional toll. Christmas the secular event is supposed to be magic, whatever the hell that is. We're supposed to be creating magic. Yeah, we're talking a whole other level of time with the magic thing.

And we're supposed to be creating magic while we're maintaining a day job. Those of us who don't have traditional day jobs, who work for ourselves, in our homes, often have trouble controlling the boundary between home and work, anyway. It's all too easy to justify slipping over the border into work time to finally get started on cookies or get those gifts wrapped because cookies and gifts are magical. Magic is worth it, isn't it?

The Unit System

As the magic bleeds all over our days, sucking our work's life blood, small units of work time become more and more important. If we try to think in terms of a work week, we run the risk of hitting the What-the-Hell Effect. Oh, we don't have all week because of one holiday problem after another. What the Hell? We might as well forget about work then. The same is true of thinking in terms of a workday. At some points in December, we can't get many of those. So what the Hell? Why work at all?

But if you think in terms of forty-five, twenty, and even ten minute units of time, suddenly work options appear. Forty-five minutes at least a few times a week will work for editing a draft or maybe even progressing with  a new one. Twenty minute sprints each day can help keep you in a new project, even if you can't make a lot of forward movement with it. It can make a dent in blog posts or take care of some professional reading. Ten-minute sprints on a laptop set up in whatever room you're working magic in can allow you to knock off all kinds of work. 

So far, this is working for me. At least, it's working as far as work is concerned. I don't seem to be getting much magic done, though.

Hmm. I might use a tiny sprint this weekend to plan a rerun for next week's Time Management Tuesday post on the 23rd. On the 30th, I'll be doing a recapitulation post for my 2014.  

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If you visited CNN's website today, you may have read an article today called Work-life Balance is Dead by Ron Friedman, a social psychologist who has a brand new book out, The Best Place to Work. He says that the idea of work remaining something that's done outside the home is a fairy tale. Well, it certainly is for writers. "Until we come to terms with the fact that separating work from home is a fantasy, we can't begin to have an intelligent conversation about what it means to create thriving organizations," he writes.

He's talking about traditional work sites where people go to work, to do something that they don't do at home. For writers, our work sites usually are in our home. Which is why you sometimes hear about writers heading out to coffee houses and libraries for mini-retreats. They're trying to escape the home demands or the home habits so they can work more. Or, as Friedman might say, they're trying to get some control. "...placing employees in control of their schedules encourages them to work during hours when they are most effective." Or perhaps where they are most effective?

Friedman writes that for "many of us, compartmentalizing our work and personal life is simply not possible and not just because of the ubiquity of email. In a growing number of companies, work now involves collaborating with colleagues in different time zones, making the start and end of the workday a moving target."

I would argue that many people can't compartmentalize their work and personal lives because their work is so much a part of their identity that it is their personal life. Of course, I'm going to mention writers here, who are always working, if for no other reason than that they are constantly taking in information that can become a new idea. But if you've known engineers and people in many medical and technical fields, anyone whose job involves solving problems, for that matter, they are often integrating what they're seeing around them with whatever is going on in their work lives.

"Instead of endorsing the work-life balance myth, organizations are far better off empowering employees to integrate work and life, in ways that position them to succeed at both," Friedman concludes. Integrating work and life is pretty much what writers are already trying to do.

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I've written here a number of times about sprinting. Perhaps you've read about my plans for sprinting. Or my speculation as to whether or not sprinting would get me through Thanksgiving, 2013. You may remember that creating a morning sprint habit wrecked my morning office management habit, something that I never recovered from, by the way. And, quite honestly, the whole sprinting thing had pretty much disappeared from my radar recently, possibly because of that lengthy vacation I took in September. But, then, there was last month's excitement over ten-minute sprints on the hour!

Well, I used that ten-minute on the hour thing during the lead-up to Thanksgiving with some good results. Last month I was on a submission binge. During those pre-Thanksgiving days I had my laptop on the kitchen counter and while I was by myself prepping for the Big Day I would stop every hour (at least several times a day, anyway) and do a ten-minute market search. I found two journals appropriate for submissions and submitted manuscripts to them.

This was a revelation, of which I have so many.

In the past, I thought the best part of sprinting on days when writers can't maintain a normal schedule is to allow them to work just enough so they can stay in their projects. Then it won't take them as long to get up to speed again when they can get back to work. That probably is the best part of sprinting. But in the chaos of family and day jobs, getting into a real work project for even just twenty minutes (the traditional sprint time) can be way too much, in my experience, at least.

But what about using some ten-minute sprints for some of the many other tasks writers need time for?

• Market research
• Submissions
• Getting started on blog posts
• Twitter work--those welcomes to new followers and thank yous for retweets and favorites, following new people yourself. There's masses of Twitter work

All these chores suck up time we could be using for work. If we can find a way to knock some of them off during periods when we can't do traditional writing, that should free up our traditional writing time for writing.

Well, shouldn't it?

We will see.

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Over scheduling is a classic time suck. It's also a big reason writers have trouble finding time for their work. We commit too many hours to various professional and personal activities. Our time is gone. Sometimes it disappears because we take on too much all by ourselves. Sometimes it goes because we're asked for it and say, "Sure."

Christine Carter has a blog post, 21 Ways to "Give Good No", at Greater Good in which she deals with this issue. I wasn't so interested in the "21Ways" that appear in Part Two of the post. Parts One and Three were another thing.

Plan How Much Time You Can Take Away From Work

In Part One of her article, Carter says it's easier to say no "when we have a concrete reason for doing so—a way to justify our refusal." "...we need to create the reason for saying no before we need it—we need a decision making structure, or “rules” to guide us so that we don’t have to agonize over every invitation." She talks about planning ahead for how many social invitations you can accept during the course of the week, then saying no to the rest. Also plan when you're going to work and say no to any requests that will conflict with your work time.

I've written here about writers working for free and being asked to work for free. If you want to be able to support some organizations with free work or appearances, you can plan ahead for how much of your time you can afford to give away. When you've reached your limit, say no to additional requests.

Your Decision Is Made. Move On.

In Part Three, Carter says, essentially, say no and stop thinking about it. "...when we make a decision in a way that allows us to change our minds later, we tend to be a lot less happy with the decisions that we make." Perhaps because the decision isn't really made if we can make a different one down the line? Forget about being happy with a decision. If the door is left open, the decision is still hanging over you, is it not? How time consuming and energy depleting is that?

So make your plan so you can make a decision. And when you've made a decision, get back to work.
 

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I've written about sprinting a couple of times here. Then in the mad rush of life, it sort of drifted out of my consciousness as a regular time management technique.

This weekend, however, I was nursing a mild cold I wanted to get rid of (and pretty much have) and noticed that the 10-Minute Novelists Facebook community I belong to was doing a Saturday sprint event. This was to help NaNoWriMo participants punch up their word counts. Their plan was to sprint at the top of each hour and then do what they had to do on a Saturday until the top of the next one. Then they'd sprint again.

I was lolling around on a couch next to a wood stove with my laptop, anyway, so though I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, I decided to go with it. It was ten minutes before one when I heard about this, so I didn't have a lot of time to prep my mind. So I went to work on blog posts. By the end of the weekend, I had done one for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Now, in hindsight, I believe the other members of the group were doing twenty minute sprints. I only did ten minutes each hour because, well, I was sick and this was a 10-Minute Novelist group. Nonetheless, over the weekend I finished yesterday's somewhat lengthy blog post, which is terrific because I'm killing most of my evenings on blog posts. I'd like to be doing some reading then.

Today (Monday) I had to be away for a chunk of time on family business. I worked in a bit better than ten-minute sprint on this post for Tuesday before I left this morning, and I'm back for another ten minutes (and more, as it turned out) this afternoon.

Now, I wouldn't like to work like this all the time. Of course, I can get a lot more done in forty-five-minute units than in ten or twenty. Twenty- or even ten-minute sprints are a situational time management technique for those days when you're going to be hard put to find forty-five minutes because your work and personal life are out of balance and your personal time is bleeding into your work time. For those people who want to write every day, to encourage their creativity and keep their minds in their projects, as well as make progress on them, sprinting could make it possible.

I'm going to try to pay more attention to sprinting in the weeks ahead, both on Saturdays and Sundays and those weekdays when my personal life is overwhelming my work life. (Next week, for instance, which includes Thanksgiving prep, Thanksgiving, and some overnight guests.) For the immediate future, I'm going to focus on getting ahead on blog posts, trying to free up some evening time for other things. That would be nice. Creating some kind of sprinting work habits would be nice, too.

As usual, at some point I'll let you know how I do with that.

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Today my new author talk, Preparing for National Novel Writing Month, Elementary School Edition, made its debut. Things went very well. This photo of the Smart Board I used in a fourth grade classroom doesn't begin to do justice to the slides Computer Guy made for me.

This program grew out of the time management for writers work I've been doing for this blog for several years. My reading on doing more with the time you have, in particular, as well as the studying I've done on plotting over the years (Hmm. I've done a lot of writing about that here.)
became my material for this presentation.

Now, authors give public talks for a number of reasons. Sometimes it's for straight promotion--talking at book fairs, for instance, or building up a presence among groups (say, museum goers) that might be interested in your work. Sometimes it's for straight income. For children's writers, most school appearances fall into that category.

Writer Joanna Penn is well-known on the Internet where she writes about and is interviewed about writing, self-publishing, speaking, the writing business, and all variations thereof. Penn is a speaker and sometimes discusses public speaking as an income stream for writers. (See the preceding paragraph and children's writers in schools.) But I've also either heard her talk or read her writing on using speaking as a way to support writing in less tangible ways. "...being a speaker," she has said, "really helps being known as a thought leader..." I have little ambition to the thought leader title. Close to none, actually. But I do realize that "being known" makes a writer more marketable and more desirable to agents and publishers.

I am between books right now. While I continue to write and submit, it would be very useful if I could also maintain a presence in the childlit world, even if only locally/regionally. Speaking could be a way to do that. A children's writer who doesn't have print books available for book sales isn't going to get traditional speaking engagements at schools and libraries. What kind of speaking could I do that would keep me known among teachers and librarians? I realized this summer that I had the Situational Time Management Workshop I ran for the NESCBWI last year that came about because of my Time Management work here and that some of the work I've done here would also apply to National Novel Writing Month.

So the blog may lead to speaking, which could lead to promotional/income opportunities. I will keep you posted.

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