Are you trying hard to work on your next story, but falling short of time? Are you finding it difficult to devote some meaningful hours to your writing, and you feel bad about it? Don’t worry, this happens to the best of us. Here are a few time management tips that will help you spend some time daily on your writing.
1. Set a Time
First of all, you need to identify a certain time of the day when you ideally would want to do your writing. It may not be easy to follow the schedule daily, but it helps to have a schedule ready, so that you know when you are supposed to be writing. The schedule may vary as time goes on, but you will definitely get more writing done if you have a regular writing time. For this, you need to figure out the “zone” or a time when you are at your productive best. For most people, this is early in the morning, say between 9 am and 11 am, but it may vary. Ideally, you would like to get your writing done as early on in the day as possible, to avoid missing out on it later in the day.
2. Snap-Writing
If you are having trouble following your scheduled time for writing, or even if you have a good working schedule, writing on the go helps quite a bit. The key here is not to fall into a habit of writing only during your scheduled time of the day. Say you’ve got half an hour between a few errands, or an hour on the train or at home. All of this time is useful for writing. Always carry a notepad with you wherever you go, you never know when you may find some time to spare, and end up writing a few paragraphs of your story. Snap-writing may require you to write in different locations and environments, you need to be prepared to write at any place and time of the day.
3. Maintain Your Momentum
This is important, particularly if you adopt snap-writing. Any form of writing requires a certain momentum to be built and maintained during the course of the whole assignment. If you miss a couple of days of writing, the whole momentum is lost, and you need to make extra efforts to start from scratch. Thus, it is highly important that you maintain your momentum. Make sure you slip in a couple of hours of writing each day, and build on the momentum. No matter how busy you are, do something related to your writing work every day, even if it means re-reading a chapter or two of your current work.
4. Say No
Stop agreeing to take on things for which you don’t have time. You need to prioritize your work, and manage your time between the more important ones. If you don’t have time for a particular job, do not take it up. If you do, it will take your focus away from your other, higher priority jobs. So, it is better if you just say no, and do not take up the task at all.
5. Keep Track of Time
Finally, it is imperative that you note how much time is being lost on unimportant activities, where most of your interruptions come from, and how much time do you require a day for writing. Once you figure out all this, it will be much easier for you to identify the times of the day which you spend idle, and where the interruptions come from, and you can work on these aspects to improve or increase your writing time.
Image credit: Fabíola Medeiros on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0
Pranay Kanagat is a freelance writer who has a love for writing on various subjects. In particular, he enjoys creative writing. He is also studying for an Engineering degree.