Time is a precious commodity and anybody would love to have more of it. If you’re a writer, it becomes even more important. Writing has you facing deadlines all the time and with writer’s block being something that you can’t predict or schedule, you have to really optimize your time if you want to get any work done. If you’re in the same situation, here are 5 tips to optimize your time as a writer:
1. Set goals
Many writers waste a lot of time because they don’t have clear goals, which means they don’t have something to work towards to and thus waste time and effort on the wrong things. You need to set goals. If you’re having trouble meeting the big goals, you can divide them into smaller chunks. For example, a goal that requires you to finish a 10 page paper in a week can be chopped up into smaller goals: 2 pages per day.
2. Keep copies of your old articles
You don’t have to do your research every single time you have a new project on queue. If you’ve been writing for a long time, chances are you have an old article that has already tackled the topic. Bring them out and review the information you gathered the first time around. You just need to double-check now for accuracy (in case new information becomes available) instead of starting from scratch. However, make sure you just use your old articles as reference and as a brainstorming tool. Don’t be tempted to rewrite the old article and just pass it off as new work.
3. Keep a writing tool with you at all times
In the past, this could be something as clunky as a pen and a paper but these days’ even smartphones have working word processors, so this is a no-brainer. The muse could strike any time, and it will help you if you’re always exercising your writing chops. So jot (or tap) things down if you feel like they could be useful somewhere down the road.
4. Take breaks
When you’re working, it can be very tempting to work at breakneck speeds just so you can finish everything and finally have some time to relax. Don’t. Take breaks every once in a while and work at your own pace. It can be very easy to burn yourself out doing this, especially since writers generally don’t run out of work to do – as soon as you finish writing one piece, you have another in the pipeline. Working as fast as you can just to get things done and over with will only leave you open to amateur proofreading mistakes and roughshod quality.
5. Finish a draft first before tweaking content
Writing is usually a never-ending task. There’s always room for more improvement and there are things that worked fine before, but could work better with a few little changes. If you keep going through your work every paragraph, or chapter just to tweak the content for the better, you could end up losing a lot of time to rewrites that would be negated later anyway. This gets worse due to the fact that when you get farther up the story, changing small things means that you’d have to go back and change other parts of the work just to keep things consistent. So, finish a working draft first before going back and tweaking the content. This way, you have a clearer idea of where things should go and you only need to make one pass for consistency if you change things.
Image credit: Bart Hiddink on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]