Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

In yesterday’s blog post, I outlined a strategy for creating the synopsis for your novel. I talked about identifying the “sequences of scenes” and summarizing each sequence in a paragraph.

Let’s look at how this plays out in practice. I’m looking right now at the synopsis that John Olson and I wrote for our novel OXYGEN. I remember writing this very well. We’d been doing research for several months, and most of the proposal was written, but we still needed to pull the synopsis together. And we were working long-distance. Then I had a chance to go up to a conference in San Francisco, just across the Bay from John’s house. So I took some time away from the conference and took BART over to meet with John for several frenetic hours of editing.

Here’s the first paragraph we wrote:

The year is 2014. Valkerie Jansen, a young Christian microbial ecologist, is presented with an amazing opportunity—to continue her research as a well-paid member of the NASA corps of astronauts. Broke, and burdened with enormous medical school loans, she accepts a position on the backup astronaut crew for Ares 10, the first manned mission to Mars.

This summarizes the first 7 scenes in only 3 sentences. The climax of that sequence is Valkerie’s decision to join NASA as an ASCAN–astronaut candidate. Notice that we don’t mention a single character other than our protagonist, Valkerie. You really can’t introduce tons of characters quickly and expect the editor to remember them.

Notice that we’ve already got the editor on Valkerie’s side–she’s broke, but here’s her chance to pay back those med school loans, by joining NASA.

Our next paragraph looks like this:

Valkerie discovers, beneath NASA’s cool and competent exterior, the paranoia and political infighting of a bureaucratic giant fighting for survival. Steven Perez, the new NASA Administrator, seems more concerned with PR than engineering. Nate Harrington, the flight director, is preoccupied with a security investigation. Bob Kaganovski, first engineer of the Ares 10 crew, is paranoid that he’ll be replaced.

This paragraph is a bit of a cheat. We didn’t cover the next sequence of scenes. Instead, we added a wee bit of background that Valkerie learns over the course of the first sequence of scenes. We’ve earned the right to do that with that strong lead-in paragraph, but in order to move ahead, we simply have to put in some background material.

Here, we introduce three new characters and set the stage for the early conflict. Valkerie has got herself into a rat’s nest of a bureaucracy (something we learned by reading a lot of books even before we visited NASA and saw for ourselves). We’ve introduced three characters here, and I’m not sure that was a great idea because of the confusion factor. One thing that worked in our favor here was the rule of three: By piling on three characters, each of whom brings a different dimension to the conflict, we make it clear that Valkerie’s in a boatload of trouble.

Notice that we are telling here, not showing. What makes it work is that each sentence tells the critical thing you need to know about each character in order to understand the conflict.

With the next paragraph, we pick up the action:

Bob asks Valkerie out to dinner, then realizes that she might be his replacement. At dinner, he tries to be polite, but when he learns that she’s a Christian, his patience wears thin, and he starts an argument, hoping he’ll never see her again. Then Tom Rogers, mission commander of the Ares 10, resigns. Kennedy Hampton, the second in command, will lead the team in his stead. Valkerie is promoted to the Ares 10 prime crew.

With this paragraph, we summarize the next several scenes. We start by highlighting the romantic tension–Bob and Valkerie have a mutual attraction, and a mutual repulsion. With that hook set, we continue the main storyline and get to the point–Valkerie is suddenly thrown onto the mission after the surprise resignation of the team leader. She’s going to Mars!

The next paragraph takes another giant leap forward:

Bob is openly hostile toward Valkerie during her training. It’s clear that Tom was forced to step down from the team, and Bob blames her. When security is mysteriously tightened yet again, Bob investigates. He learns that explosives have been stolen from a NASA supply room. Nevertheless, the launch goes ahead as scheduled.

This summarizes another long “sequence of scenes” that climaxes with the launch. We’ve injected a mystery element here. What’s the deal with those missing explosives? Who could possibly breach the tight NASA security?

The next paragraph begins with our first serious mistake in the synopsis. Let me quote only the first sentence, because it was dead wrong:

After a flawless lift-off, the four astronauts settle into a routine for their six-month voyage, but tension runs high.

What’s wrong? It’s that “flawless lift-off.” We’ve spent several paragraphs ratcheting up the tension, and now we give these boys and girls a flawless liftoff? No, no, and no. This is way wrong.

We noticed this when we started writing the first draft, and felt the tension drain out of the story at liftoff. So we fixed it. In the book, there’s pressure from high up to launch, despite windy conditions that are right on the safety margin. Rather than delay the launch, NASA lets it happen and the high winds cause the rocket to graze the tower on the way up. This damages a fin, which causes turbulence, which causes an extremely rough ride through the atmosphere. The ship undergoes severe vibrations before it reaches a parking orbit around the earth.

Should they abort the mission, or punch the button and continue on to Mars? If they abort, then they waste billions of dollars and give NASA a black eye from which it may never recover. And they lose out on going to Mars. But if there’s a problem with the ship, then they might not even reach Mars alive.

See how much stronger that is than our “flawless liftoff?” So if we were writing the synopsis now, we’d write it this way:

High winds on launch day cause an extremely turbulent liftoff. When the ship reaches a parking orbit around earth, the crew races to check out the ship. Can they continue the mission to Mars, or must they abort? The crew debates hard, then decides to risk continuing. They fire the remaining fuel in the engines and now they’re committed to the three-year journey to Mars.

When the book came out in 2001, there was some discussion by reviewers that our NASA people were making foolish decisions that violated safety procedures. Having studied NASA’s track record up through the 1990s, including its series of poor decisions regarding the Russian Mir space station, we thought our scenario was quite possible. Tragically, (and to our sorrow), we were right. Less than 2 years after our book was published, the Space Shuttle Columbia blew up on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts aboard–after an accident caused by a faulty launch. That same day, a book reviewer wrote this review of OXYGEN, which he finished reading just hours before the Columbia disaster.

I’ve now shown you about half a page of the OXYGEN synopsis. This is roughly a quarter of the synopsis, and it has covered about a quarter of the book.

I hope the procedure for writing the paragraphs of the synopsis is clear. Don’t summarize scenes. Summarize “sequences of scenes,” focusing on the climax of the sequence.

OK, now it’s your turn folks! Go ahead and ask some questions, make your comments, and if you like, post the first three paragraphs of your synopsis and I’ll critique a few of them.

We’ve spent the last couple of days clearing the ground so we could talk about how to write a synopsis for your novel. Today, we’ll get into details.

You are shooting for about 2 single-spaced pages in your synopsis. Let’s do a little math here.

A single-spaced page holds about 500 words, so we’re talking about 1000 words.

Your novel is going to be about 100,000 words, so you want something only 1% the size of a novel. In fact, you want something with about as many words as ONE of your average scenes.

Your novel will have 80 to 100 scenes in it. If you use 1000 words to cover those scenes, then you could only use about 10 to 12 words per scene! That’s about one sentence per scene.

You can’t say much in one sentence, so the fact is that you can’t even summarize every scene and do it justice. So you need a strategy to condense the story even more sharply. I’ll give you that strategy now, but first I need to give you a little background information:

I’ve been rereading Robert McKee’s book STORY recently, gleaning any wisdom I could from him. I had read his book years ago and found it overly complicated. This time, I got a bit more out of it. I have always believed that a story has four different layers of plot, ranging from the highest level down to the lowest level, as follows:
1) The one-sentence summary of the story
2) The 3-Act Structure
3) Scenes
4) Motivation Reaction Units

After rereading McKee, I think there are actually six different layers of plot, as follows:
1) The one-sentence summary of the story
2) The 3-Act Structure
3) Sequences of scenes
4) Scenes
5) Beats (groups of Motivation Reaction Units)
6) Motivation Reaction Units

The important thing to notice is #3 on that second list–Sequences of scenes. What McKee points out is that not all scenes are created equal. Some of them are more exciting and some are less exciting. They actually clump together into sequences of 3 to 5 scenes, in which the tension rises to a peak.

The reason this is important is that if you do the math, you’ll find 20 to 25 sequences in your novel. So if you identify your sequences of scenes and write one paragraph on each one, you’ll have 20 to 25 paragraphs, which should just about fill up 2 pages.

That, therefore, is your strategy for writing a synopsis: Identify the sequences of scenes in your novel and write a paragraph about each one. If you have already Snowflaked your novel, then you have a spreadsheet with one line for each scene. So it should be easy to scan down that spreadsheet and find the sequences.

That’s the strategy. What about tactics? How do you write each paragraph so they all combine to make a dazzling synopsis? We’ll cover tactics tomorrow.

Whoa, lots of questions today! Thanks to everyone who posted comments. First, let me define what I mean by a synopsis and tell you a LITTLE about it. Then I’ll answer some of the questions. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about how I recommend writing a synopsis:

When editors talk about a synopsis, they are referring to a short (2 pages or so) summary of the plot that goes in your proposal. The synopsis should be single-spaced with one inch margins on all four sides, and it should be written in third person present tense. That is the kind of synopsis I’m talking about here.

OK, let me deal with your questions first:

Donna wrote:

Is this the one line synopsis or longer? And what’s the difference between a synopsis and a summary? (Sorry, just got home from work and need sleep. My brain is mushing it all together.)

Randy sez: No, the one-sentence summary is a different animal altogether.

Lois wrote:

I’ve read about three kinds of synopses (which would seem to make the work three times as difficult, or perhaps even exponentially harder).
1) One paragraph, 2) one page, and 3) as many as 15-20 pages. I suppose the one sentence is a form of synopsis as well.

In practicing these forms it would seem that starting with the longer, and working to the shorter would help
distill the essence of the story.

Randy sez: I find it easier to start with the shorter forms and work up to the longer forms. The reason is that it’s easier to polish and edit a short piece than a long one. This is the heart of my Snowflake method.

Gina wrote:

Oops! I just sent off my 24 page single spaced synopsis to Camy Tang for critique (Yes 24, she requested the longer the better!) I’m pretty sure I got inside the characters’ heads, just a bit. I’ll be sure to remember this when I cut it down.

Randy sez: No need to panic! Camy is not an acquisition editor, she’s a freelance editor/critiquer. You can send her whatever she wants and whatever you feel like. Her job is to help you figure out your story structure. An acquisition editor is not paid by the word, however, they are paid to find gems and they are overwhelmed with thousands of manuscripts. Therefore, the quicker they can work through the stack and find the good stuff, the better. That’s why they want a short synopsis.

Camille wrote:

When talking of synops now, are we talking about something you plan to submit to agent or editor, not the one you the writer are using to write your story? Generally speaking, don’t pubbers prefer shorter?

As Randy said, they hate reading them too. I’ve heard it said that they’d rather skip the synop, pick a random spot in the writing, look for red flags in your dialogue, then if that doesn’t gag them, look at the writing, also hunting for red flags. If nothing turns their stomach, then they go back to the synop.

Randy sez: Correct. The one you show to the editor or agent should be a couple of pages. I shoot for 2 pages. The synopsis you use to write your story can be as long or short as you like; it’s for you only and so just use whatever works for you.

Most editors I’ve asked about synopses tell me that the first thing they do when opening a proposal is to look at the sample chapters. If those don’t sing, then it’s bye-bye baby to that proposal, because editors buy great writing, not great synopses. If the writing is good, then they read the proposal, looking for a reason to say no. Is the genre clearly defined and saleable? Is the concept strong? Is the story structure sound (in the synopsis)? You need a yes on all those (and probably a bunch more) in order to get a yes from that editor. I often review manuscripts at writing conferences, and the above is pretty much the order I use to approach the manuscript.

Bonne wrote:

Randy, would the progressively more detailed summaries from the snowflake be adequate for a summary sent to a publisher, or would it need tweaking? If so, what needs to be included? And didn’t you say in Fiction 101 somewhere that editors love to get all the background character stuff, writing the plot summary from each POV?

Randy sez: The one-sentence summary from the Snowflake works great on the first page of your proposal, but it is not a synopsis. It’s the “story premise”.

The one-paragraph summary from the Snowflake also works great on the first page of your proposal, but it is also not a synopsis. It’s just a one-paragraph summary.

The Snowflake calls for writing a one-page synopsis of your storyline. This is for your convenience while developing your story, but it is too short to show to an editor or agent. Expand this one-page synopsis to a couple of pages and show THAT to the editor/agent.

In Fiction 101 and/or Fiction 201, I talked about putting in what I call “character synopses” in my proposal. These are NOT the regular plot synopsis that all editors require. A “character synopsis” is a summary of the backstory and frontstory for a single character. I usually put in 5 to 7 of these in a proposal. Each of them is a third of a page up to a full page, so I shoot for about 3 pages total. “Character synopses” are not conventional; you will not find these mentioned in the usual sources on how to write a proposal. I don’t know if anyone else in the world writes “character synopses,” but I assume some people do. I like them because they tell the editor that this will be a good strong character-driven novel. Editors like that.

Rachel wrote:

I must be crazy, because I enjoy writing synopses! In fact, I’m so busy that I seldom have time to do more than a one-page synopsis of a story. I have several journals full of novel ideas, just waiting to be crafted into full-length books. I like the idea of plotting and structuring stories, and often dream of selling my ideas to someone who would craft them into amazing books. But I also enjoy writing, so I could never bring myself to do such a thing.

Randy sez: A few people love writing synopses. Lucky you, Rachel! My buddy John Olson also loves writing them, which was one reason I enjoyed teaming up with him for two novels. The synopses we wrote together really sang. I’ll talk more about that process tomorrow.

Today, I’m beginning a series of blog posts on writing a synopsis for your novel. One of my readers asked why synopsis writing is hard.

I’ll tell you why it’s hard. Because you just spent years of your life writing a novel, learning the craft of writing fiction, learning about Three Act Structure and Scenes and Sequels and MRUs and how to Show it, not Tell it, getting inside each POV character’s head in third person past tense, double-spaced and now . . .

Now somebody changed the rules on you. All the rules.

A synopsis is single-spaced. A synopsis mostly Tells, rather than Shows. A synopsis is written in third-person, present tense. You do NOT get inside any POV character’s head in a synopsis, because a synopsis does not have any POV characters. There are no Acts visible in a synopis. No Scenes, no Sequels, no MRUs.

Somebody changed all the rules on you, and it’s not fair. A synopsis is a completely different genre from a novel. Forcing a novelist to write a synopsis is like making a sonnet-writer create 4-line Google ads.

That’s why writing a synopsis is hard.

By the way, just about all novelists hate writing synopses. Just about all editors hate reading them. If life were fair, synopses would be done away with.

There is only one reason why a synopsis is required for a book proposal, and that is this: It is the easiest way to see whether the story has a decent structure. If your editor doesn’t hate the story after reading the synopsis, then it may well have a good structure. If you don’t hate the story after writing the synopsis, then it might have a good structure. If either you or your editor hate it, then the structure stinks like rat pudding.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about that pesky structure and how you show it in your synopsis.

We’ve been talking for the last week or so on that pesky scheduling problem and how we writers can manage our lives so we have more time to write.

Carrie wrote:

Of course, the real problem is that I’ve accidentally overscheduled myself. I’m having to finish up old projects I’m not interested in anymore. I took on one that seemed fun but isn’t quite as good as an almost identical project a friend brought me, but now I’m committed.

The things I want to do and the things I’ve agreed to do are not the same thing. Now if I can just figure out how to want to do the things I’ve obligated myself to do, I’ll be doing ok.

Overscheduling happens. The questions I’d be asking myself here are the following:
1) Do those old projects bring in revenue? If so, then they’re Good Things, because we all have to eat and pay the mortgage.
2) Do those old projects help your writing career in any way? If so, then they’re Good Things, whether they’re fun or not.
3) Do those old projects meet your Mission Statement for your writing career? If so, then they’re Good Things. However, if you’re finding them boring, maybe your Mission Statement is too broad.

And if they don’t fit in your Mission Statement, then maybe . . . you should escape them. I don’t know in what sense you’re obligated to do them. There are of course different levels of obligation. One thing I learned in the last year was that I needed to trim my projects down to fit my Mission Statement. In a couple of cases, that meant disappointing friends by backing away from projects that I had wanted to do with them. But the truth is that a project you’re doing that you’re not enjoying may be a project you’re not doing very well.

I’m not encouraging you to back out of firm commitments. But if the commitment is kind of fuzzy, you might do best to find a way to trim it out of your life. And definitely think twice in the future about making commitments that don’t match your Mission Statement. I didn’t have one until this year, and once I wrote it down, I suddenly had a solid reason to say “no” to things that I shouldn’t get involved in. And I continue to say “no” when people come to me with things that sound great but that I shouldn’t be doing because they defocus my efforts.

As many of you know, I learned about Mission Statements (and a whole lot more) from Allison Bottke, who helped me clean up my pesky act and start acting like I was serious about my writing business.

Mary asked today if I could talk about how to write a synopsis for a book proposal. Since I think we’ve about chewed all the sugar out of time management, I think we’ll transition smoothly into synopses tomorrow. If you’ve got questions or comments, post them here and I’ll respond to them.

Several of you had questions after my post yesterday:

Greg wrote:

So my question, then, is this: Do you, or anyone else reading this, know of a good program to use to keep track of all these different time management aids? I’m thinking maybe even just an Excel workbook or an organized series of Word files, but maybe there’s some other productivity tool (for Mac, of course! that would work better?

Randy sez: For awhile I was using a program called “Life Balance” on my Mac. (I think there’s a Windows version too.) It works well for creating multiple To Do Lists, and maybe I should go back to using it. It doesn’t do tracking of time spent on various tasks at all. And furthermore, the computer has to be logged in and the program has to be running in order to use it. So I actually prefer the low-tech way on paper. There’s something viscerally satisfying about crossing out a Task on the ol’ To Do List that you just don’t get with software. I’m tempted to write a program that will just do what I want–no less and no more. (And it’ll make a loud crossing-out noise when I knock off a task, and it’ll do weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual totals of time, so I know where all my hours go. And it’ll learn how much I can handle in a day and insist on scheduling Fun when I start overworking.)

Several of you asked for examples. OK, here’s some detail on how I do it. This is not “The One Right Way To Do It.” This is how I do it, and it works for me. I bet you all can make suggestions to improve it, and many of you will just feel like doing it differently. May a thousand different styles of To Do Lists bloom. But here’s what I’m doing this year:

I bought a bunch of cheap tablets at Office Depot. They’re about 50 sheets apiece, which is plenty. One of them contains my Annual To Do List, along with all the Quarterly and Monthly To Do Lists. On the top sheet, I wrote “Goals for 2007″ and it has six high-level Projects. Here are the first few lines:
1) Do consulting for Vala Sciences
2) Launch Fiction 301 and Fiction 401 products
3) Write one new book

So you can see that these are all high-level. The consulting thing is a continuing project that consumes an average of 10 hours per week. So this will appear on all the other lists, Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily. If I’m out of town, then I don’t put it on the list for that week. If I’m spending a day doing something special, then I won’t put it on the list for that day. But most days, I put in a couple of hours of consulting time.

The Fiction 301 project has been on my lists for Q1 and Q2, but it got bumped because of other things that were higher priority. It’s high on my priority list for Q3, and I expect it to be done by the end of September or early October. So one of the items on my August list is to do the research for Fiction 301. And this week, there’s a line item that says “Work 10 hours on Fiction 301.” Today, there’s a line item (i.e., a Task) that says, “Work 2 hours on Fiction 301.”

As for the book, I’m still composting that idea, so it’s got a line item for August that says to work on the research for the book.

So you can see that the items on my Annual To Do List trickle down to the Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, and Daily lists. If that were all, then those lists would be pretty simple. But each of those lists has some shorter-term Projects on them that don’t rate a line in the Annual list. For example, my Q3 list has a line that says: “Teach on the Alaska cruise, OCW, and ACFW.” This is a reminder to myself to schedule time for three big teaching slots. I didn’t want to clutter up my Annual list with this, because that’s too much detail to put in an Annual list. But it makes sense to put it in a Quarterly list.

Another line item in my Q3 list is “Create teleseminar series with Mary.” That’s a commitment to myself that this quarter I’ll be doing a series of teleseminars with a very accomplished speaker, Mary Byers, on how to create a speaking platform (something that many successful authors use to help sell their books and to earn money). Again, that’s too much detail to go in the Annual list, but it makes perfect sense to put it in the Q3 list, because Mary and I plan to create the content in August and September and then do the teleseminars in October. (My Annual list did have a line item on creating teleseminars, but it didn’t specify with whom or when.)

I have about 10 line items in my Q3 list, and it contains more items like those above. They’re generally more detailed than those on my Annual list (except for those that are recurring items, such as the consulting for Vala Sciences, which always appears all the way down the line.)

My August To Do List is even more detailed. Of course it reminds me to do my consulting. But now it reminds me to redo my 2006 taxes, because there was a tax deduction I forgot to take. And it reminds me to read a certain manuscript by a friend of mine. And it reminds me to negotiate the rights to a certain e-book I want to sell on my web site. And it reminds me to work on the research for Fiction 301. There are 12 items on my August list.

Some of you were concerned about how to prioritize things. The beauty of this cascading series of lists is that it almost prioritizes itself. For example, with 12 items on my August list, I can’t work on all of them all at once. So at the beginning of every week, I look at the August list and choose which ones to work on this week. And this week, there are only six items on my list. Some of them are quite detailed and some are more general. But the important thing is that I automatically chose those items that are most important to work on this week. And last night when I made my To Do List for today, I chose items from the weekly list that were most important to do today.

And if it doesn’t get done today, I bump it to tomorrow’s list. That happens a lot, because life happens. Do your best to knock the most important Tasks off the list every day; have some Fun; push the rest to manana; don’t beat yourself up. That’s the formula for having a good day, every day.

Likewise, if it doesn’t get done this week, bump it to next week. Ditto for the monthly list, the quarterly list, the annual list. As long as you are getting the most important things done on your list, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, who really cares about the other stuff? We all overschedule ourselves. By definition, that means some stuff won’t get done. If you manage your life using cascading lists, the important stuff will get done (eventually) and the unimportant stuff will get bumped. As it should.

I talked to a writer this week who had a To Do List with 100 items on it. How the heck do you prioritize THAT? You can’t. You can barely read the thing. You can’t really maintain a list that size. It’s too much to take in. It’s better to manage multiple lists that cover multiple levels of detail, from the highest strategic level right down to the lowest tactical level.

That’s my theory, anyway. If anyone knows of software that lets you track all of this, then please let us know. I may just have to write it myself.

Yesterday, I talked about the importance of not going at 100% speed all the time. Give yourself some breathing room! If you run your life at an 80% pace, you’ll have gas in the engine when a crisis hits and you need to put out 100% for awhile.

I want to tie up one loose string. Neva asked today in a comment if feeding a horse in the middle of the day counts as a Task. Yes, it does. We all have chores that pop up periodically, whether it’s daily, weekly, or whatever. They’re Tasks. Somebody has to do them. If that’s you, then you have to schedule it. I would guess feeding the horse might even qualify as Fun, but I don’t know. For sure, riding the horse counts as Fun.

I want to talk about those To Do Lists a bit more. I’ve mentioned that I spend all of about 5 minutes every night making the To Do List for the next day. My theory is that my subconscious can start gearing up overnight for those Tasks. A lot of times in the morning, I’ll go soak in the jacuzzi first thing. (Yes, we have a jacuzzi. It’s a luxury I’d never have bought for myself, but it came with the house, and it just didn’t make sense to ask the previous owners to take it away merely because it was too good for us proletarians.) What I find is that sitting in the hot water for a few minutes in the morning gets my brain revved up. Often, I’ll get new and creative ideas in the water and will then be ready to go for the day. (Kind of like Archimedes, who ran out of the bath buck naked yelling “Eureka!”)

But a daily To Do List isn’t really enough to manage my life. I also have a weekly To Do List, which I write in 5 minutes on Sunday nights. Typically, this will list the Projects I’m working on for the week, and any important Tasks. This week’s list has 6 items on it. 3 of those are Projects I’m working on, and I budgeted 10 hours apiece for each one. 2 items are Fun things to do (a book to read, and my Secret Project X). 1 item is to do my email/blogging every day.

I use my weekly To Do List to help me construct my daily To Do List every night. And if there are things that pop up unexpectedly, those also get added to the daily To Do List. I had a few of those this week which I added to my lists as they appeared.

At the beginning of every month, I also write out a monthly To Do List. This typically lists the major projects I want to work on or complete in the month. I use this list every week to guide me in creating my weekly To Do List.

And there is a quarterly To Do List, which I create four times per year, in January, April, July, and October, to list the big projects I want to work on for the quarter. This obviously helps me set my monthly To Do List.

Finally, I have an annual To Do List, which guides me in choosing my quarterly lists.

It should be obvious that the longer the time period that a To Do List covers, the less detailed it is. So my annual To Do List is very strategic, whereas my daily To Do List is very tactical. By using a cascading series of lists, I can manage my life without spending a lot of time micromanaging it. There just isn’t any way to see six months ahead, so it’s important to keep flexible. By using lists with increasing fine details, I manage my life at both the Big Picture and the Little Picture. If you think about it for a second, that’s the Snowflake Method applied to scheduling. In the computer software world, this general method is often called “divide and conquer” and for a certain class of problems, it’s known to be optimal. I can’t prove that it’s optimal for time management or novel design, but I think it works pretty well.

OK, any questions on time management? I probably can’t answer them, but you all are very smart, and I’ll bet that some of you have answers for any question that might be asked.

I talked yesterday about the importance of breaking off chunks of Projects into Tasks, and scheduling them along with all the other “urgent” but unimportant” Tasks in your life. I also talked about scheduling Fun, right along with everything else.

Why is Fun important? Because it’s your reward for doing your Tasks for the day. Lately, I’ve been scheduling fewer Tasks for myself–usually just 3 or 4, and limiting the time scheduled for them to 1 or 2 hours apiece. If I get “most” of those Tasks done in a day (say 3 out of 4), then the Fun is my reward.

You may be saying, “Whoa, Randy, are you only working 4 or 5 hours a day? How could you possibly get anything done?”

The answer is that I’m SCHEDULING about 6 hours per day. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I only WORK that much. (Oh how I wish!) The fact is that crap happens. Oops, spelling error there. I meant “crises happen.”

There was a crisis Monday and I had an extra task thrown on me that burned a couple of extra hours. I had to push aside one Task to the next day. In fact, the crisis persisted on through Tuesday, and I had to again reschedule a Task from yesterday to today because more time got siphoned away on something unexpected. And of course there were several other “small” interruptions — not crises, just little things — that burned up more hours.

If you think about it, that happens to you all the time too. I know it does to me. Crises happen often. Little things pop up all the time. When you’ve got 12 hours of work scheduled for the day, a 2-hour crisis plus 4 hours of interruptions are going to send you right over the top. But if you’ve got only 6 hours scheduled, then there’s room for the little interruptions and a normal, garden-variety crisis. And you still have time for a little Fun. (Despite the crisis on Monday, I still took 2 hours to watch a movie — TWISTER — which was Fun for me.)

All of this brings me to what I call “the 80% solution.” I used to do a lot of long-distance running when I was younger and fitter. And I learned that if you run all-out, you can maintain that pace for only about 100 yards — 10 to 15 seconds. After that, your capacity for anaerobic exercise is drained and you have to stop. However, if you slow down just a bit so that you’re exercising aerobically, you can run a lot longer. If you run at 90% of your top speed, you can last for a mile or so.

If you run at 80% of your top speed, you can go practically forever. (By which I mean you can run a full marathon.)

When I used to have a day job working for Bossbert, crises came up with annoying regularity. So we were “encouraged” to work 10 or 12 hours per day, routinely. I didn’t particularly care for that, especially since I wanted to write some too. It seemed like Bossbert wanted us all to sprint for a marathon. Can’t be done. People wear out. So I made it a point to ignore Bossbert’s request for routine sprints. Once in a while, there was a genuine crisis that called for an all-nighter. Guess who had gas in the tank when that happened? And guess who worked most efficiently during the normal times?

I’ll say it again. If you run at 80% of your top speed, you can go practically forever.

That’s my 80% solution. Schedule yourself to work at 80% of your capacity. When a real crisis happens, you’ll have gas in the tank.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about longer-term planning — because a daily To Do List is tactical, not strategic. It’s short-term, and you really want a long-term plan for your big and important Projects.

Until then, have some Fun!

I talked yesterday about tracking your time and why it’s important–because you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

But it’s not obvious that the converse is true: If you can measure it, does that mean you can improve it?

I think so. I’ve seen a lot of improvement in the last year and a half, although I sometimes backslide.

First let me say that I laughed at Mark’s comment about spending the whole day doing time management. I think there are some people who would cheerfully spend the whole day mucking with spreadsheets to plan their day. Not me. I spend 5 minutes every night mapping out what I want to get done the next day. Then I try hard the next day to do it. However, some days have their little crises (like yesterday and today, when I had a truly urgent task that needed doing RIGHT NOW).

Which reminds me of a comment Peg made about the Urgent crowding out the Important. Let’s talk about that for a minute.

My friend Marcia Ramsland is an organizing professional. She got me interested in internet marketing a few years ago and in selling my expertise on the internet. Marcia’s expertise is in organizing. She’s written three books on the subject, and she was in my critique group back in San Diego when she first started writing them. One of the things I learned from Marcia is that we should distinguish between “Tasks” and “Projects”.

A Task is something that you can start and finish in one sitting. It may take 2 minutes or it might take 4 hours, but you can get it all done in one go. Some examples are:
1) Washing, drying, and folding the laundry.
2) Writing the next scene of my book.
3) Going to see my accountant for the monthly accounting.
4) Painting the cat.

A Project is something that is going to take multiple days to get done. It may take a week or it may take 5 years, but it’s something where I’m going to have to break it up into chunks. Some examples are:
1) Remodeling the kitchen.
2) Doing research with my daughter as she gets ready to apply to universities next year.
3) Writing my next book.
4) Creating a new product to sell on my web site.

It should be obvious that the Tasks are the type of thing Peg was talking about when she talked about the “Urgent,” whereas the Projects are what she meant by the “Important.” Tasks typically are small jobs that need to get done “soon” and are therefore Urgent, whereas Projects are the things we really WANT to get done, but they’re so big we put them off because we prefer to get one whole Task done rather than 1% of a Project.

The trick is to turn pieces of Projects into Tasks. You’ll notice that Task #2 on my list is actually a small piece of Project #3. Writing a scene is maybe 1% or possibly 2% of writing a book. There’s no freakin’ way to write a whole book in one sitting, but it’s quite doable to write one scene in that time span. So the secret to getting important Projects done is to shave off slices of them as Tasks, and then mix them in with all those pesky urgent Tasks. So the urgent stuff gets done, but so does something important.

So when I’m making a To Do List for tomorrow, I try to put in a reasonable mix of Tasks and (small pieces of) Projects. And I also put in one thing that’s Fun. The Fun can be either a Task or a piece of a Project, but it needs to be something that’s truly fun. Some examples of Fun:
1) Watch a movie.
2) Have a cookout with the family down in the firepit by our pond.
3) Read a few chapters in a novel.
4) Work on Fun Project X. (This is a secret project right now, but it really exists, and I hope to reveal it to the world in a month or two. And it’s fun.)

I promised yesterday to tell my secret for ensuring that most days are “good days.” I’ll do that here. On any given day, I schedule myself to do a certain number of Tasks (either urgent Tasks or small chunks of an important Project), plus at least one Fun Task. A “good day” is when I get most of the Tasks done and I have some Fun.

Today, I had four Tasks to do, plus I had some Fun planned. I got three of the Tasks done, but switched one Fun thing for another. (I was planning to work on Project X, but we went down to the firepit and had a cookout instead.) So today was a “good day.” It didn’t go exactly as planned, and I didn’t get one of my Tasks done (catching up on email), but three out of four isn’t bad. And I had some Fun.

I’ll talk more tomorrow about why Fun is important. And I’ll talk about pacing and what I call the “80% solution”. See ya then!

I don’t know if it’s possible to say anything truly new about time management. The problem for me has always been figuring out what’ll work for me. There must be a zillion books out there on the subject, but who has time to read ‘em?

After I got laid off from my day job and decided not to get another job, I thought I’d have all the time in the world. Think again! The To Do List expands to fill up all available time, and then some.

But here is something that I learned a long time ago: You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Or if you do improve it, you might not know it. And if you know it, you won’t know how MUCH you’ve improved it.

So this is something I started doing about a year and a half ago: I track my time.

When I walk into my office in the morning, I start a new time log for the day. I have a pad of paper and I tear off the sheet from yesterday and start with a clean sheet.

At the top, I write something that looks like this: “Time Log: M, 8/20/2007″.

Below that, I write the starting and stopping times for every major task throughout the day. By “major task” I mean things that take more than a couple of minutes. I don’t track my time spent eating (unless I’m doing something “productive” while eating, which I try not to do, because mealtimes should be fun times).

When I finish working on a task, I calculate how much time I spent on it. I do that all day and then record the total time spent on various tasks in my planner. (I don’t actually use my planner for planning. I use it for keeping track of where my time went.)

You may be asking what good it does to track your time? Well, how many times have you asked yourself where all your time went this week? If you track your time, then you know. And that will often suggest things you need to do more of. Or less of. It will also teach you how much work you can expect out of yourself. We all have limitations. When I see that I’ve been working 12 hours a day all week, I know that I’m working too hard and I’m going to soon get sick of it and start wasting time. I can’t and shouldn’t work 12 hours a day, week in and week out.

Looking at my time log for today, I see that I worked on two important projects for about the amount of time I had planned. I also got sideswiped by an emergency project that had to be done TODAY, right away. That took an unplanned hour and forty minutes, which is why I didn’t get everything on my list done today. Oh well, it had to be done. Crises happen.

I also see that I had a block of time mapped out for a fun project. I changed my mind when that time block came up and used the time to watch a movie instead. The movie was fun, but it was just different from what I had planned.

Despite the changes to my schedule, it was a good day. That raises an important question. What makes a “good day?” How do you measure whether it was “good” or not? And how do you make sure that most days are good days? I’ll talk about that tomorrow.