Advanced Fiction Writing Blog

I’m going to repeat one of my main points from yesterday, because I’m not sure it came across clearly:

Successful people are focused. And focus means choosing one primary goal at a time, to the exclusion of all others.

Of course, you are doing all sorts of things every day. Many of them have nothing to do with your primary goal. Life happens. That’s obvious. There is nothing wrong with doing all sorts of things that aren’t related to your primary goal. But if you have more than one primary goal at any given time, you are diluting your efforts and slowing yourself down.

Please notice that I’m not talking about having multiple “things to do” every day. It’s a given that we all have many “things to do”. The question is how many “primary goals” we have. When I look at my list of “things to do” for today, I had:
1) My daily Simplelogy routine to set my daily task list
2) Several sessions of email
3) A couple hours of consulting time
4) A language-study session
5) A writing-practice session
6) Several hours of work on my book proposal
7) A bit of annoying personal accounting
8 ) Some reading in a magazine (background research)
9) Some revisions to my web site
10) A bit of work on a software library I’m writing
11) Blogging (right now)

Of these “things to do”, #1, #2, #3, #7, #9, #10, and #11 were just things that needed doing that had nothing to do with my primary goal. (My primary goal right now is to write a Snowflake document for my next novel. When I finish that, my primary goal will immediately shift to writing the proposal for my next novel. I am focusing as much of my time and energy as possible on writing that pesky Snowflake.)

#4, #5, #6, and #8 DID have something to do with my primary goal. In total, I spent 4 hours and 35 minutes on my primary goal, which is not bad at all.

Now imagine that I had 3 primary goals. So in addition to wanting to write a Snowflake document, maybe I ALSO have a primary goal of writing a cool new software product AND a primary goal of building a shed out in the yard. Then instead of having 4 and a half hours on ONE primary goal, I’d have had an hour and a half on THREE primary goals. And you can’t get much done in an hour and a half.

I’d also be splitting my mental energy three ways. In all likelihood, I’d be more excited about one of these than the other two, so two thirds of my productive time for the day would be spent on things I was LESS excited about. That’s not good. Your primary goal should be the thing you’re MOST excited about. (In Simpleology 101, this is called a Major Target. In fact, you have a long-term, medium term, and short-term major target. What I call a “primary goal” is that short-term target–it’s the next really important thing you want to get done.)

Honestly, I don’t think you can have more than one thing that you’re MOST excited about. Whatever that is should be your immediate primary goal. If you have more than one, you are diffusing your mental energy and splitting your time.

Now a few of you made comments that I’d like to respond to:

Lynn wrote:

My assumption is you are focussing on one primary goal during a set time period - is this correct? And that your goal has been scraped away until it is small enough to be called more a task than a goal? I ask this because I have several “projects” that have deadlines, and if I focused only on one project, to the end that the others are left undone, then I would not keep my commitments. Yet, if I work at each project a bit at a time I am more likely to get them all done by their deadlines. To do this I have to break the projects into a series of tasks. I’m assuming my ‘tasks’ are the same as your ‘goals’?

Randy sez: What I call a “primary goal” is a short-term project (something you can achieve in a few days to a week or so) and it should be the thing you’re most excited about. This is the thing you should be pouring all your excess time and energy into. Of course, there are always long-term projects that need time put into them. For example, I am doing consulting more or less continuously. But that’s for somebody else. It’s not for ME. My primary goal is something for ME.

Bonne wrote:

Well Randy, I’m all for focus and I’m going to look at Simpleology. It’s true that all people who are really great at something are very focused on it and don’t worry about developing weak areas that will only improve to mediocre at best. That being said, as a mother first and writer second, there must be two primary goals.

Randy sez: Being a mother is just part of your life. Being a writer is too. Neither of these is really a primary goal. A goal needs to be specific and concrete and objective.

You probably have a long-term target to “get your novel published”. That is a good solid goal. It’s very specific. (You want to publish a novel, not just write some words.) It’s concrete. (A novel published is concrete, not abstract.) And it’s objective. (It can be verified by anyone that you published the novel or that you did not.)

Likewise, your medium term target might well be to “develop your skills in writing a character.” Again, that’s a good goal, and it’s a subtask of your long-term goal. It might take a few months to do that.

A reasonable short-term target (a “primary goal”) might be to “read Dwight Swain’s book on characters and apply it to your current book idea.” You could do that in a week or so. It’s a good goal, IF you spell it out and then put your energy into doing it. If you don’t clearly specify your goal, you’re likely to not put nearly as much energy into it, and it might take six months to go through the book, simply because you never clearly stated it as a target and never focused your energy on it.

A good time-management process would have you clearly spell out your long-term target, medium-term target, and short-term target. Then it would focus your attention on getting the short-term target (your primary goal) completed as quickly as possible.

Camille wrote:

I’m sorry, but I gotta defend some of us MT’s. If someone is using the phrase ‘multitasking’ as an excuse for not getting much done, then they aren’t really multitasking, they’re just spinning and twirling. Also, as a MT I’m more likely to complain than brag about it. My busy home and my office admin job require me to do multiple tasks at once.

There may be some misunderstanding about the term. If someone professed be working on multiple GOALS at once, I would agree that they’re not going to get much accomplished.

Randy sez: Multitasking is fine when you are dealing with “just normal life”. You gave an example of about ten things you can do all at once. Those are all fine. They’re normal everyday tasks. My comment was about people who want to “multitask” on several different “primary goals” at once. And that is a prescription for defocusing your efforts. But you noted that in your comment, so I think we are violently in agreement.

To be effective, we need to spell out our targets, long-term, medium-term, and short-term. Of course, we can have many of these in mind for the future. But at any given time, we need to be pursuing exactly ONE short-term target with high intensity. This is the one I call the “primary goal” and it should be whichever thing you are most excited about (or which is most pressing on you).

I promised yesterday to talk today about “taking action.” This is extremely important.

One problem I see a lot is people who are “working on it.” That is most always a statement that nothing is much getting done, but it sure would be nice if that task would just sorta solve itself. Let’s be brutally honest. “Working on it” is a dodge. It’s fuzzy. It means almost nothing.

Whenever I hear myself saying “I’m working on it,” I’ve learned to ask myself exactly how I’m working on it. Have I broken it down into a series of steps I know how to do? Am I taking action to actually do those steps? Or am I taking action to learn how to do those steps?

There are really only two actions you can take:
1) Doing a task.
2) Learning how to do the task.

A successful person is a person who takes action. “Thinking about it” is not taking action. “Working on it” is not taking action. “Doing it” is taking action. “Learning how to do it” is taking action. Nothing else is taking action.

Homework assignment: Is there some project you’ve been telling yourself that you’re “working on” or “thinking about”? Are you REALLY taking action on it or are you not? This is a tough question, but it’s one I regularly ask myself, because it cuts through the bull.

I’ve been watching my former city (San Diego) go up in smoke over the last couple of days. It’s painful and my schedule has gone right out the window as I keep checking the web for news every hour or so. This fire seems destined to be much worse than the one I lived through in 2003, so I can only imagine how bad things are right now.

On to time-management . . . Yesterday, I told you all about the system I’ve been using lately, which I really like (other than the name): Simpleology 101.

Destiny asked a question about Simpleology:

Ummm…this software sounds nice but I’m not allowed to download anything much on my computer, and I would love to also learn a bit I could do without Simpleology 101 (till I get permission to download it from my parents)

Randy sez: There is nothing to download. You just sign up on the Simpleology web site and then log in and start using their software on the web. You can optionally download some software tools, but I prefer not to. Since I have two computers, by using the web site, my data is always in sync.

One thing I’ve learned from the Simpleology training course is that successful people are focused. And focus means choosing one primary goal at a time, to the exclusion of all others.

Of course, you are doing all sorts of things every day. Many of them have nothing to do with your primary goal. Life happens. That’s obvious. There is nothing wrong with doing all sorts of things that aren’t related to your primary goal. But if you have more than one primary goal at any given time, you are diluting your efforts and slowing yourself down.

I know there are plenty of people who brag about “multitasking.” My own observation is that this is nothing more than making excuses for not getting much done.

So how do you prioritize things so that you have only ONE primary goal? That’s actually not too hard. First you make a list of all the goals you’d like to reach eventually. Then you choose one to focus on RIGHT NOW. Just one. Focus on that till it’s done. Keep working on it until it’s finished. Then pat yourself on the back and pick a new goal from your list.

It’s tempting to cheat and make TWO primary goals. But if you’re using the Simpleology tools, you can’t. There isn’t any way to set two primary goals. The software won’t let you do it.

At first, I didn’t like that. But then I realized that it’s a good thing. It motivates you to FINISH tasks. And finishing is something that I’ve had issues with. I’ve got my wife using Simpleology too, and she’s finding it much easier to make To Do Lists than she did before. She just works through the daily exercise and then prints out the screen–instant list!

I’ve had a LONG day, so I’m going to bed early tonight. Tomorrow . . . a few thoughts on taking action.

You all voted today on what we should talk about next. Time Management edged out Self-Editing by one vote.

So we’ll be talking about “Best Practices in Time Management” for the next few days.

I’m glad this topic won, because it’s something that I’ve been trying desperately to get better at for the last year and a half. When I was laid off from my day job 2 years ago, I thought I’d have all the time in the world to do all the projects I’d ever wanted to do.

I was half right. I started working on all the projects I’d ever wanted to do — all at the same time. But I still had exactly as much time as I had before. And I got defocused pretty quickly.

After about six months, I realized that I needed to learn to manage my time better. So I started looking. And thinking. And looking some more.

There really aren’t any deep secrets here. The key things everyone tells you to do are these:
1) Prioritize
2) Focus
3) Take Action

I’ve gotten better at those, and have written several columns in my e-zine on various facets of time-management. But one thing I really wanted was some software to help me out with the boring, repetitive parts. I couldn’t find what I wanted.

Here is what I wanted my software to do:
1) Help me decide my priorities.
2) Help me sort out the Big Picture from the Little Picture.
3) Keep track of tasks for the future, but hide them until I’m ready to do them.
4) Roll over items that I didn’t do yesterday to today.
5) Keep track of tasks I’ve delegated.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any software to do that. So I came up with my own scheme using a series of To Do Lists on paper that manage my life in smaller and smaller time increments (years, quarters, months, weeks, and days). That’s worked well for #1, #2, and #3 above, but I couldn’t easily roll over daily tasks on paper (I had to copy them by hand) and I didn’t have a good scheme to track tasks that I’d delegated. And it was ON PAPER, which is a hassle.

For awhile, I was seriously considering writing my own software so it would do exactly what I want it to do.

Then I found a tool that’s ALREADY WRITTEN that meets all 5 of my requirements above and it has a few other advantages:
1) It’s web based, so I can manage my time from any computer connected to the web.
2) It comes with a 20-day training program to teach me time management skills.
3) Every day it walks me through a procedure to set my goals for that day.

The funny thing is that I’ve known about this tool for about six months, but I didn’t start using it until recently because I didn’t like the name: “Simpleology 101“. I thought it sounded too simplistic to be useful. And I hate simplistic solutions to complex problems. But I finally decided to give it a whirl, even if I didn’t like the name.

I love this program! I’ve been using it for the last 5 weeks, and I have suddenly become a LOT more focused. Simpleology 101 helped me define all the things I really want in life and then it asked me to choose one to work on RIGHT NOW. I did, and . . . that was the key to getting me focused.

Of course, Simpleology 101 isn’t magic. It’s a little bit of work every day. I spend my first 10 minutes every morning going through a procedure to set my goals. But I actually enjoy doing it, because the program walks me through each step and keeps track of all my decisions. I don’t have to remember the process. I don’t have write anything on paper. All I have to do is make executive decisions.

Here’s the best part of it. Simpleology 101 is FREE. (Simpleology 101 is about Time-Management. There are some followup courses on managing your money and increasing your energy that you have to pay for. But those are optional. I liked Simpleology 101 so much that I bought 102 and am working through that right now.) Quite simply, I think Simpleology 101 is the best thing going in time management.

So I hereby declare Simpleology 101 to be a “Best Practice in Time Management.”

Here’s a link to Simpleology 101.

In the next few days, I’ll talk more about what I love about Simpleology 101.

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.

Several of you had excellent comments on my post from yesterday.

Mick noted that he uses GMail as a free online storage system. He just zips up various files (so they’ll be tidy and small) and mails them to his own GMail account. I know a number of other novelists who do the same. It’s a good idea.

Lynda asked what I meant about buying back my book from my publisher. When a book goes out of print, the publisher is relinquishing all rights to publish the book. (It’s actually a little more complicated than that–there is often some sort of time span during which they can bring it back into print, depending on how your contract is written.) They will typically offer you any remaining books in their warehouse at dirt-cheap prices. They will also offer the art-work and the electronic files of the text, in case you want to republish the book yourself. This generally costs around 100 bucks, and is worth it, in my opinion. This was what I was referring to in my post.

Karri claimed that DOUBLE VISION is just about the best book ever written. Thanks, Karri! I guess I owe you a fee for that endorsement. It was a fun book to write, and I hope it’s a fun book to read. One of the main characters has Asperger’s Syndrome. One of my writer friends is a clinical psychologist, and after she read DOUBLE VISION, she asked if I have Asperger’s. I took that as a compliment. I don’t have Asperger’s, but I know perfectly well what it’s like to not be a Normal.

A few closing thoughts on organization: I’m not naturally very organized. I made it through high school and halfway through college living my life pretty randomly. When I hit upper-division physics in college, I had a professor for several courses who was probably the most meticulous person alive. And I learned from him that if I was going to get anywhere in physics (or anything else) I had to learn how to write neatly, to take good notes, to put dates on papers so I’d know when they were written, and all sorts of other things.

I’m still not great at keeping things tidy. My desk is NEVER all squared away and clean, but I’ve learned to periodically take a few minutes and put away some of the mess. If I don’t, then inevitably my productivity goes down and down until I can’t get anything done.

Those of you who listened to the “Clean Up Your Act” teleseminars that I did with Allison Bottke know that Allison is super-good at keeping things organized, and that she doesn’t come by it naturally–she has ADD and is totally right-brained and if she didn’t constantly stay on top of the mess, she wouldn’t be able to get ANYTHING done. Allison is a poster girl for the idea that good organization can be learned by anybody.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk some about time-management, which seems to be a common bugaboo for most writers. For the past year, I’ve been working hard at learning to use my time effectively, and I have a few thoughts on the matter.