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.

Thanks to everyone who wished me and my wife happy anniversary yesterday. We did have a good one.

I promised to talk today about how to manage all those pesky drafts of your novel on your hard drive. It’s really not complicated. The idea is that you always want to be able to get hold of any version of your novel, and yet not have the old stuff clogging up the new.

I organize my hard drive as follows. In my Documents folder, I have three main subfolders:
1) Archives
2) Friends
3) Personal

The Archives folder contains stuff from years ago–anything that I’m not currently working on or likely to work on ever again. I back this up to CD periodically, and also back it up to my iPod every few months, or whenever I move a bunch of new data to it. This folder doesn’t change very often, and the only changes I make are to add new stuff.

The Friends folder contains anything that friends send me that needs short term storage. Mostly, it contains electronic versions of novels. I don’t back this up at all. My feeling is that people only send me stuff that they have backed up all over the place. And it’s usually just rough drafts of things.

The Personal folder contains all my current stuff, including email, financial stuff, web sites, internet products, consulting jobs. And it also contains a special folder called Books. This is a very important folder. It holds all the books I’ve ever written and anything I’m working on now.

I back up the Personal folder to my iPod, but then I also back up certain of the other folders elsewhere as redundant backup. For example, I have a folder named “Critical Records” that contains all my financial stuff, such as tax records, etc. This gets backed up to a USB Flash Drive that I carry in my pocket all the time. I also back it up to online storage.

The Books folder is quite large, and is backed up to online storage. When I start a new book, I create a new folder inside the Books folder. For example, for my novel DOUBLE VISION, I have a folder named “Double Vision”. Inside that folder, I have a bunch of other folders.

One of those folders is named “Snowflake” and contains a Snowflake analysis of the book. (Actually, several Snowflake documents, since I produce several, and I update them as the story develops.)

There is another folder named “Proposal” which contains every version of the proposal for the book.

There is another folder named “Research” where I save all the online research for the book, including web archives, pictures, spreadsheets, pictures, etc.

Now we get to the point of today’s blog post. There are also several folders named “Draft 1”, “Draft 2”, etc. Each of these contains a series of Word documents. I use a naming convention that will make sure the files are in order. For this book, the naming convention is: “Double Vision Part1.doc”, etc. The book has four parts, so there are four documents.

Some of the folders have comments that my critiquers sent me for that draft. For example, The “Draft 4” folder has the Word document for the draft, along with a couple of folders for the two critiquers who reviewed this draft.

Now that the book is out of print, there is a new folder named “Out of Print Docs” that contains the electronic version of the text that I bought back from the publisher. If and when I decide to republish this book using some sort of POD service, I can easily find the files I need.

Here is my procedure for doing revisions. When I write the first draft, I write it straight through and save the files in the “Draft 1” folder. When it’s done and I’m ready to start revising, I duplicate the folder, rename the copy to be “Draft 2” and delete any files inside it that are irrelevant to the task of revision. Then I just start revising the Word files in “Draft 2,” secure in the knowledge that I have a copy of “Draft 1” elsewhere.

As noted, I backup my Books folder to multiple places–my iPod and my online storage service. When I leave the house, if I’m not taking my laptop, I take the iPod. If the house burns down, I’ll have either the laptop or the iPod AND I’ll have the Books info redundantly saved online somewhere. Call me over-cautious, but my books are important to me, and I want to make sure that it’ll take an Xtremely bad run of luck to lose all copies.