making it work

This year I’m trying a “no excuse” approach to some of my resolutions.

As you saw in my January 7th post, I’ve been 0% successful on my resolution to get up an hour earlier every day. I have been 75% successful on my resolution to exercise every day. The difference? My time management resolution was a traditional goal while my exercise resolution was made under the “no excuse” rule.

There is no excuse not to [insert resolution here].

The important part of that sentence is the “resolution”.

My exercise resolution is to do 25 sit-ups, 20 leg-lifts for each leg, and 25 jumping jacks. It takes me a total of 5 minutes.

There is no excuse not to exercise for 5 minutes every day.

That is the key to creating a “no excuse” resolution – resolve to do something small, something that fits into your existing routine, something you have no excuse not to do on a daily basis.

And while it’s not going to get me in shape to run a marathon, five minutes of exercise a day is more than I used to do, and something I know I can and will do every day, for the rest of this year. This is a resolution I will keep.

So what’s your writing no-excuse resolution? Writing for half an hour a day? Reading one chapter of a book on writing? Producing one page in manuscript format?

Daisy Adair: I died in 1938, for exercise we drank sloe gin and smoked Lucky Strikes.
- Dead Like Me, “Ghost Story”, 2.3

anniversary

But I still have a day job, so my external alarm clock goes off much earlier than my internal clock would prefer.

As a New Year resolution, I said I would get up an hour earlier than usual and use the time to write WritShel posts or edit, then go to work. These are easily stoppable writing tasks, compared to really getting into a story and then being late for work (not that I’ve ever done that before ^_^; ).

As of today, January 7th, I have been 0% successful at this resolution.

I have written, it’s just been from the hours of 8 pm to 1 am.

I am a Night Owl.

I could force myself to get up early, but I know I’d still end up being awake and at the keyboard near and sometimes past midnight. It’s just how my internal clock is set up, and it’s much easier to follow it than fight it.

Because sleep deprivation doesn’t do me, or my stories, any good at all.

Michael Westen: In battle not even the best laid plans can survive contact with the enemy. If you want to survive, you have to be willing to improvise.
- Burn Notice, “The Hunter”, 3.6

cruisin’

With all of the ‘top 10′ lists re-capping last year news and entertainment, it seems few people take time to make their own list of what they accomplished last year. The end of the year is a rush toward midnight so that everyone can start fresh, a blank slate, no regrets.

While you may have wanted to do more than you got around to last year, you probably did some pretty cool things. Take the time to think about what those were, then congratulate yourself.

Instead of being dejected over not finishing your novel, celebrate the fact you started one. Most people don’t even get that far.

Instead of feeling bad over having not written more, be happy that you wrote as much as you did. I bet it’s more than a lot of people you know.

Celebrate your successes and and know you can do that much, and more, this year.

King Julien: It is time to celebrate me and the many moods of me. Today, festive me.
- The Penguins of Madagascar

camo – i haz it

I write out six things I want to accomplish the next day.

Sometimes it is something specific, like email Kyle about the DFW Writers Workshop Conference fliers. Sometimes the goal is more general, like research horse-drawn carriages. Whatever it is, it is written down before I go to bed, and left on the kitchen counter so I can review my list while I have breakfast the next morning.

As I go through my day and accomplish each goal, I drawn a line through it on the list.

When I first started out, I didn’t always clear the list, so anything left over at the end of the day got moved into a slot for the next day. I’ve been using this system for about a month now, and am clearing my list more often than before. It’s usually the weekends when things slip to the next day, but I make it a point to do everything on the list on Sunday so I can start the week with a clean sheet of paper.

If you also want to try this out, you can download a copy of the 6 Daily Goals worksheet (PDF, 18k) I created to keep track my own goals. It’s two pages which cover Monday-Sunday, so if you print the PDF double-sided, you’ve got one piece of paper to keep track of each week.

Here are a few things I’ve learned

1. Try to put the first thing you want to accomplish as #1, but be open to getting the other things done if the opportunity presents itself
2. When you are working on a goal, focus all of your attention on it – it’ll get done a lot faster
3. If a goal gets moved more than twice, take a moment and think about why you keep putting it off and do something about that or take the item off your list – it’s just taking away an opportunity for you to get something done

This is just one of many time management \ productivity systems out there. I’ve tried several, and some I still use. This is one that has made it past the one month mark, so signs are it’s a keeper. By the end of the week, I have a list of 38-42 things I have accomplished. I may have done them anyway, without using the 6 Daily Goals Worksheet, but this way, I can see it writing. And that feels pretty good.

Barney Stinson: Good. That way I can cross two things off my list.
- How I Met Your Mother, “Something Borrowed”, 2.21

“The unpublished have no deadlines.”

This means if you do not have a writing contract, nobody cares if you write or not. You have to care. You have to want to tell that story more than you want to do anything else, because if you are doing something else, you are not writing.

Thinking about your story only counts if it results in words on the page.

Researching your story only counts if it results in words on the page.

Telling someone about your story rarely counts because you’ve just told the story, so you probably aren’t going to put words on the page.

balance

In order to find the time to write, you need to know how you spend your 24 hours in the first place. Just as you (hopefully) keep track of where your money goes, decide now, for just a few days, to keep track of where your time goes. Grab a journal or a notepad or a set of sticky notes and when you do something, write down what it is and what time it is. When you do something else, write down what it is and what time it is. Soon you’ll have a log of where your day went.

And the funny thing is, when you have to write it down, sometimes you don’t want to do it. You are now aware of how much time is going to what activities, be it on Twitter or watching TV. Suddenly, because you are now accountable for that time, maybe you want to spend it doing something else, like writing. You could also be pleasantly surprised to find 15 minutes here or 30 minutes there, which is more than enough time to jot down some character traits or write out a few lines of dialog.

Some people may flee in horror at the thought of keeping track of what they do all day the same way they can’t be stifled with a monthly budget. Your time record doesn’t have to be to the minute, it’s just a tool to help you find the holes, the minutes or hours that you don’t realize could be spent doing what you really want to do … assuming you really want to write.

If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.
- Lee Iacocca