This is the time of year when everyone else in publishing seems to take the month off and drink a lot of eggnog. I, on the other hand, always find myself scrambling to get everything done and feeling overwhelmed by the effort. Partly this is because I’m thinking, “The year is almost over! I didn’t do…
Tag: productivity
Just say nay
If you’re not a Shrek aficionado, this blog post’s title will make you go “huh,” but I like to amuse myself. This isn’t very hard to do (I’m a lot like Shrek that way). I know I’ve talked before about the importance of protecting your writing time, but if the conversations I overhear on…
How to: Productivity boot camp
I don’t have too much trouble getting my important work done. I enjoy what I do and look forward to the challenges as much as the opportunities. What I sometimes have trouble with is getting all the little pesky things accomplished, the pesky things that support my important work, and without which my important work…
Open the office door
Yesterday I talked about how we can sometimes get a little too narrow-minded in pursuit of goals, filtering out everything extraneous and “irrelevant.” As writers, though, we need to be exposed to new ideas, new thinking, alternative points of view, so that our work can stay interesting, worthwhile and meaningful. It can be hard…
Measuring Productivity for Writers
A couple of my recent posts on motivation dance around the idea of productivity when you’re trying to accomplish big goals. In these posts I talk about the importance of your attitude and your process, rather than focusing on the product. Still, we don’t start with page one of a book and not have the…
Big Projects and Productivity
A comment on a previous post points out that people sometimes get stuck on long projects and stall because they haven’t figured out the next step. “Write a book” seems a little daunting. You can’t get it done today. So you shy away from getting started at all. Productivity gurus talk about figuring out…