I’m dealing with a number of deadlines this month. Writing, graphic design, and personal. I’ve always done better with deadlines than without. As I, ah, matured, I learned to give myself self-imposed deadlines to try and prevent myself from letting the work pile up to the very end. This doesn’t always work. It depends how much you respect yourself, for one. If you don’t give those deadlines the same authority that an external deadline has, you’ll blow past them and then panic later. Or at least, I will.
I’m also a very visual person, which means that my surroundings get cluttered, as I need to see something to remember it exists. However, if it’s been there for too long, I stop seeing it. This paradox means that my big whiteboard on the office wall has to be refreshed from time to time, or I lose sight of the lists on it. The calendars help more – the monthly is best, I’m finding, as I have to stand there and write it all down at the beginning of the month. The annual is harder to read (smaller squares and the small markers aren’t very bold) and also a mass of information my brain finds overwhelming. I also use an online calendar, but it’s not in my face the way the ones on the walls are.
All of that to say that I can focus best when I’m being reminded of what needs to be done, but not too many reminders as then I get overwhelmed and the brain seizes up and hides. Like this post. No, I didn’t freeze up, other than sitting there staring into space for about ten minutes trying to come up with a pertinent topic for the post. It’s more that I’ve gotten the habit set that I write this on Saturday morning. I have an alarm to wake me, I get up with the sun rising, sit down, and tap away. After the aforementioned glazed stare into the coffee cup of course. Now, if I can do that for writing (and I have, just now I have lost those good habits) I’d be progressing a lot faster. Which means I need to evaluate my routines and identify the times where I could do this for writing, and then set alarms. Note that alarms aren’t proof against my brain, either. If I don’t give them the authority (people are waiting on my MGC post! I mustn’t let my fellow authors down!) I’ll start to ignore those alarms, too.
I have alarms during the week to remind me to get up and move around. About 50% of the time I dismiss them and keep working, because movement, pfft who needs that? On the other hand, the alarm labeled ‘water plants’ I don’t ignore. I have orchids (and a struggling little fern that is somehow still alive), and now that summer is upon us with the Texas Heat, I have to water the gardens daily. If I don’t, they die. So that alarm I respect and use to nudge my habitual rounds of the plant babies. Which, by the way, gets me up and moving and it’s good for my body. Now, to convince my brain of that for the other movement alarms!
I’ve got a busy day ahead of me. Irrigation to install that will hopefully keep my garden alive during my prolonged absence. I’ll video my June garden tour this morning, while I’m out there. An author appearance later in the afternoon, doing Speed Dating with Fantasy Authors for the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County. (warning: the link leads to facebook. I can’t share the zoom link publicly, but contact me if you want it). Packing and prep for the upcoming con and trip after it. Plus, I want to run away with the good camera and take flower pictures before I take this trip, as most wildflowers will be done by the time I’m home again. Looking at that list, I think I’d better shift some things off until Sunday! I also have design work under deadline to deliver, and a story that if I don’t write this week, I’ll have to finish while traveling which is less than ideal.
So! How do you manage your time to get all the things done? Do you give yourself the respect and authority necessary to be your own manager?
(Header and image by Cedar Sanderson, rendered with Midjourney)
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “Time Management and the Author”
I have gotten better at not over-loading my schedule, so I can avoid the panic lockups. In fact, I’ve probably over done it, and now need to give myself some deadlines on _finishing_ projects.
I keep trying not to overload myself and yet, somehow, here I am again.
I’m so happy you are still writing!
The voices simply refuse to shut up.
Mornings are Day Job or admin (blog), errands, exercise, or research. That’s a pattern I got into in grad school and it still works. Afternoons are writing. If writing starts earlier, great! That’s six days of the week. On the seventh day, there are other priorities. And yes, Life sometimes upsets the plan.
I tend to work for an hour, then wander around, do a chore or two, check on the cat, get something to drink, et cetera. Yes, I should move more often, but I get into a flow state and … Dang, where did these words come from?
Patterns are good. Setting them is hard (at least for me) and they loosen far too easily if I have to step away for them, like travel to a con!
I can’t write creatively to deadline — I don’t even try — too much artificial anxiety. The little commitments, like these blog posts, are something I churn draft outlines or prompts for, as creative raw material, then I create accompanying illustrations while watching TV, and finally pick one of the drafts & finish & polish it at least a day or two ahead of schedule, or I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else.
But for my real writing, for longer work (and it’s all longer work, almost no shorts), I have to sit down in the morning and write until tired. That means I can’t let myself be distracted by start-of-day email and headlines.
Coming out of medical issues (all fine now) created a huge backlog of things-that-had-to-slide, such as accounting, taxes, etc. — I’m the family accountant and it took quite a while to get enough energy back to deal with all the neglect (and I’m especially irritated with software/hardware complications, products that had to be cancelled or replaced, as unearned friction). This most recent tax season completed the catch up activity, and my other responsibilities are all cleaned up (or as clean as they ever are). That’s a great load off my mind.
I was able to outline-with-draft-content quite a lot of the next-book-in-series (#3) (and somewhat beyond) while dysfunctional, and read a lot of period/research material from the “faux”-original-setting for world-building details (adding that to my series bible). so now the only thing left is to do a hard modification/insertion of those details for the completed-but-not-released #1 & #2. I’m now sorting through a stack of notes for #1 & #2 for that pervasive but otherwise cognitively minor edit pass (it’s just details, not plot or character). Once that starts (tomorrow?) I can see myself rolling down to “final” completion of #1 & #2 in not long at all. I’ll still hold them for final copyedit until #3 is nearly done, and then I can start the release of the series while working on #4 and beyond.
I had to pause newsletters & advertising during the down time (too expensive to just let it run unmonitored) so that has to revive, too, once the new series books are available (or have set dates). That will add the advertising time sink (which I’m already doing some prelim work on), but that’s something I can work on after the morning writing sessions are done, once I get it going again.
My healthy setup is: first skim for important emails that require immediate responses, then mornings for creative writing, afternoons for marketing, email cleanup, & news, and evenings for prep/misc cleanup/online errands for non-writing stuff. That mostly works for me, and that’s the bandwagon I’m crawling back onto. The cabin can quietly decay in the background, and the critters and husbands let me know when they’re hungry. 🙂
“… if it’s been there for too long, I stop seeing it.” I never considered this, but I think that’s the case for me as well. I know that I do better if I periodically refresh my task list.
I have a host of alarms and reminders set up, some on my phone, some on my calendar. I use the calendar to remind me of periodic tasks that need to get done *sometime* during the day; those are usually things I tackle in the morning, in the couple of hours I have before I head to work. The phone alarms carry me through the day.
I should see about keeping a physical running task list. Maybe a notebook. I’ve tried using one online, but the problem is the list gets made, the file gets closed, and I completely forget it even exists. 😦
I do the same thing with online lists. There’s a reason I don’t use them any longer. Even notebooks are hard for me, because I lose the notebook!
I might have said this before. I make lists when I feel like I’m losing important information like which tasks I should be doing. I sit and think about what should be done, write it all down… and _go do something else_ that didn’t get onto the list but appears as soon as the list has, what, unloaded my mind? I think the answer as to whether I respect myself as my own manager would have to be a big no, not exactly!
I’ve done similar things. It helps to write things down, for sure.
I need to calendar like you do, somehow. Because what I am doing now isn’t working but your methods sound like good ones.
This month? It’s been about reminding myself that writing is a hobby, and hobbies are supposed to be fun. And therefore, being easy on myself and forgiving when the writing isn’t there. I got the novel finished, and then I got some feedback that had me pull it from copyedits, and go back through again, turning it into an even better book. I’d hope to have it out before LibertyCon, or as a LibertyCon release, but see again the part about forgiving, especially when I was the one who put the monkey wrench in the works.
When the well is dry, I can’t make it work to a deadline; I have to let it refill. When my husband is spending most of his day dealing with Life Issues that have nothing to do with writing, I can’t expect a fast copyedit, much less him writing to a schedule.
Outside of that, I keep a running tally of the things that need doing, broken down by critical -urgent, and critical – nonurgent. There’s always non-critical yet urgent things that pop up, and an overflowing abundance of non-critical & non-urgent tasks that I occasionally compile in a giant list just for the soothing the backbrain by knocking them out and lining out the list when I don’t have the energy for anything else, but otherwise, that list gets round-filed as not present to be a stressor and re-created when I have a day I feel like spending on minutiae.
Also, structure. If it’s structured in that I go to the gym and lift weights mon, wed, and fri, then I don’t have to have exercise on the critical-but-not-urgent list, and I don’t have to think about it. It costs very little in executive function to do, and therefore gets done.
Finally, structured downtime. Because if I don’t put effort into recovery, then the 12-hour shifts make sure I won’t recover to full capacity in time for the next week, much less for writing.
I have used a lot of different organizational methods over the years. Creation Plan, FlyLady, DayRunner, and now I’m working with BuJo and HB90 while trying to figure out whether Notion or Slack or Trello or Discord, or Thunderbird or Excell, will work for me along with my analog planners and notebooks. I have always been super organized growing up, in the Army, and even when I first started having kids. Then things slowly started slipping, and now it’s to the point where old systems just aren’t working “right” anymore. Thus the juggling of the different systems. I have eliminated several, and am still pushing and prodding at a few. FlyLady timers (also featured in Pomodoro and HB90) do pretty okay, as long as I’m not fighting a Fibro-flare or more than a normal migraine. Hiding everything on the work space so that you have “undisturbed time” doesn’t work for me, I will rebel.
I do find that “out of sight, out of mind” can certainly be an issue, but I don’t like my calendars to be too cluttered or it’s overwhelming. I can also tell if I’m getting anxious/overwhelmed, because I’ll refuse to calendar. I’ve tried the “reward” system. If I finish X then I get/to Y. But that generally doesn’t work for me, I’ll just give up on getting Y. (Rebel again).
So, I think that eventually the HB90 system (Look up HeartBreathings on YouTube if you want to know more) will work the most flexible for me, it’s kind of a conglomeration of several, so that works in my Ninja mind. But, the proper way to display it for maximum use is currently still eluding me.
(I do like my RocketBook Core, though, it’s like a whiteboard that you can carry with you, and take pics of and send to your dropbox, gooledocs, email, etc.)
I enjoyed Trello, and plotted my first space opera (arguably my best structured book) in it. But the main value added was being able to use it on both phone and desktop, and the phone started hating it, so Trello kind of fell by the wayside.
I’m wondering if Heartbreathings is the inspiration for “the notebook that tells me when to breathe” in Donna Andrews’ mystery series.
I can’t pretend to anything like a schedule. I value my few remaining nerves, so I don’t strain them with that type of thing anymore. ~:D
In terms of time management, there’s day job, which imposes its own schedule, there’s time with friends and family, and basically writing, domestic chores and self-care duke it out for what’s left.
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