I started writing a novel over a year ago (it’s ended up being 100,000 words and it’s on its third draft currently), and while it wasn’t part of NaNoWriMo, I learned a few things from the practice of writing X amount of words per day that might be helpful to anybody currently spending November burning up their keyboard. Hope it helps!

Be persistent

Regardless of how you feel, whether you have no energy or you just can’t can’t think of anything to write, force yourself to sit down and write something each day. The key is persistence, repetition and momentum. Once you skip a day because you just don’t feel like writing, any momentum you might have built up will be lost. And the biggest challenge is always starting (again) and picking up where you left off. Heck, just do a paragraph or two if you’re really not in the mood.

Be prepared for your writing to suck

Sometimes, you’re on a roll and write pages and pages of pure brilliance. Then the next day, it just doesn’t flow and you spew out unpublishable rubbish. Don’t get disheartened, that’s how it goes. If you wait for the magic to come before you write anything, you’ll be waiting a very long time. It will take several drafts and revisions, maybe even dozens, to get everything from the first page to the last polished to perfection. I would go so far as to say, you’ll spend more time editing and tweaking what you’re already written, than actually writing new content. Whatever you write in November is only the start.

Carve out a time in the day for it

Carve out an hour, thirty minutes, whatever. Just make this writing period each day sacred.  It’s critical you identify or make room for writing when you plan your day out. View it as more important than anything else you’re doing, make it your top priority, your number one task each day. And make sure everyone else understands and respects this too so you’re not needlessly distracted and they don’t take it the wrong way.

Read, read, read

This applies in two ways – read through your work often and read the work of others too. During my second draft, I got carried away, described things in a little too much detail, added a lot of superfluous nonsense that would have bored most people to death. This wasn’t apparent until I’d finished and began reading through it. If I’d read through my progress more often this would have been apparent earlier. Then I happened to start reading A Game Of Thrones and it was a timely reminder that it’s not about how many words you use to describe a person or a scene, it’s about how you use the words. Don’t write in a vacuum, be influenced by other great reads out there.

Don’t give up

It might take a month, or it might take a few years, to write your book. Be prepared for it to take just as long to get published. Rejection is part of the business. J.K. Rowling was rejected nine times, Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected thirty times. Keep evolving your work and getting  constructive feedback from as many honest people as possible. And, if you genuinely don’t think a publishing deal is forthcoming, there are numerous alternative options nowadays to get your work out there.

Write as much as you’re comfortable with

Yes, the goal with NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s basically 1,667 words a day. It’s a nice figure actually, but don’t view it as a golden rule. I went as low as 1000 words a day, or just one page a day, depending on how much time I had. It was a number that worked for me. Don’t think that such numbers are a small, effortless amount, because it’s surprising the number of well established writers who work at such a small scale. As my first tip pointed out, it’s all about persistence. 1,667 words today is smallfry, sure, but do that for a week and you have over 11,000 words. In a month you will have the magical 50,000 words.

I once heard that former British Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher said “Happiness is a ticked off list”. I have no idea if that’s true, but regardless of how one might have felt about her politics, I can certainly relate to that statement. I always write a to-do list for every project, and having recently completed a major one, I realized something about the process that causes it all to break down.

You see, as detailed as my lists are, I’ve realized that there are certain types of items that don’t appear on there. At best these unlisted tasks can slow things down, and at worst they can grind a project to a halt. I call these my hidden barrier tasks, perhaps an illustration is in order.;

My to-do list for the project of publishing my first e-anthology of short stories:

• Obtain a professionally designed book cover
• Format document in line with style guide
• Sort out PayPal
• Sort out PO Box for press releases
• Write sales blurb
• Write copyright notice and appendix
• Create landing page for e-book purchasers
• Research e-book pricing and decide on a price
• Publish e-book

Note how each of those seem perfectly reasonable and pretty detailed in some cases. When I was writing the list, I knew that some tasks would be relatively quick to execute and more straight forward than others. What I didn’t realise was that there were other tasks I had to tackle before the project could be completed. What it should have said was:

• Get over reluctance to ask my busy best friend for help
• Obtain a professionally designed book cover
• Format master document in line with style guide
• Sort out PayPal
• Sort out PO Box for press releases
• Figure out what the essence of the anthology is
• Write sales blurb
• Write copyright notice and appendix
• Create landing page for e-book purchasers
• Get over extreme block about charging money for my creative writing
• Research e-book pricing and decide on a price
• Push past the fear of failure
• Publish e-book

When I look at that second list, I feel like a fool! Those four hidden barrier tasks stalled the launch of my anthology by at least a week. The first of them was resolved in a conversation with the aforementioned best friend who turned out to be delighted to help.

Project launch delayed by: 1 day.

The second required consultation with a reader, as I am far too close to the stories to see them with enough objectivity.

Project launch delayed by: 3 hours (plus a huge amount of frustration incurred by my inability to write a sales blurb for my own project!).

The third hidden task really stalled the project, which was still secret at the time. It ultimately required the creation of a secret project support group of lovely people who were prepared to listen to my plan, look at specific concerns I had and then give me feedback and lots of kind encouragement. They also encouraged me to blog about it, and that helped immensely too. The lesson I learnt at that stage was that developing things in secret might lead to a grand unveiling, but doing something way beyond your comfort zone in secret is a recipe for procrastination.

Project launch delayed by: 5 days (ouch).

The fourth hidden barrier, well, that’s still there, but I have that fear with everything (even writing this post)! I did just have to take a deep breath and push the publish button regardless of the fear. But becoming aware of that fear made it easier to deal with, and squeeze past.

Project launch delayed by: 1 hour (that was me actively fretting about whether to click the button -  it was probably hours and hours spread over the last month).

I guess that’s what this is all about: awareness. So the next time I write a to-do list, I’m going to take a moment to see how I feel about each task, rather than a purely logic-based, practical appraisal of what needs to be done. After all, it was the emotional side of it that slowed me down, but bringing them out into the open helped me immensely. I’ll also be sure to prioritize tackling those previously hidden barrier tasks, to make sure the project proceeds more smoothly.

So, do you have a big project on the go? Or a to-do list the length of Italy? Are there any items on it that are taking far longer than they should, or just aren’t being tackled at all? Maybe there is a hidden barrier task that needs to be drawn out before you can continue? I hope this helps!

You can get Emma’s e-book, From Dark Places, here.

Most professionals can name a handful of time management systems that they have come across in their professional careers. They can probably also list a few people here and there who have embraced these systems and are quite happy using them. If they were to think of improving their productivity they would probably look to adopt one of the systems they have heard about and take a course, read a book or visit a few websites in order to learn what to do.

Except, what if the way we think about time management is completely confused? In reality, aren’t we all really just walking around using unique systems of our own creation?

Perhaps our time management systems are like fingerprints – one of a kind. The most recent research has focused on the fact that habits, rituals and practices are the building blocks of ALL time management systems, whether we realize it or not. In other words, even if we don’t do it consciously, the habit patterns we use on a daily basis to get things done are uniquely ours, developed over time to suit our particular circumstances. In other words, there are potentially over six billion time management systems walking around, one for each person on the planet.

Is there something wrong with thinking in this way? Should we all be following one system instead of adopting infinitely many? While it’s possible to teach groups of people to goose-step in unison in some settings, companies should not be encouraging all their employees to take the same approach to managing their time. The fact is, needs differ from one person to the next, and it would be a mistake to try to implement the CEO’s habit pattern, for example, in the life of all employees.

Why so?

First there is the fact that habits are quite difficult to change. New rituals are hard to establish, and old ones are tough to quit. It’s a misguided executive who wastes the company’s money and time trying to get all the employees to follow a single time management system.

Secondly, the CEO’s lifestyle is very different from that of employees. While he may be a black belt in time management, the front-line employees may simply not need such sophisticated skills, nor even want them. Sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander, if top performance from employees is what is most desired.

This isn’t to say that companies shouldn’t encourage employees to be more productive. Instead, they should help employees learn how to manage and upgrade their own time management systems, in order to achieve their individual goals. This kind of assistance could start by helping employees to see and understand the time management systems they have been using on a daily basis, without necessarily being fully aware of them. Then, once they gain some awareness, it’s not too hard to teach employees how to perform upgrades to their system using best practices taken from wherever they can be found.

In this way, each employee ends up with a truly custom system, plus a pathway for steady improvement. That’s the way to tap into the creativity of each person on the payroll, as a way to ultimately achieving superior results.

Here’s an idea. All those prioritizing tips and tricks that self-help and business books and blogs go on about (yep, I’ve done it too) are really covering up a fundamental problem – you’ve got too much to do and/or you’ve not got enough time to do it all.

Whenever I have had a big change in my life, whether it be going to university and having to do a lot of studying, or getting a full time job that took up so many hours each day, people always said that I would have to forget about doing this and that. There would be no more time for going out, enjoying hobbies or playing on my XBox. It was presumed, even expected, that I would have to knuckle down and focus on my studies or work. In other words I’d have to prioritize. Not likely!

If you need to do a bunch of things, then they are all important to you at some level otherwise they wouldn’t be on your radar. So why should you have to pick and choose which is more valuable? Which is priority A? Which is low priority? Prioritizing can feel more like sacrificing. It’s the equivalent of deciding whether to drop your son off at football training or drop your daughter off at her piano class. With some juggling of your time and schedule, you can do both.

Right now, I feel like prioritizing is the medicine you take after you’ve caught a bad case of Excessive Workload, or you have the painful symptoms of Lack Of Time. As is typically the case with any answer to what ails people in the 21st century, the focus is on managing the symptoms rather than preventing the problem in the first place.

If you had enough work to fill up your 9-to-5 workday without any overtime, would you need to prioritize? Would it matter which tasks came first? Likewise, if you had twelve uninterrupted hours each day to do all the work you needed to do, would it again matter which order you did it? Would you even have to contemplate which projects were more important than the other?

Yes, I know that things are never that clear and easy, but for now I’m going to focus on using my time more efficiently and trimming my workload of junk, rather than dwelling on what tasks should be high, medium or low…

This extreme procrastination manifests itself as excuse-making – coming up with any rationalized reason not to act on your aspirations or plans now. Yet the fact is, conditions are never perfect so why not start today and correct course as you go along?

Of course, it’s easy to tell yourself that, it’s quite another thing to put it into practice when ‘Someday’ disease is running rampant. However, there are ways to combat it. In the same way washing your hands regularly can stop you catching colds, the following five practices (combined with the three truths from last week) can cure you of procrastination.

Capture your thoughts

Anything that involves substantial time or effort invariably needs planning, preparation and a focused mind. Procrastination spreads like a bug in minds that are unclear and fuzzy. That means you need to free yourself up from the burden of remembering the little things and day-to-day distractions, and capture those thoughts onto something external, like a notepad or onto your PC. A general doesn’t plan a military strategy in his head, he uses a tactical display. Likewise, a teacher doesn’t keep his lesson plans locked in his brain, he prepares presentations and notes.

Decide what really matters

‘Someday’ disease is particularly prevalent nowadays because people are told they can do anything they want. Regardless of the truth of that, it usually means people have a lot of stuff they’d like to do but no time to fit it all in. As a result many goals have to be put off till someday regardless of best intentions. That hardly helps with the problem.

However, if you really challenge yourself, you’d probably admit half of those things you say you want do are just pipe dreams or nice sounding ideas anyway. I would like to learn a new language, go traveling around Australia and learn to play the guitar but how genuinely motivated am I to do something about it? Not very. So I’ve let those goals go for the time being.

Ask yourself what really matters to you. What do you really want to do? Don’t spread yourself thin. Identify the vital few and forget about the rest – they will only serve to distract you, and perpetuate the ‘Someday’ disease.

Break it down

This is a crucial step. Society is no longer geared towards a get-up-and-go mentality, a traditional remedy to ‘Someday’ disease. Nowadays, it seems like everything requires copious amounts of tedious paperwork, form filling and preparation in order to get any real work done. With all that confusion and baggage it’s no wonder people procrastinate. Two random examples – traveling around Europe or learning to snowboard – pose numerous hurdles before you’ve even boarded a plane or taken your first lesson. The best way to overcome that complexity and confusion is to break it down into bitesize chunks of activity.

Apply Parkinson’s law

Time management as we know it only serves to feed the ‘Someday’ disease, as discussed in a previous post about time wasting. Instead, forget what you know about managing your time and apply Parkinson’s law. Work expands to fill the time available to it, as does our perception of the complexity of that work. In other words, the more time you give to doing something, the more of that time you are likely to waste dragging it out. If your deadline for action is someday in the future, that’s a whole lot of wasted time, and a goal of starting your own business or writing a novel is naturally going to carry a lot of weight and expectation, regardless.

As stressful as the prospect of being tight with your time, and even tighter with deadlines, might seem, it is a very powerful way to spur yourself into action.

Overcome that first hurdle

Momentum. We all need it to get things done, but we vastly underestimate quite how much it effects us. The hardest part of any project is usually at the very beginning when you have no momentum to get through those first few tasks. Just contemplating it can make you feel like putting it off till later. The very beginning is typically when procrastination is at its worst.

Think of it like driving a car. Once you’ve got moving and out of first gear, the journey becomes considerably easier. In other words, be aware of that first hurdle and put extra focus into clearing it. Once you have that momentum, things will become much easier from then on (so long as you keep moving forward).

It’s that fan favorite topic again. Procrastination, as widespread as the common cold. We tend to focus on the little things when it comes to procrastinating, stuff like reports that needs finishing or the piles of washed clothes that need to be put away. But there is a side to procrastination that doesn’t get covered nearly so much – the far more pervasive, harmful effect it can have on our long term goals, dreams and aspirations. That’s what I want to look into today.

Whether it be a big hobby you want to try or that company revamp you’d like to implement, that classic film you’ve always wanted to see or that friend you feel like catching up with, ask yourself why you’re putting off doing all these things. Go on, do it now. What do you come up with?

From my experience I’ve found this bigger picture procrastinating manifests itself with a certain mindset. There is the believe that conditions have to be just right – that you have to know enough, have enough, etc. In other words you believe all pieces of the jigsaw have to be in place before you can take action. This is well intentioned but in the real world grossly naive.

I’m just as guilty of it. I want to learn Spanish, but part of me feels I can’t do it right now because I need to make time for it, need to build up the requisite motivation, research the right tools and study guides to help me… The end result is that I’ve put it off till someday in the future when, somehow, all those little issues will have magically resolved themselves. Crazy thinking right? Except at the time, all those excuses kind of make sense.

Consider this quote by Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Work Week which probably sums it up best:

“Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way.”

I think with this in mind there are three critical rules, or truths, that we need to realize when we come down with ‘Someday’ disease, and start making up excuses to not take action:

• There is no such a thing as the ‘right’ time
• Putting things off doesn’t make it any easier
• You learn more by taking action

There is no such a thing as the ‘right’ time. When you’re waiting for the right time to do something, what you’re really saying is you’re waiting till you’ve run out of excuses to start. Very rarely will everything come together perfectly just when you want them to. You might have enough money but not enough time, you might have a great idea but not enough knowledge to put it into practice… that’s life, that tends to be how it works. Whatever the excuse, understand that things will never come together unless you take action first.

Putting things off doesn’t make it any easier. Of course, taking that action and putting yourself out there can be scary and daunting. However, regardless of how much preparation you put in or how long you put something off for, things will remain challenging in one way or another. The fear or embarrassing yourself in front of colleagues, or the worry that you might find things too hard and not know how to deal with them, can be crippling. You need to accept that not only will conditions never be perfect, they will also be challenging.

You learn more by taking action. Reading and researching or waiting till you have enough experience is all well and good, but none of it compares to practical training in the field. Kids starting out in the workplace realize this, university graduates discover this. It doesn’t just apply to your job, but every area of your life. You learn the most by doing things and from subsequently making mistakes, not from reading tutorials and theory.

If you are interested, I have written a follow-up piece where I delve deeper into the ‘Someday’ disease and consider five ways you can cure yourself of it.

Emergency! You’ve fallen off the productivity wagon. You’re tired, you’re feeling down, you’re procrastinating, you might even be a little hungover, and you feel like chucking that to-do list in the bin. We’ve all been there, and more often than not when you’ve lost your momentum it’s doubly hard to get it back again. That’s why I’ve created this guide for just such emergencies. It covers five suggestions that I personally use. The key focus is to get that momentum back and get the wagon rolling again and that’s what the following will help you to do.

• Do something, anything!
  This may go against a lot of what I talk about here – focusing on the right things and not doing stuff for the sake of it – but the one advantage of just doing anything is that it’s a quick and cheap way of getting some momentum behind you. Sometimes when you just can’t be bothered, doing a bunch of small and irrelevant but easy tasks like organizing the contents of a drawer or de-cluttering your book collection can give you the forward motion you need to focus on those bigger obstacles.
• Get a good nights sleep
  It’s a simple one this. If you’re tired, hungover or generally overwhelmed with everything, make sure you get a good night’s sleep. It’s hard to regain your productivity if you can’t think clearly or have a banging headache. You may be surprised how  much your productivity is tied up with your energy levels. The best way to get recharged is to get sleep!
• Clear the decks
  I hate loose ends. They are a distraction and a major drain on your resources. Often, I’ll ignore them or let them slip under the radar because, all they really are is annoying, finicky little chores. However, when you’ve fallen off the wagon those loose ends create the muddy ground which makes getting moving again twice as hard. A little time spent clearing the decks now – moving your paperwork into folders or tidying up your home – will make things much easier when you finally get back on track.
• Have a major mind sweep
  If the metaphorical muddy puddles of having loose ends lying around everywhere isn’t bad enough, than the weeds and vines of uncaptured thoughts swirling around your head is likely to keep you rooted to the spot. Bring up a trigger list, take a seat and start capturing all those thoughts, things to do and creative ideas that are swirling around inside your brain.  Better out than in as they say.
• Start ASAP
  Fallen off the wagon? Get back on now. Don’t put it off. Don’t look for a fresh start with a new week, day, month or anything like that, you will just drive yourself mad waiting around to take action. Even if it just involves doing one of the tips in this post, don’t wait to regain that sense of purpose. Waiting for the idea time to pick yourself up again or waiting to achieve that spark of productive magic means you’ll be waiting around for a long time. It’s like playing a game of football. If you get tackled and loose the ball, you get back up again and keep playing – you don’t wait till the next match to start playing again.

Back to school
Thankfully, by and large it’s not our fault as I will hopefully demonstrate today. To make the point, let’s go right back to when we were school kids. At my school at least, classes always lasted 45 minutes. I never figured out why but according to the teachers that’s exactly how long it took (plus homework) to teach a concept, idea or subject. This was all well and good but occasionally I’d understand the subject in much less time than this (and no doubt a few other kids in class would too). Of course, we couldn’t say anything or go off and do something more constructive. We’d have to sit there, hide our boredom and pass the rest of the time in the best way we could, otherwise face getting shouted at by the teacher.

Back to work
Naturally we grew up and entered the big wide world of work where everything was… exactly the same. School days of 9AM to 3.30PM (for me at least) were replaced with work days of 9AM till 5PM (again, there are variations on this but the principle remains the same). We couldn’t finish our work early or fly through it with efficient ease because the boss would shout at us for taking it easy while the rest of the workforce were still trudging along doing the work that you had finished several hours ago. And so, we’d drag our work out, come up with pointless activities and make sure it filled up our time so as to look busy. Go figure.

My point is…
What I hope is apparent from my example is that society as a whole is geared towards wasting time. From the moment we enter school we’re in an environment where dragging work out, taking your time and generally being inefficient is the norm. That manifests itself all the way to the world of work so it’s no wonder that our entire mindset is geared that way. Take checking your email inbox as a prime example. What should be a simple five minute task if you focused on it, often becomes thirty minutes of dawdling just to pass the time till the bell goes or the workday is over. When society is like this, how do you break free?

In the 21st century it’s no longer a simple matter of picking up a pen and writing or getting your tools out to build something. You can no longer stand in front of a metaphorical conveyor belt and crank widgets all day long because what’s coming down that line is multi-layered, multi-faceted, time consuming and complicated.

Now excuse me while I go on a long analogy worthy of Gregory House. Nowadays the road from A to B is no longer smooth and straight like a Roman road. It’s potholed, snakes all over the place and has numerous pitstops along the way. It’s difficult to make the journey when you’re faced with that. That’s why we need travel guides – Getting Things Done, 7 Habits, Zen To Done, Do It Tomorrow, The 4-Hour Work Week – so that we are better prepared to navigate all of those bumpy roads and make the journey easier. But at the end of the day you still have to hop in the car and get moving. You still have to just do it. You still have to stop procrastinating and get on with it. The old advice applies now more than ever.

What I’m trying to say is that the doing habit has become increasingly lost in a world which on one hand expects instant results and allows you to pick and choose what you want, but on the other hand is dumbfounded by just what it actually takes to do something nowadays. Getting 7 Zen Habits Done In 4 Hours is great (invaluable?) for giving you a direction and guidence and making the whole process easier, but it’s still not going to mean you’ll do anything. That’s a habit you need to rediscover or develop through commitment and repetition to the original rule of productivity – just do it.

The to-do list is perhaps one of the oldest staples for anybody trying to get organized and productive. Whether it’s on paper or as part of an app, it’s such a simple concept – write down a list of things you need to do and tick them off as you complete them. Unfortunately, as our workload has got more complicated and large over the years, so too as the traditional to-do list. It can take a little bit more thought and organization to make it work and that can cause problems. So, I thought I’d create a list of the most common problems I’ve come across and how you can fix them.

Problem A: My to-do list is too long and it depresses me!
A long to-do list is very overwhelming and de-motivating for obvious reasons. It serves as a (bad) reminder as to how much stuff you have to do and it’s often difficult to know where to start with any of it. However, the problem isn’t always how much work you have to do, it’s how you organize it all.

• Solution 1: How many of those tasks do you need to do now? How many of those tasks do you need to do at all? Separate your to-do lists into tasks you need to do this week, tasks you need to do next month, tasks you’d like to do someday, maybe in the future, etc. All that you need to focus on is what you need to do today. Don’t cloud your vision with stuff that doesn’t require any of your attention.
• Solution 2: Your to-do list is full of junk and needs to be cleaned up. Refer to my extensive series on achieving a slim to-do list (part one and two).

Problem B: I just stare at my list and never do anything with it
When people talk about to-do lists they think it’s just about putting down whatever comes to mind that needs attention. A to-do list sounds like a simple idea but to make it genuinely useful you need to really think about what you’re writing down. If it’s not actionable, all you’re doing is staring at a list of vague projects that don’t tell you very much, rather that it telling you what you need to do.

• Solution: For each task you want to write down on you to-do list, ask yourself what the next physical action would be and write that down instead. “Arrange birthday party for Sarah” is not actionable, because where would you start with that? “Collect a list of Sarah’s friends” is a much better item to have. If you see that on your to-do list you know immediately what you’re doing.

Problem C: I can never complete my to-do list
It’s 5PM and everybody is putting their coats on and making their way out of the office. You meanwhile, are still sat at your desk, staring at a half complete to-do list. Yet another unproductive day, but don’t blame the to-do list just yet. There are numerous causes as to why you might not be completing it.

• Solution 1: Your to-do list is too long, refer to problem A
• Solution 2: Your to-do list isn’t actionable, refer to problem B
• Solution 3: When home time or a deadline is looming and you still have several tasks left on your to-do list to complete, is there an inner drive to get on with it? If not, your personal trust is low. When you add something to your to-do list you’re making a personal promise to complete it. Every time you don’t do it, your personal trust drops. To rebuild this trust, identify the small number of tasks you genuinely need to do and focus purely on ticking them off as complete. Once you’re confident you can come away everyday having completed what you say you’re going to complete, you can increase the length of your to-do list.

I enjoyed writing this little guide to common to-do list problems and I’d like to write a second part to this series. However, I need your help. The above have been my main problems but I need yours too. What common to-do list hurdles have you had to deal with and how did you resolve them (assuming you have done)? Share them in the comments or on Twitter and hopefully I’ll be able to include them in part two!