Tag: productivity

Put writing on the calendar. Multiple people have said this to me, and it doesn’t work at all. That is to say, it hasn’t worked at all so far. I want it to work because I want writing to be my job, but here’s what’s really happened:

1. One day, put an appointment on my calendar that says “Write” from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM, for example
2. 10 o’clock comes around and I’m in the middle of doing something else… so I keep doing it
3. 5:30 comes around and I never did go and write
4. Well, that didn’t work
5. Don’t try it again for a few months

Writing out the above list quickly unearths some problems. First, there’s the problem of giving up on something when it doesn’t work the first time, a corollary or reflection of the pursuit of novelty, where I’m more likely to try some new thing (or, let’s be honest, try nothing) when I don’t see immediate success. But I’ve been building a writing habit for the last month or so quite successfully: writing every day, at least a little, usually empowered by getting up early and writing before I do anything else.

There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to show up somewhere at a specific time and do specific things; after all, I remained gainfully employed for about fifteen years before deciding to strike out on my own.

Some ideas for making the time-blocking approach more successful:

• Block out a whole week at a time (that is, a block at the same time every day)
• If you miss one block or don’t start at quite the right time, don’t worry: just try again the next day
• I bet you’ll sit down at the given time at least one day out of that week
• Have a preparation ritual (h/t Atomic Habits, again); if you know you are going to sit down at 10 AM, don’t wait until 10 AM to stop whatever you were previously doing. Realize you have to stop at, say 9:50 or 9:45
  • Wrap up whatever it is you’re doing as best you can, maybe that’s just putting the iPad down or hitting the pause button
  • Do whatever preparations you need to do to start writing at 10
    • So, if you want something on your desk to drink, get it now
    • Go to the bathroom, damn you
    • Even if you don’t want either of the above things, do something consistent to signal to yourself that you’re shifting into writing mode
      • Even if it seems goofy
      • So making a cup of tea or some favourite beverage isn’t a bad idea; associate the anticipation of mmm a cup of coffee with sitting down to write
        • I’d argue part of my problem right now with writing before breakfast is, my anticipation centres on ceasing to write so I can make coffee…
      • I’m 100% in on the idea of having, like, a writing hat or writing sweater, or something you change about your environment (lighting) that you put on or do to say it’s writing time
  • Now when your calendar appointment rolls around, you’re ready to start immediately
    • And, as experience shows me over and over again, starting is the toughest part. Sometimes continuing is tough, sure, but even if you have to switch away from the thing you want to work on and just free-write¹, it’s worth it to have spent the time making the words come out
  • Come to think of it this is the same way you treat any calendar appointment with an external party
    • If you have a meeting in the conference room, you gather your notebook and lock your desktop and maybe get another coffee with minutes to spare: you don’t start doing that at the meeting time, because then you’ll be late
    • If you have a date across town you backtrack and think, ok, I want to be there a few minutes early, the travel time is about forty minutes, so I want to leave the house no later than 5:00, so I need to start getting ready at 4:00…
  • So another big part of this is the fact that, sadly, tragically, it’s much easier to break a commitment to ourselves than it is to break a commitment to others
    • There are things you can do here, like ‘accountability partners’ where you tell someone else you’ll do a thing at a certain time, but admittedly this isn’t something I’ve tried a lot, it’s another thing I kind of bailed on when it didn’t work great right away…

I hope something in that brain-dump is helpful! To me, as much as to you… 😉

1. which is basically what I’m doing right now by the way ↩

I’m on too many mailing lists. This happens every few months. I remember before I got an iPhone, circa 2007, I remember talking to a workmate about how whenever we had a situation where people are away from their computers and disagree about a piece of information, how you could just take your phone out and look it up, get the facts.

And wouldn’t that be marvelous!

And it’s come to pass, sort of, not that we don’t engage in wild conjecture even though Wikipedia is right there. But the other thing that happened is that there’s so much information available all the time that seeking it out has become a default activity.

For me, anyway. Some people spend all their free time playing Candy Crush or looking at their social network of choice. I don’t tend to do those things, not that I think it makes me a better person than those who do¹.

But I have my own default activity, and that has become the consumption of information: in my case, information about writing and business. And this has two three problems:

1. I end up in sales funnels for online courses and sometimes spend hundreds of dollars on them but don’t necessarily do the work to get my money’s worth back out
2. Seeking the information eats up a lot of time
3. And, related, it’s easy to feel like that time was productive, and not spend a similar amount of time producing instead of consuming.

I’ve been thinking about why information is so… addictive. And the phrase that came to mind was “the terrible lure of the next thing”.

As humans we seem programmed for novelty: we don’t just want a given thing— information, a relationship, food—we want the next, new thing, and there’s probably some mechanistic evolutionary explanation for this but for once I don’t feel like exploring it. I just want to talk about the problem of novelty in a life where most of the best things come out of consistency.

It’s so much easier to seek out the next course or blog post instead of, say, re-reading the one you already have and taking notes and studying the notes and applying the lessons.

Sigh. Everything I just said sounds so boring, doesn’t it? I’m already reaching for my phone so I can check Twitter.

The terrible lure of the next thing keeps us from the boring work that we nonetheless need to do, not just to keep a roof over our heads but to fulfill whatever drive it is that makes us want to type out words and send them off into the world to link our brains up with other brains.

That magical act of telepathy. Isn’t that more important than the next morsel? And yet.

I don’t think the solution is to cut off all sources of input yet, although some days I’m headed in that direction²—and look, we know as storytellers we need an ongoing stream of input to keep our idea factories hot and humming—but somehow, somehow, we have to manage our own pursuit of novelty.

And it’s easy, especially if you were born in the 1980s like me, to reflexively think “Just say no!” because you saw those War On Drugs ads on every arcade game you ever played.

But, like, haven’t you picked up a smartphone before, bro? We have built a machine whose whole job is to demand our attention. We have filled it with supernormal stimuli³, and we can scoff at each other for being weak and enslaved by our little pocket gizmos, but the very same we, that is, humans, all of us, we built these machines to have this effect!

Why are we surprised that it worked?

Humans are good at this stuff, at understanding the little levers that make us run around in circles and then producing things that exploit the levers.

What we’re not particularly good at is using that knowledge to overcome our short-term desires.

Next time, I’ll share what I’m trying… and how well it’s working.

1. Just between you and me, I’m pretty sure it does make me a better person. Don’t tell anyone. ↩
2. I call these “that’s it, I’m going to go live in the woods” days. ↩
3. Oh, there’s plenty more to say about this ten-dollar phrase ↩

Now if uh, six, turned out to be nine

Oh I don’t mind, I don’t mind

I was reminded of that Jimi Hendrix lyric thinking about my mornings lately. I tend to wake up automatically between, say, five-thirty and six-thirty… but I haven’t been setting an alarm and haven’t been getting out of bed.

I know, I know: I quit my day job, lucky me, shut up. This is the struggle I’ve chosen, do you want to learn from it or not?

Anyway, I tend to fall back to sleep and then when I finally wake up and rise for the day it’s like 9:45. I don’t like this, as luxurious as it sounds. It puts the whole rest of the day behind the eight ball. Let me illustrate.

By the time I have breakfast and dawdle around and shower and look at the internet and read some, it’s noon and I should go outside and get a walk in, and the next thing I know it’s three in the afternoon and I’m in a coffee shop somewhere and then it’s dinner time and I haven’t done anything all day but it’s like 8:30, so… do I go to bed, or stay up late?

And the cycle repeats.

Again, if this sounds like heaven to you, well, fine. I’m not complaining like I have to dig ditches for fifteen hours a day. But I’m trying to be self-employed over here and they don’t tell you that structure is a challenge when you’ve had it forced onto you for your entire life by parents, school, more school, work.

The solution seems to be to form new habits, and they seem so simple it’s insulting: whaddya mean I have to learn to wake up at the same time every morning?

But it’s true.

As easy as it is to think, well, I don’t really need an alarm because no one’s gonna get mad if I’m not wearing a collared shirt in a fluorescent-lit building downtown in ninety minutes… life starts to suck when you have no structure for more than a couple of weeks.

Really. It does. I promise.

So this morning I set my alarm for seven. I use an app called Sleep Cycle, which tries to wake you up inside a half-hour window so you won’t feel groggy. When I set the alarm for seven it actually goes off between 6:30 and 7:00. You can snooze it, but every time it snoozes for fewer minutes until finally at 7:00 it won’t snooze anymore at all.

This is a pretty good way to get your ass out of bed even if you like to snooze… unless you just turn the alarm off and fall back to sleep. Which I have done, I’ll admit.

But not today.

Today I actually got up. Here are things I’ve found make the difference for me.

Put the phone across the room.

Alas! The way my bedroom is set up I can reach from the foot of my bed to the phone on my desk without really “getting up” but it’s better than having the phone lying next to my head, which is how I used to use Sleep Cycle. I’ve thought about going even further and putting the phone in the bathroom with the alarm volume at max, but I might not hear it when I shut my bedroom door.

And I’d lose the benefit of sleep tracking. Yeah. That’s the reason.

Me, I wear glasses.

Putting my glasses on right away makes it a little harder to just drop back onto the pillow.

Get your feet on the goddamn floor.

Even better, stand up. Even better, leave the room—go to the bathroom. If you develop the habit of splashing some water in your face first thing, that’ll probably get your day started.

Open the blinds.

Once there’s too much light in the room, it gets difficult to stay in bed, which is probably why I eventually get up between 9-10 when the sunlight gets intense¹.

Look: it feels ridiculous to write those things down, like people haven’t known about these dark secrets for centuries, but we’re in rarefied air, here: nothing will die if I don’t get out of bed on time… nothing except my dreams, anyway. So I’m trying to swallow my pride and start doing this stuff, to see what’s effective.

Do you hop right out of bed every morning and start writing? If so, tell me your dark secrets.

1. I should note that I made a lot of these notes back in the summer; this whole game gets even harder in the winter when it’s still dark at 6-7 in the morning, and the room is cold, and your bed is so warm and comfy… ↩

So far, the biggest thing I needed to learn about writing a novel came from running: just like you can’t go from couch potato to marathon runner, you can’t just sit down and write 100,000 words. Even if you’ve done it before, even if you start at, say, 4 in the morning and write until midnight. Let’s break it down, just for fun:

100,000 / 20 hours = 5000 words an hour

But there’s a book with that title, so I guess that means it’s possible, right? No. Even if you can crank 5000 words in 60 minutes, you can’t do that over and over again, 60 minutes after 60 minutes, with no break¹.

And if you’ve never written anything longer than, say, a 10,000-word short story before (raises hand), you definitely can’t spend 20 hours writing a novel.

But that’s ridiculous anyway, so why are we even talking about it?

The way I used to approach writing a book was:

1. Have an idea
2. Dawdle for a year or two
3. Open a Word document², and… start typing.

If this works for you, cool, but what I’ve discovered is I am definitely not a pantser: I need to plan things out. I need to know where I’m going, I need to know what the point of the scene I’m about to write is, how it serves to either move the character or plot forward (ergo, I need to know what the both of those are) otherwise I end up staring at a blinking cursor until my nose starts to bleed.

More to the point it doesn’t avail us to sit down and bang out two thousand words in a breakneck session and then write nothing for the next two weeks… because I don’t know about you but I want this novel done in months and not years. So back to the marathon metaphor: the way you train for a marathon is, you run just a little, and then a little more, and then a little more, and then a little more, until your “Oh, just going for a relaxing Sunday run” is still 15-20 K, like my crazy running friends.

Same deal here. I tell people I can do about 1000-1500 words in about 20-40 minutes ³, and that’s impressive to most people who aren’t writers in the same way as tossing off an “easy” 10 K is impressive to most people who aren’t runners, but we got here the same way.

It’s all a matter of training.

So: write a little, then write a little more. But here’s the thing, and I mentioned 5000 Words Per Hour before, here’s a big tip I took away from that book:

You need to track how much you write

Do this:

1. Choose a piece of spreadsheet software. Say, Numbers on the Mac, Excel on Windows.
2. In one table (Numbers uses separate ‘tables’ on a single sheet, in Excel each sheet is basically a big table but you can just use different ranges of that sheet as little independent tables) make a long list of dates in one column
3. In the next column, tally how many words you write per day

Do this. Right now, I’m serious.

My writing tends to fall into two buckets—The Almighty Novel, and Everything Else—so I use two separate tables. Novel Words, which is how many words I threw at the draft, and Total Words, which is Novel Words plus everything else I wrote that day, including notes and journal entries and, for example, this blog post. Here’s a pic:

I’ve dropped a handy chart in there with a trend line. That’s cute, but… what’s the point of this busywork?

The point is, I can see that if I keep up the current pace, in eight weeks I should be averaging 4000 words per day instead of 2500. And you can watch that trend line over time. When it starts getting shallower, you know something’s up.

We can look at ranges of time, too. Look at this period: Banging that novel out.

Yeah, baby. But in the last week or so, I’ve been limping along. Full disclosure:

Now I can pull back and examine… well, why? What else is going on in my life, what can I do to get back in the groove? This is where journaling comes in handy.

If you don’t quantify any of this stuff, you can’t grasp it by the neck and take back control.

The trend lines are there to reinforce this message: you can’t improve all at once, you improve a little over time. In his book Atomic Habits⁴, James Clear talks about getting 1% better every day. Like compound interest, this sneaks up on you: after a year of writing 1% more per day, you’re doing 37 times what you started with.

Let’s pause for a second, that’s ridiculous. So if you were writing 100 words a day, now you’re writing 3700. That’s a novel in a month instead of in three years. Gimme gimme.

And this goal is much more realistic, less threatening, less fear-inducing, than thinking “OH GOD I HAVE TO WRITE A WHOLE NOVEL???!!” No. Someday a whole novel will have been written by you. All you have to do is, write today. Try to write as much as you wrote yesterday. In fact, just try to write 1% more. And you’ll get there, eventually.

1. And Chris Fox never suggests this, I’m not calling him out. Not only is that not at all my place, but it’s also a great book. ↩
2. Literally don’t get me started ↩
3. Depending mostly on how well I can visualize the scene, I’m finding out. Action pours out of me, two people talking in a room takes ages. ↩
4. I may have mentioned this before. I will mention this again. Go read this book, seriously. ↩

Been thinking of putting up a page here with book recommendations, and/or links to the things I mention all the time (Chris Fox, Pressfield, etc.)

But it also occurred to me: it’s dangerous to spend more time reading than writing. Or reading at the expense of writing. What if we agree to write a certain fixed amount as the “price” of making a recommendation? What if you wrote a page for every page of a book you recommended?

Pretty soon you’d be recommending your own books. Well, if politeness allowed such a thing.

The Learning Trap

I’ve bought a lot of “infoproducts” over the last few years. And some are excellent. Many feel oily, though: they teach you how to make money, quit your job, live the life of your dreams by…. creating infoproducts. This sort of self-referential loop, we’ve all been warned, will leave us with hair growing out of our palms.

But I want those outcomes so much, and you know what? I always think because I’ve spent my heard-earned money on a course, now I’m invested and now surely I’ll have the motivation to work!

Well, no.

Not for me, anyway. It turns out if I spend a couple hundred bucks on something it doesn’t really make me get out of bed in the morning to do that thing. That isn’t me being fancy, like a couple hundred bucks isn’t a lot of money, it’s just apparently not how my brain works. Okay.

You can consume information forever which would be fine except it feels like you’re doing work, and you’re not. I could teach you a couple things because I’ve read and watched videos for hours on end about writing… but it doesn’t mean I can sit down and grind out a half-decent novel¹.

At some point you have to elevate implementation over information, and a mentor of mine suggested declaring the coming period an Implementation Season, where you pay less attention to incoming information and just create output.

Sounds great! But this is not easy, because information is

1. Seductive, and
2. Everywhere

I don’t really want to shut off the input entirely, you know? Because, well… let’s be honest, because the reason you sign up for a course after reading the hypnotic sales page or you buy the book after reading the Amazon reviews is there’s a little nagging part of you full of hope, thinking, oh, this one will be what makes everything finally slide into place.

Oops.

For Example

An offer emerged from my inbox for one of these joint-venture deals, where two dozen people throw their books and courses and videos about writing into a hat, and instead of the two grand it’d cost you to go buy each one individually², you pay fifty bucks for the lot.

It’s so tempting, it might as well come slathered in maple syrup. 🍁

And I bought it! Because if you read ten books and nine of them aren’t great but one changes your life, you’re out maybe a hundred bucks and a few hours, which is a lot less than the cost of, oh, I don’t know, a university degree.

Right??

The problem isn’t really the money, it’s I could easily spend the next 300 hours poring over all this material instead of writing, which isn’t really going to help me be a writer.

What I really need to do is close my web browser and get to cranking, get to staring my inadequacies in the face long enough to actually produce these words.

A Modest Proposal

So I made myself the deal I suggested up top, and I recommend this to anyone who has to choose between consuming and producing (i.e. all of us): if you’re going to recommend a book, you’ve got to write, say, a thousand words first.

If you want to recommend another book, you’ve got to write another thousand.

As long as I bought all this material, I’ll be here to share whatever I learn. But the point is to keep writing even while I’m learning, instead of being the most-learned learner with no books to his name.

Let’s you and I adopt this rule: between every chapter of the latest book that will finally turn you into a writer, between every module of the course you’re still a little shell-shocked you spent so much money on, commit to writing those words.

At the end of all the courses and all the books that were supposed to turn us into writers, surprise! We’ll have done a bunch of writing. So we’ll end up writers after all.

1. Though I’m trying. ↩
2. Not that you even knew they existed, which is the point of the joint venture… ↩