Set yourself deadlines to increase your productivity

When you are working on your own writing projects that you will submit to the market when complete it can be difficult to motivate yourself to complete to a set schedule – after all no-one is saying to you, ”I need that article by Friday.”  Your productivity may be adversely effected not only because of procrastination but because you may also find yourself spending considerable time perfecting your work when in fact your writing is already of a high quality.

If no-one is setting deadlines for you then it can be useful and productive to set your own deadlines.

To set and meet deadlines take the following approach; each week:

• List the projects you are working on or want to begin; these might include a novel, an article for a named publication, a short story for a competition, a short play for the local am dram group and a blog post.
• Prioritise your projects in order of importance
• Note a completion deadline against each one – write it down as this will increase your commitment
• List the tasks involved to reach completion (research, writing first draft, editing)
• Put a realistic, or best guess, estimate of the time needed for each task – for long projects you might put two hours per 1000 words rather than the total time needed
• Schedule tasks into your writing week – it is important to plan the week ahead so that you can see where you might need to make adjustments. Ensure that you allocate time to your top 3 priorities. Also ensure that your schedule allows you to complete a smaller project in no more than two weeks though completing a project each week is even better.
• Follow your schedule and complete the tasks – remember you are aiming for good work not perfection. As you are working think of your deadlines as just that – deadlines, you must complete the article by the set date even if you have to allocate additional writing slots.
• At the end of the week review how well you did and then set your schedule for the next week.

Keep this up for the next few weeks, reviewing and adjusting where necessary, and you will find that as you start to complete projects and send work to your chosen markets your motivation to further improve your productivity will increase. During your writing time you will become focussed on getting the job done which will lead to you getting the job done.

Happy writing.