What will you get done in ten minutes a day?

Do you ever find that you get to the end of the day and you have not achieved as much as you would have liked, perhaps you have not actually done anything towards your writing goals. Yes you are busy and have a lot of priorities however if you have too many days like this then you are unlikely to complete much work.

One way to make improvements is to start small and develop habits that support you reaching your writing goals. Don’t think too big, 1000 words a day may be doable but if you don’t do it then you will feel a failure.

Start off by taking one of your writing goals – this might be enter a short story competition, write and submit an article or write and complete a novel.

Set yourself a 10 minute time and place session that you are going to use each day to write – you may have a different weekday slot and a weekend slot. Think carefully and creatively about when and where your session will be as you do not want any distractions. For some working at your desk over lunch might be fine, for others this will be an invitation for colleagues to hijack your time. You might find that 10 minutes in the morning works well for you, or you may find other family members think of you as up and available and will ask for coffee, an ironed shirt or even a cooked breakfast.

Consider going to work a little earlier and, if you drive, staying in the car for 10 minutes to do your writing. If you use public transport pop in your earphones (you don’t need to have your music on), and write. How about going out for lunch and writing in the park or a coffee shop.

Once you have identified and committed to your session then use it to write every day without exception. Never think you do not know what to write, or you don’t feel inspired, or you are writing rubbish so you may as well stop – just write. At this stage it does not matter how good your writing is, this is a first draft, you edit later.

If it helps you try these techniques to help overcome that feeling of not knowing what to write:

• Finish a writing session partway through a scene and sentence; this can help you get back in the flow quickly as you read the last sentence from the previous day.
• At the end of each session make a note of which scene or section you are going to write the next day.

Commit to developing this habit for a month. At the end of the month this habit will be embedded into what you do each day and you will have increased your word count considerably. At this stage you can now add another habit – this might be increasing your 10 minutes to 20 minutes; it might be doing your writing related admin every Monday evening. Whatever it is commit to it, do it and then add another.

Happy writing.