A Writer's Perfect Day - Scheduling your tasks

Imagine your calendar is clear and you can spend whatever time you wish working as a writer. Create a list of activities. It probably will include some time for drafting new pages, adding to your story. If you're like me, and you have a lot of projects that need attention, you might also spend time on revision. I also regularly get involved excavating through files of notes, ideas, titles, and unfinished manuscripts – often uncovering some surprises. Research might be added. Connections with other people might be added.

Stephen King pointedly reminds writers that they need to be readers, so that probably gets on this list, too. And I think that no matter where you are in your writing career it's important to keep yourself fresh with education, exercises, and conferences.

Certainly, some time would need to be dedicated to career planning, exploring opportunities, pitching, and marketing. Reasonably, it's good to schedule some "oops" time because things don't always go as planned. For me, plotting and outlining tends to be a separate, dedicated activity, which could come before drafting or after I've spewed out the first draft.

This has become quite a long list of activities, and I invite you to consider how you would prioritize these items and what time you would dedicate toward each. You also may have some items you care about that I missed here. Go ahead and add them. Or you might want to slice up my items, such as revision, into smaller pieces like story development, scene analysis, and ferreting out typos.

When you have a your list done, you'll probably see more than can be done in one day. You may wish to look at a full month and see how a perfect month might play out for you with these activities assigned to different times and days. My recommendation would be that you put together a perfect day, just for fun. Then put together a perfect week, which would be good to take more seriously.

So now you've taken a blank week and populated it with the jobs you need to do as a writer. Feel free to fill up every available hour or to stick to the bare minimum — 15 minutes of drafting per day, five days a week (based on my experience with people I've mentored). I hope you feel pretty good about it. I hope it makes time for the efforts you've prioritized and chosen. (You can check out more about making good decisions on where to put your efforts in the writer's decisions series I just completed.)



I hope it looks to you like the kind of schedule that would make all your dreams as a writer possible.

I suspect, that as good as this may look, you still have a problem with the schedule – the rest of your life. Many things intrude -- day jobs, family, household work, health, and more. Presuming you done a good job as far as your fantasy schedule, now you have time to put together a week (or day) with achievable tasks. So the next step is to go back to a blank week and populated with commitments that can't be avoided. Usually this begins with boxing out time for work or school. If you have regular medical appointments, you probably can't trade them off. So make sure all the absolutely untouchable things (church on Sunday for me) are marked down in indelible ink.

Other tasks may offer more flexibility. You want to take advantage of that so you can shift things around to take advantage of your golden hours. For me that means drafting in the morning and revising the early afternoon. So you might want to shift the time or day for that phone call with your daughter or trade-off the days on which your responsible for dinner.

Your week is beginning to fill up. In all likelihood, you feel a level of frustration because this calendar leaves out activities on your ideal calendar or doesn't provide enough time for work you care about.

The good news is that you probably do see more opportunities for writing related work than you imagined. How do you get more time? Having things scheduled and working more efficiently will immediately provide more productive time, so you've already taken an important step. You may also see that there are big open areas that normally capture web surfing, television, and sleep. To an extent, these may be negotiable. How much are you willing to sacrifice for your writing career?

Also, looking at your original list of tasks and those that didn't make it into the one-week schedule, consider putting some of these jobs into slots that might become available once a month or even once a quarter. Just get them onto the calendar somewhere if you can.

I have two other suggestions regarding perfect days and perfect weeks. First, always have a list of tasks that can be done in 15 minutes or less. If you make sure you're prepared to jump right into them, these can be disposed of during what I call interstitial times. If a phone call and early or your waiting for water to boil order appointment gets canceled, that creates openings to get these done and off your lists.

Second, don't schedule every moment. Leave lots of extra time for projects that go over, illness, emergencies, unexpected visits, and all those things that surprise us on a regular basis. Acknowledge that life cannot be completely controlled and make allowances for that.

I'll repeat one thing – make time at least five days a week for drafting new work. This is the essence of what being a writer is. Sacrifice all the other writer-related work before you skip this. A writer writes.

I begin an online version of my How to Write Fast course next week. To tee it up, here's an article on the Five Reasons to Fast Draft.