Jen's Writing Journey

On Monday, I talked about how to avoid taking on too much writing work, but what if you have already over-committed?

1. Prioritize
   Lay out all of your projects and assign a numerical priority to each based on deadline and contractual obligations. Yes, this means you should work on the boring contracted piece before you dive into the fun spec piece!

   Arrange them in priority order and figure out how long each will take.

2. Break Them Down
   One of the pedagogical tricks I learned while working for an ed tech publisher was the concept of chunking information. When teaching complicated concepts, effective educators break the concepts into easily digested chunks to present to students. Each chunk builds to the next so that students will understand the new concepts based on their prior learning.

   This concept also works with large projects. If you sit down to write a novel, you may give up because that big monolithic goal seems too hard to achieve. But, if you take it chapter by chapter, soon you’ll be finished with your first draft.

   Take your highest priority project and your estimate of the time it will take. Break it into maybe five chunks. If necessary, break those chunks down further, then do the same thing with your second highest priority.Schedule your time so that you apply internal deadlines to each chunk, then put the tasks on your calendar. Stick to these deadlines.

3. Adjust Your Personal ScheduleIn a perfect world, family time and work time would never butt up against each other. But, when you have too much work for your scheduled work time, something has to give.

   Find tasks that other family members could help with. Could your spouse pick up the weekly groceries on the way home from work? Could your kids sweep or vacuum? (If you have any tips for training the dogs to do the dishes, please let me know!)
   

4. Build in Rewards
   Remember that boring contracted piece I mentioned? You will quickly burn yourself our if you work on it nonstop. Figure out how much time you can work without a break and how much time you can spend on a break to recharge.

   The reward can be writing 100 words on the fun spec piece when you finish 1,000 words on the boring project. Or it can be catching a favorite TV show if you meet your daily goal. It can even be 10 minutes on Twitter if you have devoted the previous 50 to work. Find what motivates you.

5. Make Plans for the Future
   After you make it through this time of overwork with your sanity and career intact, make sure it doesn’t happen again. You’ve learned a valuable lesson about how much one person can accomplish, and you can use that knowledge to help you decide when you need to turn a project down.

How do you get through crazy work times?

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• The Glamorous Life of the Writer
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• Writing in the Cloud
• The Importance of Backups