Six surefire ways to boost writing productivity

After last week’s doozy, I figured I’d tee up a couple of softballs out of the gate for the resurrected SOTB.

I’d like to say that I can sit down to write anywhere and any time. I do know some writers who can pack up the laptop and head to the busiest coffee shop in the neighborhood and pound out words by the thousands.

Not me.

I’d spend more time looking at people and listening to their conversations than I would actually writing anything. While I might be able to call that “research,” I’d be completely useless when it comes to getting words on the page.

Now, this doesn’t mean I have to fully control my environment before I can get things written. But it does mean I have a process for getting my nugget primed for lots of verbs and nouns and adjectives.

While I hate it when people tell me how I should write, I do like it when people can pass along to me what works for them. In that spirit, here are six things I do that make my writing productivity soar.

De-clutter

I’m not a neat guy. I’m organized—granted, it’s my own form of quasi-chaotic organization—but I’m not one to put stuff in folders or categorized piles. It’s pretty much just the one pile. I know that, if it’s important, it’s in that pile.

But the one thing I have to have, before I can pound out even the first letter of anything, is a clean workspace. Pens I’m not using get put away, stacks of Post-it pads get put in the drawer, junk gets tossed or shredded, and important papers—research, notes, etc.—I don’t need for the task at hand go in “the pile.”

I find it keeps me focused on the page in front of me, freeing me to work unencumbered. It takes just a couple of minutes at the beginning of my writing day, letting me get to work sooner.

Read yesterday’s stuff

After I de-clutter, I make sure I go over what I wrote the day before. I find it helps me in a number of ways.

First, it assuages my inner editor. I can get that shitty habit out of the way so it doesn’t poison the rest of the day’s writing.

Second, I can reinsert myself into where I left off the day before faster. Not only does this help me get the mojo back, it can help spark new ideas or paths I hadn’t considered before.

Unplug

This one’s important for me. If I’m not careful, I can get sucked into an Internet wormhole—in the name of “research”—and not return for hours. It’s best if I just turn off the damn modem and get to work.

I suspect the same is true for just about everyone.

Chunk it

It’s so easy to look at the size of a project and get overwhelmed by the sheer scope of it all. It’s for this reason the work on things like highway and skyscraper projects get partitioned out and managed as smaller projects within the larger one.

Those things—which are similar to a writing project—have lots of little moving parts. Once you focus on the smaller tasks and milestones within, the end product looks a lot easier to achieve.

Even over the course of a single writing day, I’ll break up what I’m doing into smaller, more manageable bits, say, twenty-minute blocks. It keeps me fresh and helps me maintain momentum.

Give yourself permission

A few months back, Konrath mentioned that bestseller James Rollins attached the following to his computer monitor:

“I allow myself to write crap today.”

I did the same thing two seconds after I read that. It really became a liberating way to approach my writing for the day. I know what I do isn’t always going to be good. This was a much needed way of reassuring myself that that’s okay.

Give yourself a break

If you’re a regular gym-goer, you know that one of the best things you can do for yourself is to take a day off every so often. Your body needs the time to recover… heal a little… get stronger.

I find something similar to be true when it comes to a writing project. Taking a day off from looking at and thinking about what I’m working on is often what’s needed to keep me going. Otherwise, I get bogged down in the grind of writing.

Getting away, even for just twenty-four hours, is a welcome break. And I usually come back better off than where I was when I stopped.

I know that we’re a nutty lot, given to things like “muses” and “writer’s block.” Whether real or imagined—I say imagined—it’s important for us to keep our writing moving forward.

What I’ve given here works for me… I’m curious about what works for you. Leave a comment, let’s talk about it.

Tags: On writing, Six on the brain

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Tagged as: On writing, Six on the brain