HOW I PLAN MY WRITING TIME
I've been someone who's good at being organised my whole life. While there have been times when I've been more scattered than usual, I almost always come back to my planning and organising ways. This is especially true when it comes to planning my time, working or otherwise. I thought that today I would give you a glimpse into how I make it work for me, and maybe along the way give you some tips that might help you do the same, should it work for you.
Planning has always been something that comes naturally to me, except when it comes to actually drafting, and then I'm just organised chaos because I lean more to pantsing than I do to planning. But that's not the point. The point is that it's something I've always found particularly easy, having gone from my school days and colour coded studying timetables and onto uni where I did the same, and then into writing where it took me a while to find a way to effectively plan my writing time.
I've been writing for over twenty years now. I've been published for twenty years in August and yet when it comes to having solid plans for that writing time, especially given how easily organisation comes to me, it took me a really really, really long time to find a way of planning my time that worked for me. I think some of it has to do with being chronically ill. I struggled to find a way that worked for me within the limitations of my conditions. For a long time while doing uni, and even before and after that, I would have to plan tentatively, because there was a very big chance that I'd end up in hospital for an amount of time.
While now my health has calmed somewhat, or at least I'm more able to manage at home, I have a better idea on how to make the limited time I do have work. Saying that, it still took me years to bring it to a point where I was very happy with it. I know a lot of writers who swear by bullet journals, or planners, and for a long long time, I couldn't get into it. My start in planing my time was the sticky notes app on my computer, and then I started very very small, and made sure to leave a lot of catch up days.
Those who've been on my blog before, or even on my Authortube channel, know that I will talk a lot about having adequate time to both rest, and leaving room for things going wrong. Because when you're chronically ill and disabled, things will always go wrong at some point. It even happens to the healthy people too. I didn't want to set myself up to fail. I didn't want to put too much pressure on myself, and I didn't want to be in a position where I wanted or needed to get something done in a certain time period, and just could not manage it. It was all about finding that balance between work, down time (which I'll talk about in a couple of weeks), and meeting any deadlines that I had to get things down by.
It was not easy, but then again doing things like this never are. It's rare that you land on something that works the first time you try. I did sticky notes, setting myself just one thing to do a day, with those catch up and such days included. From there I gravitated when I found a planner that worked for me, and kept with the one thing a day, but once I saw the success I was having, because in the start it wasn't only about the plan, but having the energy and time to get it done in that space. But once I hit a point where I could manage to do the things, I started to branch out, put a bit more on my plate, and make it so that some days, I had a couple of things to do a day. I didn't go for every day because even now, even after all this time, I still need to keep that precarious balance just right or I crash and fall.
So while my way works, while my planner is the right one for me, I know that my way is not the only way, and it can simply be a case of finding the right way of doing things, and everything else slots into place. Whatever you do, do it slow, be gentle with yourself, and do not think after a week, well I managed that so let's go full tilt. That will lead to crashing and burning and ain't no one want that.
Whatever you do, however you do it, good luck and I wish you the best!
Any questions? Lemme know in the comments!
Follow Joey to be kept up to date with the latest news regarding Joey and her books.
No comments:
Post a Comment