Tag Archives: time management

Time Management: Just Fifteen Minutes!

Time management has been a challenge for me for as long as I can remember. And keeping my house clean?

(Excuse me while I go have a good laugh)

Okay. Anyway, yes, the day job makes a convenient excuse. Not sayin’ it’s a good one, but it’s mine, and I’m sticking to it. Actually, I no longer worry about it, because now that my husband’s retired, he does a lot of it, and trades work with a friend to do some too (don’t hate me!). But when I was laid off a few years ago, I knew I had to step up.

Enter Flylady.

Before: My shoes were out of control!

Flylady’s website is full of tips to get your house (and other aspects of life) under control through routines. She sends out motivational emails every day, and sells products on her website that she’d personally used and determined to be the best value for what they do. She also has a lot of great sayings:

“Your house did not get messy in one day, it’s not going to get clean in one day!”

“You cannot organize clutter, you can only get rid of it!”

“Baby steps get the job done!”

“Just fifteen minutes!”

What a difference ten minutes makes!

Words to live by!

While I was out of work, I did a good job getting clutter under control, and I kept up with the house fairly well. But reining in clutter is an ongoing task, and I haven’t kept up with it since going back to work several years ago. Yesterday, I tripped over shoes in my walk-through closet and decided enough was enough. Surely it wouldn’t take that long to declutter my shoes, so I noted the time and figured I’d spend fifteen minutes on it and see what I could get done.

Buried in that junk, I found three pairs of boots I hadn’t worn in at least two years, and five pairs of shoes that were worn out (and I also hadn’t worn in a year). Those went out. Behind them, way in the back of the closet, were a cleaning bucket I’d thought was lost, and a laptop I had from my first software development job, that I bought in 1997! Even if it could run modern software, the screen was just about shot the last time I fired it up. So I found a place that recycles computers for free, without using toxic chemicals or shipping it over to China, and I put the boots in a bag for the next AMVETS pickup.

Time? 10 minutes!

Okay, five more minutes. I decided to tackle my husband’s shoes, since his size-14s are even more of a tripping hazard than my shoes. He didn’t have any to throw out, but I did move a few he doesn’t wear often to the back, behind his slacks.

Fifteen minutes total, and I was done!

The rest of the closet awaits for my next fifteen minutes, some other day, maybe tomorrow!

Have you ever put off something because you thought it would take a long time – then when you finally jumped in and got to it, found that it didn’t take long at all? Have you found anything as ridiculous as a non-functional, 14-year-old laptop??? Got any decluttering tips? Please share!

#ROW80: Week 1 Wednesday Update

I usually don’t get a lot of writing done on Mondays or Tuesdays, because Monday is paperwork night, and both nights are big TV nights for DH. Yet, I managed to knock out my first goal of the week: I finally noted the remaining places in my manuscript where plot holes need to be plugged – yay! There were quite a few, so that’s one revision step that took longer than the week I’d originally planned for it.

That leaves timing and sequencing for the rest of the week for me. If anyone else here has done Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel workshop, this is Lesson 14 and 15. This is my third book using this system, so I’ve managed to compress it a bit. Anyone else using HTRYN?

Good luck to my #ROW80 peeps!

#ROW80 Goals

I am taking part in a new writing challenge – well, new to me at least. It’s called Round of Words in 80 Days, and the idea is to set a measurable goal not only for the challenge as a whole, but each week. We report our progress each Sunday and Wednesday, so I’ll be doing that here. If nothing else, it will keep me accountable on my revisions for Time’s Fugitive.

So here goes:

My goals for the 80 days are:

Finish revisions on Time’s Fugitive by November 7, with the ultimate objective of a release by Christmas (although that depends on my beta readers and editors too). I have specific steps to achieve this, so it’s not just a big eat-the-elephant goal.
While Time’s Fugitive is with the beta readers and editor, my goal is to either outline the second half of the book I started for NaNoWriMo 2009 and never finished, or to outline a new Saturn Society novella – I’ll figure out which when the time comes.

This week’s goals are:

Mark where changes are needed in Time’s Fugitive to fix plot holes
Review scene sequence and timing issues, note fixes where needed. This sounds simple, but it’s time travel – with multiple characters traveling in multiple times – so it’s not. Especially since I want it to make sense to readers. 🙂 After all, that’s all of us writers’ ultimate goal, right?

Time Management: Not Enough of it in the Day!

As I dig deeper into revisions for Time’s Fugitive, it seems lately that I never get done what I’d planned. Seeing as the release is set for December (thankfully, I haven’t committed to when in December), this is a problem. I really need to be done with these revisions by the first of November at the latest, in order to give my beta readers and editor adequate time to do their thing. So it’s time to reevaluate the schedule again.

If nothing else, it should be clear that the routines (or schedules) we set up for ourselves need to be flexible, and we need to reevaluate periodically to make sure they’re still working for us (and not the other way around). So what was going on with mine?

My Cozi to-do list: It's frightening

I was spending no more than an hour each night dealing with email, checking friends’ blogs, and checking in on my social media presences. I was doing my workout, eating dinner with my family, and spending time with my pets. I was getting my paperwork and chore stuff done. Best of all, I was getting my writing. But not necessarily done. And by the time I got done with that and was ready to do a little business stuff – finding review blogs, designing business cards, stuff like that – it was time to get ready for bed.

Of course, it would be really easy to cut back on sleep. I’m a night person, and it’s almost always a challenge to get to bed on time because, hey, I was a zombie for half the day, but by evening, I’m good to go! That might not matter if I didn’t have a kid to take to school, and a job to go to. But I do, so I need to get up no later than 7 AM. Which is even harder than going to bed on time, even when I do. But going on less sleep has more ramifications than simply a lack of energy the following day. Sleep is our bodies restore themselves, both mentally and physically. Too little of it can make your ability to focus on a task take a real hit. That, too, might not be a problem if you do a mindless job, but I am a computer programmer. My day job deserves better, as does my writing! There are other health disadvantages in inadequate sleep, including more difficulty losing weight. I need all the help I can get there!

So cutting out sleep is not the answer. Better to figure out where the schedule went wrong – and what to do about it. Once I gave it a little thought, it was obvious where my failure was: my writing tasks for the day were taking more than the allotted hour – more like an hour and a half, or even two hours.

The lesson here is that we need to figure out how long does a task really take, and choose a realistic time frame for completion. Maybe you were able to crank out a 50,000-word novel in one month for NaNoWriMo last year, but is working at that rate sustainable long-term? For many of us with day jobs, family and other responsibilities, NaNoWriMo involves putting other tasks to the side for that month, or cramming lots of writing into the weekend. I did NaNoWriMo in 2009 and won, and that’s how I did it. Instead of trying for the 1,667 words/day, every day, I instead shot for 1,000 words on four weekdays out of five, and 3,000 on Saturday and Sunday.

And therein is my other tip for today: Allow yourself some time off. By divvying up our tasks in such a way that allow for an evening/day off, we reduce the pressure on ourselves, and in doing so, increase our chances for success. Miss a day? No worries! It’s built in. No need to stress about having to do x much more tomorrow.

And going back to the issue of tasks that take longer than we expect, the answer there is easy, too: we need to realistically estimate how much time a given task will really take, and allot for it.

The problem is, sometimes it’s hard to know how much time something will actually take, especially when it’s something that’s not always the same, like writing – or computer programming! Yes, I deal with this in my day job on a regular basis, and that’s where I learned the secret of scheduling: However much time you realistically think something will take, double it. And if there are a lot of variables or unknowns, double it again. I can’t tell you how many times these have saved face for me at work, where in programming, Murphy’s Law rules. With this kind of scheduling (and a great project manager who will fight for it with the client), I almost never fail to deliver what my clients expect, when they expect it. The times I have run up against this, have always been cases where the client refused to give us the amount of time we asked for. Conversely, clients are never upset when we deliver a project ahead of time, or are able to include wish-list features now that they were hoping to add later.

Do you find yourself not having enough hours in the day to do all you’d planned? If so, can you figure out why? Is it because things took longer than you thought, you didn’t allow yourself any extra time, or something else? Got any tips to share? If so, please do!

Time Management: Do It First, DUH

My time management plans have been a bit challenging lately. The main reason for this is that I have several ongoing tasks on my plate that each need more time than the allotted hour each evening. Some have fallen off the schedule, except sporadically – email and social media, for example. In some cases, this was unexpected. An upgrade to my accounting software that should have been easy, ended up taking up a whole evening, ending with a lengthy tech support phone call (normally, a last resort for me). All ended up well, as the technician was actually able to help and we finally determined that the download sites I’d tried getting the software from, were both dishing up bad files. Still, that’s three hours I can’t get back.

Treadmill + good stuff to read on my netbook + DUH = Success!

One thing that amazingly hasn’t fallen off the schedule is my physical activity, which for the most part amounts to a thirty-minute interval workout on the treadmill. I’ll be honest here: I hate exercising. I like walking in and of itself, but I don’t like to sweat (which the interval workouts certainly do), I get easily bored, and I get stressed thinking of all the other stuff that needs to be done, that I’d much rather be doing.

So how have I kept it up?

Two things, actually. The first is something I learned several years ago in psychologist/author Margie Lawson‘s wonderful Defeat Self-defeating Behaviors online workshop: The DUH principle.

The DUH principle is pretty simple, and therin lies its beauty. Its three facets are:

Do it first. Or at least, as close to first as possible. I’m sooooo not a morning person, so there’s no getting up early to exercise. Not gonna happen. So my “first” is first thing after I get home from work.
Understand it might not be easy. This part I put out of my mind and Just Do It, even if I don’t feel like it (and I often don’t).
Hurray! Celebrate your progress and success! I mark down my treadmill time in my food and exercise diary on my Android phone, and also on my workout site. I also have a Yahoo goals group, to whom I report my success each week.

The other thing that’s helped me is Make it Fun if at all possible. With a little help from my netbook, the Kindle for PC app, and tons of great books, my exercise time doubles as reading time – something all writers should do anyway. So knowing I’ve got a good book to read just waiting on my netbook is a great incentive, and helps me get past the I-don’t-feel-like-its. It really makes that half hour zip by. Years ago, I tried reading print books on the treadmill. Didn’t work. My treadmill has a book slot on its control panel, but the panel is way too high for me, and it’s too low a slant. It was also a pain to turn pages. The netbook holds the book at the perfect angle, and turning the page is just a tap on the page-down button.

Got any good tips on getting an un-fun task done? Please share! And if you’re having trouble, try the DUH principle – and see if you can make that drudgery fun!

Time Management: How’s That Working Out for You?

A couple weeks ago, we discussed how we want to use our time… and how we actually do use that time. For those of us who work a full-time job, have a family, and have a writing “job” on the side, it can be especially challenging.

So how’s it going two weeks in? For me, it’s gone quite well… at least during the week. I’ve managed to get an hour of time working on my current book in revision each weeknight, just as I’d planned. In addition, I also got a workout in every night, something I haven’t done regularly for some time, so that’s significant.

The above is not to say my schedule never got disrupted, but that’s OK because I outlined it to allow for that.

For example: On Tuesday night, DH suggested going out to dinner. The Schedule allows for an hour for dinner, which includes spending time with and feeding the critters. It also allows an hour for chores. However, going out to dinner took two hours, as we met friends and had a couple beers too. So that night, something had to be sacrificed from the schedule: chore time. (Hint: any time something disrupts the schedule and something’s gotta go, chores wins, hands-down, unless there’s something there that can’t be put off, i.e. paperwork/bill paying when the bills are due within a few days.) On another day, I ended up doing unplanned mom-taxiing (and I think that was a day the paperwork couldn’t be put off), so writing business got left off. No problem there – I have it on the schedule every night, but honestly, there isn’t business stuff that needs to be done every night.

Where time management might continue to be a challenge is on the weekend. When we have Two Whole Days stretched out before us, it’s easy to put off whatever’s on the To-Do list, until next thing we know, it’s 10:30 PM Sunday night, and we haven’t written Monday’s blog yet <cough>. We also have the tendency to see that big block of time and fill it too full, without leaving any time for what the weekend’s supposed to be for: going somewhere, doing fun things with family and friends, or just relaxing – which are all sooo important, to avoid burnout.

So that’s my next challenge – get caught up on the stuff I didn’t get done this weekend, and figure out how to manage that time, so I don’t run into this next weekend.

Especially since I have some family fun planned.

What about you? Have you seen a difference since taking a harder look at how you spend your time? Any suggestions or insights to share?

Illustration via Microsoft Office Images

Thursday Thoughts: A Writer’s Time

One thing many writers find to be challenging is time management. That’s especially true for those of us like me who also have a full-time job, family, perhaps even a small business aside from writing, but I think it’s something just about all writers wrestle with at one time or another. You think you have a whole evening (or – gasp! – a whole day!) so you take your time getting around to the writing, hurp-durp around on the Internet some, check your email 20 times, play a few computer games, then finally sit down to write… and next thing you know, you’re falling asleep at the keyboard. You look up, and it’s midnight. Where has the day gone???

Add Facebook, Twitter, and trying to build an Internet presence into that mix and… well, for me, the scenario above was becoming an all-too-common occurrence.

Daily goals were not being met. Weekly goals – halfway, if that. Yet, I still felt like I’d been busy! So I did something I learned in a time management course, way back when: I analyzed where did my time go… and where did I want it to go each evening?

A few things were immediately apparent: I was spending way too much time goofing off, and way too little writing. And too much time accomplishing too little (that big, light-blue block of “I don’t know”). Also, notice what’s not there: attending to the writing business, and exercise.

I have five and a half to six hours from the time I get home from work, to the time I need to go to bed. I thought about how I thought my evening should break down, and this is what I came up with:

A half-hour for exercise (bonus: I read while on the treadmill)
An hour to read/answer email and hit social media
An hour and a half for dinner, and spending time with family, feeding the critters, etc.
An hour for doing personal/family chorse, like personal paperwork
An hour for writing – that’s actual writing, planning on the WIP, or revising
A half-hour (average) for writing -business stuff: updating my website, blogs, designing promo materials, etc.
A half-hour of downtime (usually playing computer games)

I read before I go to bed, that’s not counted in the above.

I came up with this “schedule” on Monday. So how has it worked so far?

Monday – so far so good, but didn’t get the paperwork done so that went over into Tuesday.

Tuesday – I ended up fighting with OpenOffice for an hour, because my manuscript had somehow become corrupted and my editor couldn’t open it. Sometimes stuff happens. This ate into my writing time. Last week, it would’ve killed it. Tuesday, I still got a half hour in on the WIP.

Wednesday: worked out almost exactly as planned, expect I spent more time on this blog, twiddling with the charts. I’m finding that the exercise is much more likely to get done if I do it right after I get home from work (I’m soooooo not a morning person, so getting up earlier is not happening).

The thing to keep in mind is this is a guideline, not a must-do. But so far it seems to be helping.

How about you? Do you have trouble with time management, whether or not you’re a writer? If you’ve found anything that helps, please share!

Jennette Marie Powell

Life and Love in Four Dimensions