Time Management Tuesday: Maybe We Need To Plan Our Holiday Work Ahead Of Time

Well, sprinting wasn't everything I'd hoped for last week. I did get a couple of sprints done on Tuesday, but only one on Wednesday. Over the rest of the week, I got some marketing done (the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, for instance, posting it, promoting it, e-mailing the newsletter), but little on the revision I need to finish. And, to be honest, I did most of the marketing work in the evening, when I usually do it.

Last year at this time, I was all enthused for a structured hourly sprint system. And I raised the question of using sprinting for writing tasks that don't involve creating new material. Creating new material usually requires getting into a world and staying there a while. Maybe you can do that if you're sprinting for twenty minutes every hour or so, but it's going to be a lot harder to do in twenty minutes a day or twenty minutes over a weekend.

Working on a calendar, checking out a journal as a potential market, making a submission--those are entirely different stories. How much could we get done sprinting if we had the right work planned for the sprints? For a week or more of sprinting?

Of course, that means remembering that we have to do the planning. I think we're talking a goal for next year--planning work for the holidays.