Time Management Tuesday: The WRQS

Is everyone having a great beginning of the year-long unit of time? Planning like mad? Knocking off tasks one right after another? Yeah! Me, too! Since we're still at the beginning of this year-long unit of time, here's a little plan for managing your month-long units from Kelly Carey of 24 Carrot Writing so you can do even more.

The WRQS

The WRQS, as Carey calls it, stands for write, revise, query, and submit, and the idea is that you do all of those things each month. Speaking as someone who tends to submit in binges after long periods of leaving everything on my hard drive, I like the idea of forcing myself to spread that work around.

The WRQS requires that you spend the first week of each month writing (anything), the second week revising (anything), the third week querying or looking for a place to query (anything), and the fourth week submitting (anything). Looking for agents, editors, and publications to query/submit to is hugely time consuming. I have complained about it here many times, I am sure. A structure to help make that work happen is a good thing. Essentially what you're doing with this is scheduling work instead of just doing whatever is in front of you, which leads to some things being missed.  

Modifications?

If you're working on a major project, by which I mean a book, you're not going to want to write just one week a month. You can still make WRQS work by simply taking a few units of time away from your writing during Weeks Two, Three, and Four for revision, querying-, and submission-related tasks.

Another thing you could do with this is not do it every month. You could have WRQS months when you want to make sure you're doing more querying and submitting.