Time Management Tuesday: Once Again...Sprint!

Monkey Summer Continues

We still have more birthdays, a family member's move, an out-of-state trip, and a surgery in the family coming up. And that's assuming nothing uninspected comes up.This kind of
thing always leads to a nice case of monkey mind for me.

Sprinting...working in a short spurt...has helped me in the past during high family times. So I've been working sprints recently. I plan to squeeze in twenty minutes here and there.

The beauty of sprinting is that it usually leads to a little bit of flow and the next thing you know, you've worked a half an hour, thirty minutes, or more. You've made a submission, found another new publication to follow, rewritten those first few pages...again.

Sprinting keeps me in the game when the rest of my life is in danger of overwhelming the game.

Yeah, I know. Enough with the game analogy. Go do a sprint, Gail.

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.

Time Management Tuesday: Okay, We Know What To Do During The Holidays

Every year I struggle with time during the holidays. It's a situational thing. One of my very first Time Management Tuesday posts was on the December Time Suck. For the record, according to the Christmas spark book I mention in that post, we need new lights for the tree this year. That's good to know.

Holiday Time Management Strategies 

No one has time to waste reinventing the wheel between the third week in November and the first week in January, so these holiday time plans come from the Time Management Tuesday archives.

• The Unit System Lifeline During That Time Of The Year  Basically, the unit system is my go to cure for any time management problem.
• Will Sprinting--And A New Laptop--Get Me Through The Holidays? Yay! I'm glad I saw this one. This seemed to help in 2013.
• Maybe Routine Was What Got Me Off The Mat. Yeah, when time gets away from us, we may need something to get us back on the clock.

So Here's My Plan For The Rest Of This Week

I'm going to use short units of time to sprint, then use routine to get over it when I'm disappointed in what I get done.

And, yes, I did sprint this morning. A real writing sprint, not a real posting a blog post sprint.

Time Management Tuesday: What Kinds Of Work Are Best For Sprints?

I've written here a number of times about sprinting. Perhaps you've read about my plans for sprinting. Or my speculation as to whether or not sprinting would get me through Thanksgiving, 2013. You may remember that creating a morning sprint habit wrecked my morning office management habit, something that I never recovered from, by the way. And, quite honestly, the whole sprinting thing had pretty much disappeared from my radar recently, possibly because of that lengthy vacation I took in September. But, then, there was last month's excitement over ten-minute sprints on the hour!

Well, I used that ten-minute on the hour thing during the lead-up to Thanksgiving with some good results. Last month I was on a submission binge. During those pre-Thanksgiving days I had my laptop on the kitchen counter and while I was by myself prepping for the Big Day I would stop every hour (at least several times a day, anyway) and do a ten-minute market search. I found two journals appropriate for submissions and submitted manuscripts to them.

This was a revelation, of which I have so many.

In the past, I thought the best part of sprinting on days when writers can't maintain a normal schedule is to allow them to work just enough so they can stay in their projects. Then it won't take them as long to get up to speed again when they can get back to work. That probably is the best part of sprinting. But in the chaos of family and day jobs, getting into a real work project for even just twenty minutes (the traditional sprint time) can be way too much, in my experience, at least.

But what about using some ten-minute sprints for some of the many other tasks writers need time for?

• Market research
• Submissions
• Getting started on blog posts
• Twitter work--those welcomes to new followers and thank yous for retweets and favorites, following new people yourself. There's masses of Twitter work

All these chores suck up time we could be using for work. If we can find a way to knock some of them off during periods when we can't do traditional writing, that should free up our traditional writing time for writing.

Well, shouldn't it?

We will see.

Time Management Tuesday: Taking Another Shot At Sprinting

I've written about sprinting a couple of times here. Then in the mad rush of life, it sort of drifted out of my consciousness as a regular time management technique.

This weekend, however, I was nursing a mild cold I wanted to get rid of (and pretty much have) and noticed that the 10-Minute Novelists Facebook community I belong to was doing a Saturday sprint event. This was to help NaNoWriMo participants punch up their word counts. Their plan was to sprint at the top of each hour and then do what they had to do on a Saturday until the top of the next one. Then they'd sprint again.

I was lolling around on a couch next to a wood stove with my laptop, anyway, so though I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, I decided to go with it. It was ten minutes before one when I heard about this, so I didn't have a lot of time to prep my mind. So I went to work on blog posts. By the end of the weekend, I had done one for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Now, in hindsight, I believe the other members of the group were doing twenty minute sprints. I only did ten minutes each hour because, well, I was sick and this was a 10-Minute Novelist group. Nonetheless, over the weekend I finished yesterday's somewhat lengthy blog post, which is terrific because I'm killing most of my evenings on blog posts. I'd like to be doing some reading then.

Today (Monday) I had to be away for a chunk of time on family business. I worked in a bit better than ten-minute sprint on this post for Tuesday before I left this morning, and I'm back for another ten minutes (and more, as it turned out) this afternoon.

Now, I wouldn't like to work like this all the time. Of course, I can get a lot more done in forty-five-minute units than in ten or twenty. Twenty- or even ten-minute sprints are a situational time management technique for those days when you're going to be hard put to find forty-five minutes because your work and personal life are out of balance and your personal time is bleeding into your work time. For those people who want to write every day, to encourage their creativity and keep their minds in their projects, as well as make progress on them, sprinting could make it possible.

I'm going to try to pay more attention to sprinting in the weeks ahead, both on Saturdays and Sundays and those weekdays when my personal life is overwhelming my work life. (Next week, for instance, which includes Thanksgiving prep, Thanksgiving, and some overnight guests.) For the immediate future, I'm going to focus on getting ahead on blog posts, trying to free up some evening time for other things. That would be nice. Creating some kind of sprinting work habits would be nice, too.

As usual, at some point I'll let you know how I do with that.

Time Management Tuesday: Using Units To Get Through Panic

Work is piling up, as it often does.

• It will be time soon to pull May's Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar together.
• I have some more Saving the Planet/Earth Day promotion to do this month, and it's coming up soon. Tomorrow for some of it, in fact.
• I've been working on an essay I'd like to finish, and then I should be looking for markets to submit it to. (I have a couple in mind, so I'm not writing this thing blind.)
• Speaking of submitting, I've been working on submissions for weeks. What about that?
• Last weekend I realized that another May Days opportunity is coming up and that I have a two-fer project I'd like to work on then, one that involves producing new work and time management. I need to do some prep for that, if I want to make any real progress. 
• World Book Night is next week, and I have to pick up the books I'm giving out. I think there may have been a glitch in the order, and I've been hunting for e-mails related to it today.
• In June, I'll be speaking on Ethan Allen at the Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington, Vermont, and I want to start bringing myself up to speed on that starting in May. We're taking a long weekend up north for that, so I'll have to find us a place to stay soon.
• I have Computer Guy working on some logos for Original Content, and I need to do something about starting to use them.

Then a few days ago I remembered that Easter is next Sunday, a holiday I try to observe with a family event. In addition to all the work that entails, I've been having trouble getting a count on the number of people who will be here. Oh, I'm also supposed to be planning a multi-week trip for September.

That's when I started to panic about time. It was the pile on of personal work onto work work that did it. During this mini-crisis I started thinking about Charles Finch's point about amateur writers spreading themselves too thin. Pick some things to work on, Gail, and stick with them.

And, better yet, give them some units of time when they have you all to themselves.

• I'll start using evening units for the CCLC next week. There's a whole week and a half after Easter. Huzzah!
• Tomorrow a unit will be devoted to getting the Saving the Planet & Stuff giveaway started for Earth Day. Before the weekend, another unit will be used to go over again what I have to do to lower the  STP&S price for next week and deciding when this weekend I should do it.
• The essay I've been working on for over a month I've been writing in sprints. It's quite far along, and by giving it some forty-five minute units over the next week, I should be able to finish it by the end of the month easily. And maybe spend some time determining the best submission plan. 
• That submission project is pretty much done, too. I just have to wait, which I can easily do while working on something else.
• I used a couple of units of time yesterday prepping for May Days. I just have to do something on it as many days as I can. Some reading is involved, and I might be able to work on that on weekends.
• I'm stopping at the bookstore to try to pick up my World Book Night books on my way home from tai chi tonight. (No special trip out.) I may find that there are no books, in which case, this is done!!!
• The Ethan Allen talk can wait until into next month. Once I have some of these other things done, assigning it units will be easier. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
• Logos--That's not critical. Yeah. Let's save that for next week at the earliest.
• And Easter, well, you don't want to hear about that. But that's started.

The old unit system helps with panic because it at least makes you feel that you've broken an overwhelming job into doing bits. In addition, planning units is a lot like creating objectives to meet a goal.

In this case, the goal is getting through the next week.

And now, if you will excuse me, I just took a break and am about to start another work unit. This one will involve that May Days project I want to get ready for.

Time Management Tuesday: Trying To Remember What We're Supposed To Be Doing

Last year I did a Time Management Tuesday post on Remembering That We Were Going To Practice Self-discipline. It was an argument that the self-discipline required to manage time required remembering that we have time management/self-discipline plans.

I remembered the memory aspect of time management last week as I tried to move forward in getting back to work after weeks of being off my game due to a nearly month-long cold, a retreat week, and surgery preparation and recovery. How many things I was I doing back before this whole thing started.

I remembered the unit system first, both sprinting and the forty-five minute segments, which was hugely helpful. Then I recalled my plan to limit reactive, noncreative work to Fridays in order to prevent things like marketing from taking over all my work time. This week I remembered that I use some morning transitional time to maintain my office. Unfortunately, it's been a while since I've done that. Planning fell apart at the end of December, and while I do recall it from time to time, I haven't been able to get back to that, either.

Managing time does require remembering a lot.

I had my best workday in weeks yesterday, spending multiple units on one big writing project. And I managed a sprint over the weekend on a new essay I started last week. On Saturday I also dragged Computer Guy into helping me with some reactive work. Remembering the unit system, sprinting on weekends, and keeping reactive work out of the workweek all figured in to what I've been able to do in the last week or so.

Time Management Tuesday: Sprinting

August and September were rough months as far as time is concerned. (Yeah, aren't they all?) In addition to an increase in the elder care duties, I spent a couple of my workdays having a great time with family members who don't work in the summer and another couple with friends I only see once a year. One week I worked only Monday and Tuesday with five days going to other things. What I find happens in those situations is that I also lose my first day back at work, trying to get back up to speed. That was certainly the case in that instance.

I'd been trying to start a draft of the project I'd worked on during May Days and getting nowhere. When I could work,  there was always something else that needed to be done. So I decided to try sprinting, which I'd read about in a Query Tracker post by Ash Krafton. She described writing in 20- to 30-minute sprints throughout the day. As Krafton said in her post "sprints are tiny finite things," and you have to work intensely during them. Hey, for 20 minutes I can be intense. As she also said, "sprints aren't tiny finite things" because they do lead to sustained writing.

I used 20-minute sprints, only once a day, trying to squeeze one in every day to avoid those long breaks in the writing process for that particular project. The first time I did it, I was trying to work between the time a family member left after staying overnight and a commitment to be somewhere else. (I can't even remember now.) I only did 10 minutes. But I did work. For the most part, I've also been able to get a sprint in at least once a weekend.

On days when I can be here to work, I still do a WIP sprint in the morning. Then I do some units of time on other things I need to get done (a submission, for instance) and go back to the WIP later in the day. The morning sprint makes getting into the project in the afternoon much, much easier.

In fact, I managed to get two and a half chapters done working this way. Of course, I'm now working on revising them down to one chapter, which seems like going backwards. But that's an organic writing issue, not a time management issue. And, by the way, because I'm an organic writer, I'm not actually going backwards. That's off topic, but just saying.

Anyway, right now I'm loving sprinting. It doesn't just generate content. It keeps you in the world of your project, which has a big impact on managing time.