by Dave Haslett
More time to write
Could you spend less time doing certain things and squeeze in a few more mini writing sessions? Would you really miss something that much if you gave it up or postponed it for a few weeks to write your book? If you do something every week, could you skip a week and do it every two weeks instead? Could you catch up with it at the end of the month? If you watch an hour-long TV show every week, could you record it or use a catch-up service and reward yourself with a four-hour binge when your book is finished?
Get off the phone … sometimes
Do you spend hours on the phone? See if you can reduce the number of calls you make and receive, and make them shorter. Could you send a few short emails or text messages instead?
If you call someone several times a week, see if you can reduce it to just once or twice a week. If you must call someone every day, try to keep the conversation short and stick to the point. Perhaps you could make a list of the things you need to cover that day, and have a longer catch-up when you aren’t writing.
If you tell people you’re writing a book and need to find the time to do it, they’ll understand. The promise of a signed copy should help too. You could even ask them to prompt you to get back to your writing if they think the call is taking too long. Or you could set a timer for, say, ten minutes and make sure the person at the other end of the line hears it when it goes off. Time to get back to your writing!
Speed-reading
We looked at skimming and speed-reading in Chapter 6. The ability to skim books and speed-read the important sections can free up vast amounts of time. It’s particularly useful when you’re researching your book, but you can also use it to read newspapers, work-related reports and memos, textbooks and training manuals, minutes of meetings, research papers, and anything else.
If you skim and speed-read documents at work, you’ll have more time to actually do your work. That means you’ll feel less stressed and overworked, and you shouldn’t feel so tired when you get home. And that means you can get more writing done.
Lots of little sessions add up
Imagine that you’d never heard of mini writing sessions. If you had fifteen or twenty minutes to spare, what would you do with that time? Most people would say it’s not long enough to do anything worthwhile, so it’s not worth starting anything. But, of course, that’s not true. Five minutes is long enough for a thinking session, and fifteen to twenty minutes is long enough to write a section of your book.
One of the key points of this book is that it can be more effective to spread your thinking and writing time over several mini-sessions throughout the day, rather than having one or two really long sessions as most writers do. You can fit more writing into your day, it has less impact on your social life, and it doesn’t drain your energy.
Use your spare time wisely. Always carry something to write on or something that can record your voice. Always carry a page of your outline with you, even if it’s just few lines scribbled on a scrap of paper. You should always be able to work on your book, or think about the next section of it, if you find yourself with nothing to do for a few minutes.
Delegate
Do you have to do the household chores while everyone else is slumped in front of the television? That’s not fair, is it? It’s time for a change.
Get them to do their share of the work. Pay them or bribe them if necessary. Or go on strike and refuse to do any more chores until they agree to help.
Tell them how much better things will be when your book is published. They could have a new house, a new car, a new (and much bigger) television, a new computer, a holiday in Florida*… That should be enough to make them leap into action.
Before they lose their enthusiasm, draw up a rota and share out the jobs fairly between everyone. Then work out how much extra writing time you just gained.
*It’s over-optimistic to suggest you’ll make that much money from just one book. But never mind that for now. The mere suggestion of such rewards will gain you more writing time, so it will have achieved its aim.
In fact, you could say it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy, because the money to buy those things might well come in a year or two when you’ve gained enough time to write a whole shelf full of books.
Similarly, if it only takes you a month to write your book, it won’t hurt if you postpone a few chores. If you usually do something every day, perhaps you could reduce it to once or twice a week until your book is finished. If anyone notices the difference, ask him to do it for you while you get on with your book.
Is there anything else in your schedule that other people could do for a few weeks? Could someone else take your children to school, collect them, do your shopping, do your laundry, look after your garden, or walk your dog? You could return the favour when your book is finished, or do something else for them in exchange.
How much extra writing time will this give you? How much sooner will you be able to finish your book? Remember, every additional twenty minutes you can find means another section of your book gets written.
Don’t just delegate your chores, delegate some of the work on your book too. We’ll discuss this further in Chapter 15.
Hiring help
If you don’t have anyone to help you with your chores, perhaps you could hire someone. Get a cleaner to come in for an hour or two once or twice a week, or a gardener once or twice a month. Use a laundry service. Most towns have someone who runs an ironing service. Have a look around and see what else is available.
Get a personal recommendation from someone who uses the service – and ideally from several people. The fastest way to do this is to post a message in a Facebook group related to your town or city.
Services like these can be surprisingly inexpensive, especially when you think about the extra writing time you gain. A professional cleaner might be able to clean your whole house in an hour or two, whereas it might take you an entire day. Ask them for a quote or estimate rather than basing it on how long it would take you to do the same job.
You don’t have to use them all the time; just when you need extra writing time. But in my experience, if you find the right person you’ll find her so indispensable and affordable that you’ll keep her on permanently.
Taking time off
Is your work getting in the way of your writing? If you try the other ideas in this chapter and still can’t find enough time to finish your book, consider taking a week or two off work.
Once you have several books on the market and they’re selling well, think about gradually reducing the number of days or hours you work each week. Eventually, you could even quit your job entirely.
Unless you strike it lucky with a runaway bestseller, you’ll probably need at least twenty books on the market to make a decent living. But if you write a book every month, you should be able to reach that goal in less than two years.
Switch off the television … sometimes
Try to be more selective about what you watch on television. Refer to your time budget diary again. How many shows do you watch out of habit but no longer enjoy? Remember that you should always put your writing first, at least for the month you’ll spend writing your book. If something else is taking up your writing time, then it has to justify it. A show you watch out of habit and moan about afterwards – doesn’t justify the time you spend watching it.
You could extend your time budget diary to list specific shows, rather than lumping them together under the general heading of “watching television”.
Give each show a rating, such as:
Essential viewing – I can’t miss it.
I want to see it, but I could record it or watch it on a catch-up service when my book is finished.
A complete waste of time.
Ask the other members of your household which shows you watch avidly and which ones you always moan about. They probably know exactly what you watch – and they’ll have plenty to say about it.
Get out of your rut
So y
ou’ve eliminated all the non-essential activities that you don’t enjoy, and you’ve scaled back the ones you enjoy until your book is done. Now what’s left? How about the essential activities? Could they be done any faster? Could you do them differently? Spend a few minutes thinking about alternative methods.
It’s worth talking through these activities with someone who isn’t directly involved. He might have a different perspective and come up with ideas you wouldn’t think of. You don’t have to actually talk to him, of course; simply describe the activity in an email or text message. Talk about the way you currently do it and how long it takes you. That’s usually enough to get your brain thinking about the issue, and it might come up with some brilliant solutions of its own. I’ve often found that the perfect answer occurs to me just moments after I’ve clicked the Send button.
It’s also a good idea to search online for phrases like “tricks of the trade” or “inside secrets” related to the activity you’re thinking about. The tips you find should enable you to complete your essential tasks faster and more easily.
Keep up with the news – faster
News reaches us in many different ways:
TV and radio news
Our local radio station broadcasts a three-minute news bulletin every hour and a one-minute summary every fifteen minutes. You only need to catch one or two of these each day to stay on top of what’s happening.
Newspapers
Newspapers are fantastic resources when you need ideas for your book, but they can suck up huge amounts of valuable writing time. I stopped reading them years ago. If you must read them, save them up and read them when your book is finished.
In the meantime, keep up with the news by listening to short bulletins on the radio or cast your eyes over a news website like BBC News or CNN once or twice a day.
Use your friends
Ask your friends and relatives to go through their newspapers and clip out any articles they think you’ll find interesting. If they don’t think it will interest you, you won’t see it.
As you write your book, you’ll probably start having ideas for the next one. Let people know what you’re planning so they can scan their newspapers for articles relating to that book too. When you’re ready to start work on it, you’ll have a useful pile of clippings already waiting for you. They could send you links to useful-looking online articles too.
Magazines
You probably read magazines for entertainment, education or research. None of these are urgent, and you should have completed all of the research for the book you’re currently working on. So let them pile up for a few weeks, and read them when you have more time.
Email and newsletters
Email is easy to deal with: only check it once a day – after you’ve completed your writing so you don’t get distracted by the messages.
If you’re worried that you might miss something important, check who sent the message, or read the subject line, but don’t read the message unless you think it really is important.
If your electronic devices notify you when you receive a new message, turn the notifications off. There will be a setting to do this, but you might have to hunt around to find it.
The fastest way to find the setting is to search online for something like “turn off email notifications iphone”. Adjust the search phrase for whatever type of device or software you’re using.
Once you get around to checking your email messages, it’s best to handle them in the following way:
If a message needs a response or some sort of action, and it will take no more than five minutes, do it immediately.
If it will take longer than five minutes, add it to your to-do list or calendar. Send a short reply to say you’ll send a proper response later, on a specific date, or when your book is finished.
If it doesn’t need a response or action, or you’ve already done what was needed, archive it or delete it.
Your Inbox should only contain today’s new messages that you haven’t read yet.
Keep the messages that need a longer response in a separate mail folder, or give them a “needs response” label if you use Gmail. In fact, it’s a good idea to create several folders or labels for the different types of message you receive.
If you find yourself writing the same thing over and over again – such as telling people you’ll send a proper response when your book is finished – keep a pre-written response to hand. Just click Reply and paste in your response whenever that sort of message arrives.
Newsletters are easy to deal with too: file them in their own folders or label them appropriately, and save them until you have the time to read them. Again, this is a simple way of getting them out of your Inbox so they don’t distract you. If you no longer have the time or inclination to read them, unsubscribe from them so they stop coming.
Anything else
If you receive any other types of news or communication, you should be able to work out the best and fastest ways of dealing with them, based on the tips in this chapter. You can probably throw most things away, and archive the rest or get someone else to take care of them until you have more time. Skimming and speed-reading can save you heaps of time too.
Using your body clock
As we saw earlier, you’ll be able to write much faster if you work with your body’s in-built clock rather than struggling against it. When are you most awake, creative and alert? Early morning? Mid-afternoon? Late at night? That’s when you should be writing.
It’s worth extending your time budget diary to record how alert you feel throughout the day. Try setting an alarm or timer to go off every hour, and record how awake, creative and alert you feel at that time.
It’s also worth recording the time you start and finish each writing session, the number of words you wrote, and how productive you felt the session was. This will enable you to tell whether certain times of the day are better for writing than others.
If you write in different places, it’s worth making a note of that too. You might find that you’re happier and more productive when you write in your favourite café rather than at home, for example. If that’s the case, try spending more time there.
After keeping your time budget diary for a week or two, see if you can adjust your schedule so you do most of your writing when you’re at your most alert and productive. That might mean getting to work earlier or later, taking lunch at a different time, or changing your family’s meal times. Other people might have to agree to the changes, but if you tell them why you’re doing it and point out that it’s just until your book is finished, that should be enough to persuade them.
If you can’t change your schedule, look for other workarounds. Talk to your manager and your family to see what can be done.
You could try writing early in the morning before everyone else gets up – set your alarm an hour earlier. Or you could wait until everyone has gone to bed and write for an hour then. Even if you’re a night person, it’s worth writing early in the morning for a week to see if there’s any improvement in your productivity.
What about those nights when you lie awake in bed? There comes a point when you know you aren’t going to get any sleep, so you might as well do some writing. You’ll feel rough in the morning, but you would have done anyway. And an hour of productive writing might be just the thing to send you back to sleep.
Similarly, if you wake up in the middle of the night knowing you aren’t going to get back to sleep any time soon, try a mini writing session or two. You should be able to return to sleep quite easily afterwards.
Sleep researchers say our brains are naturally programmed for two separate sleep periods each night. It’s perfectly natural to wake up in the middle of the night feeling reasonably alert. So why not take advantage of it?
Do you have a lie-in at the weekend? Sleep researchers say this is a bad thing because it upsets your natural rhythm. Try skipping the lie-in for a few weeks, and get up at your regular time. You’ll gain several mor
e hours of writing time over the course of the month.
If you write on a laptop or other portable device, or use a notepad and pen, or dictate your book into a voice recorder or app on your phone, you don’t even need to get out of bed. So it might still feel like a sort of lie-in – but a much more productive one.
Work with other people’s schedules
Study the daily routines of everyone in your household, and make a chart that shows the best writing times. You might find several opportunities you weren’t aware of where everyone else is off doing other things. These opportunities might only last for fifteen or twenty minutes, but as we’ve seen, that’s all you really need.
If you regularly collect someone from one of their activities and it’s too noisy or distracting to write at home, consider leaving earlier to collect him. You can sit in your car, or in a café or waiting room, and write another section or two of your book.