13 Ways to Improve Your Writing Productivity

Is your writing as productive as it needs to be? Here's a checklist that will help you do better...

1. Do the most important job first. I'm a strong believer in writing first thing in the morning. You don't have to get up at 5:30 or 6 am, like I do, but try to write before you do anything else, even everyday stuff like eating and having a shower. The critical brain seems slower to wake up in the morning,  meaning that you'll find it easier to write without your internal editor giving you a bad time.
    
2. Work with a timer clicking in the background. I'm a big believer in the pomodoro. This means working on anything, but especially writing, for 25-minute blocks of time during which you refuse to do anything except the work you've identified. (No email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Internet surfing.) Initially, I'd thought I could ignore the clicking-timer requirement of the pomodoro. But I was wrong! The tick-tock of the digital clock I use (I'm on a Mac and I like Action Enforcer) keeps me focused and engaged. Maybe it's Pavlovian conditioning, but now, as soon as soon as I hear the ticking, I want to write.
    
3. Reward yourself. Celebrate every accomplishment. Even finishing one pomodoro on writing can be feted with five minutes on Facebook. (Use a timer, though.)
    
4. Forgive yourself. So you don't meet your goals. That happens to all of us! There's no point beating yourself up about it. Just resolve to do better tomorrow.
    
5. Write a to-do list, every day. Like every other activity in life, you'll get more done if you make a plan for it. I'm now using a free app called Wunderlist that I really like. (Good news: It works for both Macs and PCs.)
    
6. Make sure your well has enough water. Writers can't write if they haven't been surrounded by enough interest and beauty. Take more walks outdoors. Read more books. Listen to more music. Go to more concerts, movies or plays. It's not procrastinating; it's filling your well.
    
7. Understand your top priorities in life. If you want to be a writer, make sure you give it the time it needs and deserves. You don't become a writer by procrastinating about it every day. Or, paradoxically, even by being published. You become a writer by writing, a little bit every day. If you have trouble with this, here are some suggestions on where to find the time. 
    
8. Clean your desk. This may be a personal peccadillo, but I cannot work with a messy desk. It makes my mind feel cluttered. Even if I'm not actually filing the papers that mysteriously accumulate in my in-basket every week, it helps for me to sweep them away, temporarily.
    
9. Break big jobs into smaller tasks. Never let yourself become overwhelmed by the size of any writing job. Instead, break it into a series of much smaller jobs. Writing a big report, for example could include: figuring out who to interview, conducting those interviews, doing a mindmap, deciding on a lede (beginning), writing a rough draft, letting it incubate and editing/rewriting.
    
10. Delegate everything that doesn't meet your goals. I know this will be hard if you're self-employed, but figure out ways to get other people to do things you really don't like or that aren't core to your writing. I loathe everything to do with my own accounting so I have a bookkeeper. Preparing my files for him still exhausts me, so I'm trying to figure out a way for someone else to do it. Ask yourself: Can I ignore this? Can I get someone else to do it?
     
11. Pick up your email manually. When you're writing, be sure to turn off your email so it doesn't arrive in your in-box automatically and taunt you with its little red number. Instead, pick up your email manually, after you've finished writing. Bonus points if you can pick up your email no more than twice a day.
     
12. Read more books. I try to read for an hour a day and always finish at least 52 books per year. (Here's half of my list from 2014.) Reading relaxes and engages me. It also is the best and most cost-effective source of writing education on the planet.
     
13. When overwhelmed, just write a little. We all have days that are too much. A child breaks a leg. A dog gets sick. We crash a car. We have 12 hours of work to do in six. Stuff happens. Still, try to find five minutes when you can write. It needn't be more than a sentence. It can even be about what's overwhelming you. 

Develop the habit of writing for comfort, and you'll have gone a long way towards improving your writing productivity.