This is the first of a special weekly series on time management for writers. These tips will appear every Monday.
Maybe you’ve heard the saying: “The best time to start writing was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.”
If there’s a writing project that you’ve been meaning to start, do it as soon as you finish reading this.
I don’t care if you have only two minutes. Use those two minutes to get a folder and write the name of the project on it and stick some empty sheets of paper into the folder.
Tomorrow you may have five minutes, so you can use those to jot down as many thoughts as you have in your head about the project. Maybe all you know if you want to call it “Fishing With No Worm” (presumably you have a better title in mind…). That’s fine. Or you may know how it ends. Or starts. Or some bit in the middle. Jot it down.
Keep going that way. Don’t let the kids or the job or the anything else get in the way. You have ten minutes a day, I know that much. You can sleep ten minutes less or pretend to go to the toilet and work on the project instead.
One it’s rolling you’ll get more excited and you’ll find bigger chunks of time to work on it.
And one day you’ll realize you have a first draft. Congratulations—it all starts NOW.
(When I couldn't find a good right-brain oriented book about time management I wrote one. You can geti it from Amazon and other online and offline book sellers. It's called "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done.")
