Create a Productivity Habit in 2019

by Madelle Morgan

So much to do, so little time

FINDING THE TIME TO WRITE IS DIFFICULT

My 2019 is off to a busy start. How about you?

My To-Do list is long. During the day something always seems to come up to pull me away from what I meant to do. My precious free time is squeezed to a few evening hours, and that sliver involves watching TV or reading.

No doubt you are familiar with this writing advice, which I'm sure works for some people: 

• Get up early to write. Ha. I got up early for most of my life for school and jobs. Now that I'm retired, NO WAY.
• Write in 15 minute increments. I need a block of time to get rolling.
• Dictate while driving or doing other chores. I can only focus on one thing at a time.
• Get off social media. I already limit it.
• Cut out TV/reading in the evening and write. Good luck with that. My brain is tired.
• Make writing a priority. Easier said than done when there are a lot of competing demands.
• Etc.

There has to be another way.

When on the lookout for some fresh, no-fail tips on how to fit more in my day, I bought The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

It turns out this book is not what I expected. I'm still working my way through Part One, and there is no mention of time management, establishing priorities, task lists, etc. At least not yet.

This book's tag line describes what it is about: powerful lessons in personal change. Covey's goal is to teach us how to become a better person, a better spouse, a better manager, and a better leader. We all want to do that, right? No wonder there are over 25 million copies sold.

Covey includes this quote:

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.—Aristotle

Half of our days are taken up with habitual, no brain power-required behaviors. We make coffee and breakfast, we shower, we check our email and social media, we buy the same groceries every week and make many of the same meals over and over. We are habitual creatures.

Therefore it follows that a person can create a productivity habit. 

Now, I have not read past page 53. Reading this book is slow going, requiring time to reflect and absorb the content. I could probably read each chapter three times and still learn something.

One thing no book needs to tell me: radical change is almost impossible—a recipe for failure. Changing a habit is not easy. Unless that habit is getting up in the dark to get ready for work.

However, expanding upon an established habit is much, much easier!

I thought about productivity habits I already have. 

√  I have a To-Do list of tasks, which is written in a section of my agenda.

√  I keep an agenda with all my appointments, including fitness classes that repeat week after week.

√  I look at my agenda every morning to see what I'll be doing, at what time, and for how long.

√  I actually follow through on appointments that are booked in my schedule.

Does this sound like you?  Then you and I can easily expand this habitual behavior to a new, improved productivity habit. 

CREATE A PRODUCTIVITY HABIT

An agenda could be a physical book or an app on your phone. You must have the ability to book start and end times.

Step 1. Review your To-Do list

Step 2. For each "must do" item, make an appointment with yourself in your agenda. In that fifteen minutes, half hour or hour, that task is your priority. Be realistic about the time you can devote 100% to that task. Don't block off Saturday morning to write if you also have to drive your kid to an activity and bake a cake for a party. Those are separate appointments with specific time slots allocated to them.

Step 3. Life happens. If you have to cancel the appointment to do something else, reschedule the task as if it were as important as a dentist or hair appointment.

I booked an appointment in my agenda to write this post. It works!

Productivity is really this simple:

#1 Book each task into your agenda.

#2 Reschedule missed appointments.

Optional Recommendation: 

#3. Book an hour every month to read a chapter of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

What are your existing productivity habits? How could you expand those to a new, improved productivity habit?

Madelle

Madelle Morgan is a Canadian author who writes romance set in Canada.

Baby, It's Cold Outside

Seduced by the Screenwriter Review

Cat and Chett’s characters are well developed, drawing the reader into their individual plights, while their campy banter keeps the story light and downright fun. Ms. Morgan keeps the plot moving with humorous situations and dialogue interspersed with exciting and poignant drama. A good read for a snowy afternoon. —Marc Joseph, InD’Tale magazine review, March 2018.

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COUNTER-INTUITIVE GOAL SETTING by Sarah Raplee

Hi, I'm Sarah Raplee, author of surprising romances that cross genres into suspense, paranormal, fantasy and steampunk.

Last year I wasted a lot of time and effort setting yearly, monthly, and weekly writing goals. I read lots of articles on goal-setting, most of which repeated the same basic, sensible advice:

• Set realistic-but-not-easy goals
• Begin with your Big Goal and then break it down into sub-goals and sub-sub-goals so you won’t feel overwhelmed.
• Track your progress and make adjustments where needed.

Why sensible? Because it seems to make sense, right?

Then why is my success rate so appalling? Why didn’t I achieve more of those detailed, reasonably-difficult goals? They’re intuitive and sensible, right?

For me, not so much.

It’s a mistake to assume that, like a magic bullet or a secret handshake, one method of achieving goals works well for everyone:  extroverts and introverts, plotters and pantsers, visual learners and auditory learners and kinesthetic learners, lefties and righties and OMG what about the ambidextrous?

There are a number of reasons the above method doesn’t work for me. I’m an analytical thinker, a left-brainer. Give me something to analyze (say, a Big Goal) and I’ll spend days breaking it down into miniscule chunks of future achievement. Analyzing gives me the illusion of control and an excuse to procrastinate rather than Do the Work.

Never forget that writing is the most dangerous profession. Words are important and risky and scary.

Doing the work requires me to anesthetize my analytical left brain and turn loose the creative right side of my noggin. Who knows how much of what that produces will be embarrassing, imperfect twaddle?

Twaddle that I’ll need to submit to my critique partners, and ultimately to agents, editors, and Susie next door. That’s a looming landslide of potential criticism, rejection or ridicule. Of course it scares me!

You’ve probably guessed by now that one of my many faults is a tendency toward self-criticism. Having lots of goals to potentially fail to achieve feeds into this negative aspect of my personality. And giving me free reign to reassess and make adjustments to the goals I spent days setting is like plugging my brain into an eternal procrastination feedback loop. It’s a prescription for failure.

This year, I’m trying a couple of new methods to help me progress toward my Big Goal. Both have shown documented results for many people.

One is Intention. Each morning, I focus for a few minutes on my intention to accomplish a small step in support of my current Big Writing Goal.

I’m also reading Robert Maurer’s life-changing (according to customer reviews) book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way.

From the blurb: “Introducing the practical and inspirational guide to incorporating Kaizen and its powerful principles into one's daily life. Rooted in the two thousand-year-old wisdom of the Tao Te Ching--"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"--Kaizen is the art of making great and lasting change through small, steady increments…”

My Big Goal this year is to write and publish Book 2 of the Psychic Agents Series.

My Kaizen Goal is to write new words each week. Fingers crossed achieving this small goal will lead to achieving my Big Goal.

Am I the only writer who slows down when tasked with setting goals?

Has anyone else tried the Kaizen approach to productivity? ~Sarah

*** This is an updated version of a post I first published Jan. 13, 2011, on the now-defunct MWVRWA Blog.

Writing Productivity, NOT

by Madelle Morgan

Some authors publish a new book every month or so. Apparently volume is the freeway to success. Write fast, get them online, and sales will roll in.

Well, I'm stuck on a back road, having taken too many detours...

I've indie-published a book a year, for a grand total of two. 

Not twenty. 

Two. 

And, I'm behind schedule to revise and publish the next in the Hollywood in Muskoka series this fall.

What's new with me is that I decided to find out if I could write faster. I signed up for a course called, what else, Write Better Faster, taught by Becca Syme at MargieLawson.com. It started May 1. 

Meanwhile, I've been analyzing why I don't seem to have a block of time to write. The answer?

"My brain has too many tabs open."

Source: Business2Community.com

I saw that quote online. And I'm online a lot. 

There's so much valuable information about writing, publishing, marketing, what's going on with my friends, those funny memes... you get the gist. What if I miss something important?

For example, Sunday morning, prime writing time, I was browsing through a favorite Facebook writers' group posts, and discovered a link to a Myebook.co.za article on how to create 3D book covers.



Of course I had to try it. Marketing is so important for indie authors, right?

Then I went to Canva.ca, a free design site, and created this.

And this:

The end result? All my books have 3D images. Writing word count on Sunday? Zero.

You already know what I need to do in order to carve out time to write.

Disconnect

Ah, easy to say, not so easy to do. Social media is like a box of chocolates--difficult to resist.

I discovered, online of course, that there are applications to force a person to disconnect from those time-suck distractions. Efty Konick published a list in a Linkedin post entitled 5 applications to disconnect from the Internet and be more productive.

The post is three years old, so there are probably many more apps available today. I'd search for them, except for the fact I'm trying to limit my time online. 

As of now.

Seriously.

After I play my Scrabble turn on Facebook...

Happy spring!

Madelle

Madelle has written and published Diamond Hunter, a romantic suspense, and Caught on Camera, a Hollywood wedding romance.

Subscribe to her blog at MadelleMorgan.com and follow her on  Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, and Wattpad.