Multi-Tasking Prevents Madness

Want to avoid writer’s block that limits your productivity? Work on more than one project at a time. So if you do get stuck on one project, you can jump to another one and keep typing away.

I usually work on 3 to 5 projects at one time with a blend of long-term projects (book-length projects or client projects that involve at least 10 hours worth of project time) and short-term ones with rapidly approaching deadlines, and some not-so-urgent (but important) other projects such as self-promotion materials, experimental-projects, or just thinking-on-paper projects (brainstorming).

This blend allows me to leap into a completely different project if I do get stuck and the change of pace often helps my mind work out whatever problem I have with the first project in the “background.”

Don’t work on more than 5 projects though. Working on more than 5 waters down your focus on the rest of them, and you lose track of your progress on all of them. Plus, you run the risk of never completing ANY project.

If you are afraid of forgetting future project ideas, list them with some notes in an idea notebook or folder, or keep a separate file for your ideas on the desktop of your computer or some other prominent location.

10 Things You Shouldn't Be Doing Instead of Writing

1. Watching coverage of the Anna-Nichole Smith debacle. Why watch hours of boring court procedures, when you can watch trailer trash go at it on Springer and that will only waste an hour of your time. Trust me... you'll hear one way or another where they bury her rotting silicon-enhanced corpse and who gets custody of the infant who everyone claims to be thinking about, but no one really is. Pray for that poor girl, she's going to need all of the help she can get.

2. Watching coverage of Britney. Is she in rehab? Is she out of rehab? Does she got a new tattoo? Is she passed out drunk pantie-less in the back of a limo with Paris and Lindsey? Trust me... you'll hear about it one way or another.

3. Reading spam in search of brilliant new writing inspiration, a hot new stock tip, or the best prices on Viagra. Trust me... no one is going to give you $10 million dollars for giving some rich individual who is caught in difficult circumstances access to your bank account.

4. Not even Anna-Nichole... or Britney...

5. Playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance... well, it is pretty fun... Spider-Man and Iron Man really kick ass, so maybe you can play it a little while, but not too long... get back to work.

6. Watching ice melt. It is February... it ain't going to melt. For a very long time. It sucks, but you have to deal with it.

7. Obsessively watching the weather waiting for the next big snow storm or Alberta Clipper, and wondering if your power company will manage to keep the juice flowing so you don't lose that brilliant thought when the power suddenly dies. It never really is the same when you try to recreate it later, is it??

8. Cleaning out your fridge... unless of course you lost power for over a day and the food is starting to smell like a teenage boy's wet sneaker (and the lad doesn't wear socks... ever...). Then of course you may have to do it.

9. Obsessing over the right pen or notebook. Just grab one and go. You will always want the perfect pen and notebook... get the one that is almost perfect and get started.

10. Wasting time reading silly blogs like this... I appreciate the love... really, but get back to work now.

15-Minutes is a LONG Time

When I was in third grade, I wanted to take piano lessons and I went every Thursday at 5pm to Mrs. Croskey’s, a retired music teacher’s house, for my lesson for almost 3 years. I never got very far. Why? Because I hated to practice. I didn’t feel comfortable holding my hands in the proper playing position, I couldn’t seem to get those notes memorized, but mostly, I just wanted to read comic books, explore the woods behind my house, or watch TV, instead of practice… and it showed. I’m sure Mrs. Croskey dreaded 5pm on Thursday every bit as much as I did. Many weeks the only time that I played my assigned pieces was during that lesson.

Every once in a while, my mom would banish me to the basement where the old upright piano that we got from our neighbors across the street resided and demand that I practice for 15 minutes. Right next to the piano on a planter was a clock designed to look like a miniature grandfather clock, and instead of playing, I’d stare at the clock and watch the agonizingly slow movement of the minute hand. Every once in a while my mom would shout, “I don’t hear you playing!” and I’d tap out a few bars of whatever piece my music book was open to and resume staring at the clock. I couldn’t believe how long 15 minutes could be.

15 minutes IS a lot of time. And the first thing that a 15-Minute Writer has to do is know exactly how long 15 minutes really is. This is one of the most difficult tasks that I ask the students in any of my 15-Minute Writer classes to do:

Find a calm, quiet place, set a watch, microwave or egg timer for a fifteen minute countdown. And just sit there for fifteen minutes… and do nothing. Do not doze. Do not do any other activity but stare at the wall or the clock. Do not have a radio, TV, phone or any other distraction that will interrupt your fifteen minutes. You will discover how long fifteen minutes really is once you dedicate it to doing absolutely nothing.

Do it, and post what happened in Comments below. How did you feel? Was it easy? Hard? Be honest. No cheating!

Starting Over

Sometimes you have to admit that you’ve lost your way, and this is one of those times. This blog suffered from a major flaw from the beginning: my approach to it. I was writing about what and how I’m doing writing this book (the proposal and the manuscript), when what I should have been doing all along is providing good CONTENT and INFORMATION of how to find and use 15 minutes each day to achieve your writing dreams.

I mean, let’s face it. Who cares how many chapter summaries I complete in a day, where I steal my time from to write, or what my latest excuse is for not keeping up with this blog. This blog needs to be the rough draft of the book itself, filled with time saving ideas, writing exercises, useful links, writing info and inspiration, so that what this blog will be. I promise.

Things I've Done in 15 Minutes or Less

Some of the things that I've done in 15 minutes or less over the last couple of days:

• Buried Barry Pepper, a gentle teddy-bear hamster who was a favorite of my daughter, in a Lipton Tea box. I even broke a new shovel trying to dig under a root, but I was racing to beat the rain and managed to get the job done.
• Drove to drop off the minivan to replace a cup holder that won't slide back in.
• Created temporary file folders for and filed about 100 papers in my filing cabinet
• Ate a ham and Baby-Swiss sandwich on wheat bread, pistachio nuts, carrot sticks and drank a Coke.
• Made calls to schedule haircuts for me and the boys, check on class enrollment for my November 18th 15-Minute Writer class, and harass my buddy Matt about picking up my wood stove to take it to get the door welded.
• Play one campaign game of Blitz: The League on my PS2, as the Columbus Crushers, destroying the Arizona Outlaws 37 to 20.

Oh, and signed up for NaNoWriMo, where I'm not going to write my novel but a combination of 50,000 words of this proposal and the book itself.

Knocked out chapter summaries for 15 and 16 today.

Tick... Tick... Tick...

I'm getting rolling again on this project, but desperately don't want to bore anyone to tears by stating what my daily work entails (although I will sometimes do that) instead I'll focus on the writing life, advice for those trying to squeeze in their words in hectic, busy lives. So a little bit about writing, a bit about time management, and a pinch of motivation.

Tomorrow: What can you do in 15 minutes? This week, I'm going to keep a time log of sorts where I'm going to note what tasks I take 15 minutes to do. I want to capture a variety of tasks that will help me track what I do on a daily basis, as well as prove to myself and my readers that 15 minutes is actually a LOT of time. So check out the blog this week for details...

Getting Back on Track

I knew that getting through September and October would be tough. Teaching 4 classes, Cub Scout meetings and the annual Cub Scout camp out, working on a video project, and last, but not least, remodeling our master bathroom.

Six months ago, I thought that putting in a new shower stall, floor, and vanity would take a couple of weekends and a couple of vacation days to do the hard stuff (like plumbing and electrical) and would cost around $700 to $1000 at most. I started this project about 4 months ago, and now that we have sunk at least $1500 into the bathroom, and I've spent two days replacing the sub flooring, leveling out the cracks and gaps between the boards, and then sticking the self-adhesive vinyl tiles on a Masonite base. My dad suggested that I use glue on the tiles as well so that it will stay in place better. But the glue and the Masonite didn't work well together and the tile bubbled and oozed glue for over a week. So I had to buy several sheets of cement board, and do it again over the next two weekends... Fitting it into place, screwing it in place with a screw every six inches, then re-gluing and re-tiling the whole thing.

After the flooring is almost finished, we begin install the new toilet (it works great) and pull in the shower stall base to lay it down on the floor to see where it will fit. As it turned out, nowhere. The damn thing is too big and ends up too close to the toilet. Next we begin calculations to install the vanity and the new medicine cabinet. Guess what? They don't fit either, so pretty much everything that I bought over the last several months at Lowes has to go BACK to Lowes, and of course, there are no receipts to be found for the items... anywhere. Kristen and I tear apart the house, and all we can find are the small, $12.76 receipt for planter hooks, or the $6.43 receipt for screws and a small piece of wood. And we save ALL of our Lowes receipts.

So as this has proved. I am not even qualified to shop for my own home improvement supplies, let alone execute a do-it-yourself project. I need to stick to writing and spend my time more efficiently.

Getting Started is HARD

I hate this about myself. Why is it that on weekends (or when I take a day off like today) when I sit down to write it takes me 15 minutes to a half-hour to go myself going? I check my email, answer any quick ones that I can respond to, check the progress of my fantasy football teams (both of them), read any news stories that catch my eye on my Google homepage, and give in to any fleeting curious impulse like looking up houses in my old neighborhoods online (if I'm lucky one day maybe one of my old houses will be up for sale!!), pricing wireless keyboards and mice on eBay, checking the status on the library books that I'm on the waiting list for, or checking one (or both blogs for comments).

Then when I at last get down to work, I wonder what took so damn long to get started. What is so different on these "free" days. Today I'm writing because I'm procrastinating doing some prep work on my bathroom floor. Today, Matt and a friend of his came over and reinforced a weak spot (AKA "hole") in the floor, and cut and fit another sheet of plywood for the floor. Now I need to smooth out the cracks, holes and uneven parts of the floor before we can move onto the next part.

I did manage to get chapter summaries done for chapters 1 and 27 today (so far). I'd like to finish at least 4 more today... well maybe after the flooring compound fun...

I have a confession.

I haven't been working much on the book proposal this week. But that doesn't mean that I haven't been busy writing. With a flash fiction writing class starting this week, preparing for an interview of the last person who lived in the Reese-Peters House, before it was the Decorative Arts Center, caught up on several email messages that I wanted to follow-up on from the Columbus Writers Conference from last month, and the usual other job, chauffeur, dad, and handyman duties necessary to keep functioning around here.

There was a great series of interviews this week in Newsweek about the lessons that successful women have learned, and Martina Navratilova response really struck a chord with me about how a writer must approach the craft:

"Athletes just do not quit until they get it right, whether it is shooting free throws or practicing serves or practicing one particular shot. It is getting up when you don't feel like getting up for your training session, it is going to bed early even though you want to go out with your friends, it is only drinking half a beer when you really want to drink two. Everything it takes to get to your goal—that's the mentality of an athlete or a successful human being. Period.

I think we know when we are letting ourselves off the hook. If you look in the mirror and you really look yourself in the eye, the image you see forces you to be honest with yourself. As a result, you'll make the right choices."

To read the full interview (and the rest of the interviews), click here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14870681/site/newsweek/?page=2

I often see parallels between athletics and writing. Both depend on hours and hours of practice and preparation before you see a hint of success. They both depend on making sacrifices to position themselves for a chance at success. Anyone who wants to write... who really wants to write... makes the hard choices to turn off the TV and miss the latest episode of The Office, lets the dishes sit in the sink (unwashed), passes up lunch with a group of co-workers, and gets the writing done. Not only on that one day, but tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and so on.

Tomorrow, back to work on the proposal...

Music Lesson Interlude

Task: The dreaded outline

Time stolen from: Writing during music lesson

Sorry I haven't been posting everyday, although I have been whittling away at the outline for the last several days and wanted to avoid boring everyone to death with the details of what I'm working on... since not a lot has changed. The outline is slowly getting organized into chapters, and I think that I'll be ready to start working on chapter summaries tomorrow.

Writing during waiting times always works good for me. Today I brought my laptop with me to my daughter's music lesson (she is taking piano and violin), and got a good 30 minutes of outline work done. I don't mind these types waits. Waiting for doctor's appointments, for oil changes and auto repairs, getting your driver's license renewed, etc. Always bring a notebook or reading to do when you think that you might be waiting for someone else.