To Triple Your Output as a Writer, Plan Each Day Like This

I recently had a life-threatening medical condition. In the run-up to surgery, I thought about how much I’ve gotten done the past few years, what worked, what didn’t, and what I intend to do with my remaining time.

A year ago, I was in a productivity slump, and spent two months rebooting my processes. I hit on a few things I like and have proven out this past year. The key is to plan your work, but planning takes many forms and you have to get them all correct to make real progress.

It’s a little like picking a lock. You have to get all the tumblers aligned just right to open by applying leverage.

Daily planning is the trickiest, so we’ll start there.

During the slump last year, I was as busy as I ever was, but it didn’t feel like I was making progress that mattered. You’ll have to define what matters to you; for me, it was getting a novel done so that I could get another novel done.

What threw me off course was taking up a different writing genre (short humor). My excuse was that learning to write humor well would improve my writing in the novel. I published a couple of pieces, which was cool, but the progress on the novel slowed to a crawl.

After that two month reboot, reminded of how to plan creative projects, I tracked down a spare Best Self journal and put it to use. Best Self journals are focused on daily planning, and help you organize up to three main goals, and break those goals into milestones. Each day, you tackle some amount of work that completes a milestone (or a segment of the milestone).

They also allow you to plan and track your time, and that’s the leverage you control. At least in theory. If you have a family and a job, you may not have a lot of time. The planning process helps you exploit the time you have available.

Within a week, I made noticeable progress on the novel, and was able to advance other projects, as well, without sacrificing the novel.

You can’t expect everything you create to work well. You might work very hand writing humor or short stories, but they might just stink. Still, you put in the time, and that’s the part you control.

Start your daily planning by blocking out the time that’s spoken for my family and your employer. Block out the time you need to care for yourself, such as walking, eating, and relaxing. Then block out the time you’ll commit to writing.

Mark that out in the daily schedule, and that’s your number one target for success. Basically, if you can’t control your schedule, you’ll never have time to write, or do anything except what other people want you to do.

Once you have the time thing figured out, the greatest skill in planning a creative project (or any project, really) is accurately identifying a trackable unit of work. Depending on what you’re trying to create, you’ll have to figure this out.

For a novel, you might think word count is the key, but a story doesn’t emerge after a certain number of words have been written. A story is built with scenes, so “scenes” is the trackable unit of work. Because a scene’s length isn’t fixed, and because the ability to conjure it from your creativity isn’t predictable, it may take several units of time.

In the run-up to actually writing a novel, there can be dozens of things you need to do to figure out the story, such as character development, setting exploration, and world-building. It’s a safe bet that any creative activity will have similar preparation work, creative development work, polishing of the work, and some project management. Figure out what are the units of work for each.

It’s okay to not have the units of work perfect once you start tracking. Obviously, after you’ve thought about how to track your creative project daily, it’s critically important that you start doing it, as in make the daily plan, do the actual work, and review how much progress was made.

You’ll learn how to adapt this to your own preferences and style. You’ll test what you learn by seeing the progress in your actual work.

Daily planning and progress tracking is some administrative bullshit, but it’s critical to making progress on creative projects. Sure, you could just write when the mood is right, or when the muses visit, but you’ll have no idea when you might finish.

Again, it’s fine to not push yourself if you don’t want to, if you think that would ruin your creativity. Most writers with multiple novels completed will tell you that creativity is what happens when you tell yourself there’s a deadline looming, and this is your chance to do the work.

So if you want to complete some creative projects, you’ll get yourself a daily planner, you’ll figure out how to measure your actionable unit of work, and you’ll schedule the time and track the progress.

Do all that and your output will triple. And remember, the only thing you control in any creative field is your ability to create.