Just Say No

After beating procrastination, you may have another challenge to getting writing done.
One of the biggest reasons work doesn't get done is that there may simply be too much to do. However, this rarely happens to a beginning writer. But one who’s been in the writing biz for a while can easily be overwhelmed.

Sometimes the biggest favor you can do for everyone involved is to just say "No." When the war on drugs, the Government adopted the phrase “Just say no.” But that can be a terribly hard thing to do, especially if you’re a freelance writer who lives from one project to the next. Saying no just may mean tearing up your meal ticket.

To get control of this situation, take these four steps:       

    ●    Know what's being asked of you and why. Determine if you’re in a position to handle a job. Do you have the expertise? And more importantly, do you have the time? If the answer to both questions is yes, then you understand the request and how it affects you.

    ●    Refuse the request—say "No." Sure, saying "No" is easier said than done, but just start with an "n" sound, and then put your mouth in the shape of an "o" and say "No, I'm sorry, I can't do it."

    ●    Follow your refusal with logical reasons. Simply and clearly state the reasons that you can't do the project. "No, I'm sorry. I can't do it because I have three other commitments." Some editors will take your “No” as a bargaining tactic and up the ante. But stick to your guns. If you accept higher pay but have to rush to get the job done and make mistakes, then you may put the relationship you have with that editor at risk.

    ●    If you can’t do the job, suggest some alternatives. If you understand the what and why behind the request, suggesting another way or another writer who may be able to do it is easier. "No. I'm sorry. I can't. but so and so knows just as much about that subject as I do and he may be able to do the job."

It’s important to keep the solid relationships you have with editors rather than risk losing them because you end up doing a bad job on a project Learning to say “No” will bolster your professionalism and encourage editors to call you when they have another project.

Procrastination—An Evil Lurking

To make any headway in writing, you have to get started, and often starting is the toughest part of the job. For many writers, perhaps you, procrastination is a force to be reckoned with. It can slow down or stall even the most creative of writers. Procrastination can be a deep psychological situation involving fear of failure or success, or a natural result of overload. Sometimes you simply don't know where to start.

In order to fight this monster, you must first know what it is. Procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority tasks with those of lower priority, especially if the lower priority ones provide enjoyment. Writing can be stressful at times—let’s face it, lots of times. Deadlines can loom overhead like giant alien spaceships. Generally, those lower priority tasks are things that you can do later or perhaps not at all.

Just because you procrastinate doesn’t mean that you don’t have the motivation or willpower to complete a writing project. Perhaps the project is too big or maybe your skills aren’t developed enough to handle it. While you may be motivated to write a particular book, for example, you may not have the resources or knowledge to do so. This leads to putting it off as long as possible. Simply trying harder won’t do it. You must understand what triggered you to procrastinate in the first place.

One of the most common triggers for writers is the fear of rejection. Every writer, from novice to experienced professional harbors this fear at some time or another. Too prevent the fear of rejection from overwhelming you, the best thing to do is have several projects going at once. If one fails, you’ve got the others as backup. And who knows, the rejection of one you had hopes for may cause you to put more effort into another which may go on to be a bestseller. Let’s face it. Not all writing projects are meant to be successful.

When battling procrastination, consider whether you tend to do better when working with other people or relying on yourself. Then choose your technique.

There are four ways that you can call on other people to help you do what you ought to be doing.

First, tell someone what you're going to do and by when. Accountability is built into an office work environment when you work for someone else, but when you work for yourself, you don’t have anyone to remind you to get to work. Tell your spouse or your best friend what you’re planning to do and by when. Ask either to check on your progress.

Second, if you procrastinate because you don't like or know your task very well, simply swap jobs with someone. Perhaps you can ask a friend to do some research for you or maybe some accounting while you get on with your writing. If each person does what he or she does best, you’ll both win.

Third, collaborate with someone on a project. Working with someone else can help get the job started and done faster because you now have a shared commitment and two minds and pairs of hands. Writers often collaborate on a book with an expert or another writer, especially if it’s a particularly difficult subject.

As the sole owner of your writing business, you can do only so much. There are only so many hours in the day. Why not ask for help? Delegate tasks to a student intern seeking experience or pay someone to do clerical work for you like filing.

Other things that may cause you to procrastinate are distractions. Is your office cluttered with papers that need to be filed? Does your house need cleaning? Does your garden call out to you to be tended? All of these can keep you away from your work. To make sure you don’t spend all your time on them, schedule each for specific times during the week. By doing a little each day of any of your chores, you’ll not only get them done but get your writing done, too.

If you need or prefer to lean on yourself to beat procrastination, there are plenty of ways to do that.

You can jump right in. Kids do that when they’re swimming at a pool. Most just jump in. The faster you get to work, the faster you’ll get finished.

You can also take it one step at a time. Any project can be achieved the same way, one step at a time so take a small step and beat procrastination.

Go With the Flow

Now that you hopefully are on your way to a better organized work space, you need to take a moment to analyze how you spend your time in your writing space—and better yet how writing fits into your daily routine.

Whether you're driving your car to go pick up the kids from school or shooting a few hoops on an afternoon break, churning out an article or researching a book, the ability to get in the groove so that you're working with time instead of against it is the key to increasing your productivity. Psychologists call this transcendent marriage between time and the mind flow, and when you get flow. you're good to go.

But first you have to find your flow taking control of your time and eliminating the interruptions and time wasters that waste so much of it during your day. Be prepared for good news and bad. The bad news is that unless you're practicing good time management or are a very organized person—most people aren’t—you probably waste a lot of time. The good news is that once you find that time, you can reclaim it. The extra minutes and hours are a gift, something you shouldn’t squander.

Keep track of everything you do in an average work day. Jot down each activity. Then take a red pen and circle anything that was, in light of your values and goals. a waste of time, even a phone call to a friend. How can you get these time wasters out of your day? Or at least take better control of them. For instance, you could talk to your friend after dinner.

Most people spend their time on things according to their priorities. How about you? Does anything stand out? Too much time texting on your smartphone? Too little time for yourself or with your family or friends or on your current writing project?

And don’t forget procrastination (We’ll take a look at that next week.) How much time did you spend procrastinating? How many interruptions did you have? What kind? Who were they with? Are there things you shouldn't have been doing because the activities could have been delegated or you simply should have simply said, "No"?

If you spend much of your time complaining about not having enough time to get things done, then perhaps you’re not doing those last two things—delegating and just saying no. By the way, that phrase just doesn’t have to do with drugs.

Look to see if you can bundle certain activities together? With the high price of gas, many people are grouping their errands by location so as not to be running all over the place. Try consolidating some tasks. Is it possible to get all your paperwork out of the way at once? Can you set aside a morning to take care of marketing calls and Emails?

And speaking of Email, how many times a day do you check it? For the average person, looking over and replying to their mail can take up to an hour each time. If you check your mail four times a day, that’s four hours you’re spending reading and corresponding. And if you’re constantly checking messages on your smartphone, who knows how much time you spend on your mail.

To find out how you actually spend your time, you’ll need to keep a Time Log—a record of all the time you spend on every little thing, from the moment you rise in the morning until you put your head down on the pillow at night. A Time Log is a powerful tool for discovering how you allocate the minutes and hours of your life. Sounds tedious, but once you do it, you’ll be able to take better control of your time.

To start your Time Log, take a sheet of ruled paper. In the left-hand margin, note the time you change activities, and on the line to the right list exactly what you're doing: getting ready for work or bed, projects or paperwork, making calls, talking to visitors, attending meetings, reading mail, making or eating meals, walking the dog, watching TV, and so on. Also note who else may have been involved so you can later determine how relevant each activity was to your goals and who tends to take up your time the most.

If your more computer savvy, you can create a spreadsheet, making each row on the sheet represent a 15-minute time block. Many people find this easier because the blocks remind them to log what they were doing. Accounting for time accurately on the computer spreadsheet can be harder, however, because not all activities neatly fall into 15-minute blocks. Whether you log an entire week including a weekend is up to you.

And, yes, keeping a Time Log, even for a couple weeks is a hassle, but it’s a hassle worth considering.

Putting Off What You Can Do Today Until Tomorrow—or Never

How many times have you stared at your computer screen or perhaps looked out over it through the window to the outside? There you are, staring into space instead of writing. Why can’t you focus? Oh well, you decide to go for a walk instead—or perhaps clean out your clothes closet or rake the yard or check your news feed on Facebook for the third time today. I think you get the idea. Procrastination, that ugly habit of putting off what should be done today until tomorrow. All writers experience it. So why should you be any different?

Why does procrastination take such a stranglehold on writers? It happens to other people, too, but with writers it seems especially prevalent. Maybe it’s because writing is a mental thing. It takes more effort to get your mind going than your body. Thinking is hard work. And some days you just don’t want to think.

You have ideas—lots of ideas. Which one should you choose to write? That can be a challenge and that in itself can lead to you to procrastinate. This problem is particularly severe when writing a book. If you write non-fiction, you have the facts of a story to fall back on, but if you write fiction, all you have is your imagination, and perhaps some research. That’s not much to go on.

If you’re planning on spending the next year or two writing a book, it better be a good idea. What if you spent all that time, and it turned out to be a bomb? So you decide to take your time. But this can lead to a draw. As your ideas compete with each other for your attention, it draws you away from the one that is most likely the best.

Let’s face it, ideas are always better in your mind than on paper. It never fails. Once you start developing an idea, it seems to lose its punch. Again, if you write non-fiction, you can always dig up more facts. But adding extraneous material to your fiction can often water down a good idea. This can lead you to hesitate getting started for fear that once you start writing, your great idea will fizzle. That just may be because you didn’t thoroughly think out that great idea in the first place.

For a few writers, telling others about what they’re planning to write helps them think out the idea. But for the majority of others, telling friends and family about an idea can often take the motivation out of writing about it.

Feedback is important, but if you get feedback on your idea too soon, it can stymie your need to write it. Plus, the feedback you get from friends and family may not be the type you need. To make sure your great idea gets rolling, only you know what should go into it. Any of this premature feedback is only opinion. And those opinions may be wrong.

One way to avoid procrastination is to plan out a project. While you don’t need to jot down every detail, you do need to block it out so that you have a good overall idea of how it will take shape. Without some sort of a plan—even a loose one written on a scrap of paper— you’ll most likely stall before you make any headway.

Knowing where you’re going in an article, story, or book enables you to begin, stop or switch to something else, and then come back to pick up where you left off. If you think writing is all about sitting in front of a computer screen and waiting for the words to pour out, you’ll be sitting there waiting until tomorrow—or maybe never.

Don’t Put Off Until Tomorrow What You Can Do Today

Everyone suffers from occasional bouts of procrastination. The subject is so popular that over 600 books have been written about it. But for many writers, this happens more often than for others. Why? And what can you do about it?

According to its psychological definition, procrastination refers to the act of replacing high-priority tasks with those of lower priority, especially if the lower priority ones provide enjoyment. Writing can be stressful at times. Deadlines can loom overhead like giant alien spaceships. Generally, those lower priority tasks are things that you can do later or perhaps not at all.

Behind most procrastination problems lies abulia, the abnormal lack of the ability to act or make decisions. And there’s no mistake that it’s a force you need to conquer. Knowing when, how, and why you’re procrastinating is the first step toward improvement.

Just because you procrastinate doesn’t mean that you don’t have the motivation or willpower to complete a writing project. Perhaps the project is too big or maybe your skills aren’t developed enough to handle it. While you may be motivated to write a particular book, for example, you may not have the resources or knowledge to do so. This leads to putting it off as long as possible. Simply trying harder won’t do it. You must understand what triggered you to procrastinate in the first place.

One of the biggest triggers for writers is the fear of rejection. Every writer, from novice to experienced professional harbors this fear at some time or another. Too prevent the fear of rejection from overwhelming you, the best thing to do is have several projects going at once. If one fails, you’ve got the others as backup. And who knows, the rejection of one you had hopes for may cause you to put more effort into another which may go on to be a bestseller. Let’s face it. Not all writing projects are meant to be successful.

Other things that may cause you to procrastinate are distractions from your environment. Is your office cluttered with papers that need to be filed? Does your house need cleaning? Does your garden call out to you to be tended? All of these can keep you away from your work. To make sure you don’t spend all your time on them, schedule each for specific times during the week. By doing a little each day of any of your chores, you’ll not only get them done but get your writing done, too.

Procrastination isn’t a harmless little hang-up. Don't reward it. Sure, you need to take breaks once in a while, but don’t take time to drink too many extra cups of coffee.

To conquer procrastination, define the stumbling blocks in your path. Then tackle them one at a time. Pick one specific area where procrastination plagues you and conquer it. By becoming aware of the problem, you’re half way to solving it.

Learn to set priorities, then focus on one problem at a time (See my blog on priorities from two weeks ago.) If you try to tackle all your problems at once, you won’t get anywhere. Set a goal to take care of the most severe one first.

Give yourself deadlines. Many writers work best when on deadline. The added stress of knowing a project is due by a certain date makes them work harder. But when they don’t have a deadline, they find other more enjoyable things to do.

Don't duck the most difficult projects. Work on them but perhaps not as long as some of your others. By doing a particularly hard writing project a little at a time, it tends to make it seem easier. Another way of tackling this problem is to begin with an easier project, then switch to a hard one, followed by an easier one. Giving yourself a break between difficult projects makes doing them less stressful.

Don't let perfectionism paralyze you. Too many writers are perfectionists. Some continue to do edits and rewrites until they lose sight of the project as a whole. Know when to stop. Perhaps give yourself a limit on rewrites. Continually rewriting can sometimes make what would have been a good project a mediocre one.

To paraphrase an old saying, “If you can't beat procrastination, make use of it.” Perhaps the fact that you’re procrastinating about a project means that your subconscious is holding you back from something you’re not yet ready to do. This "something" may be only a segment of an article or short story for which you’ve written a good beginning, or it may be the approach to a better-paying market.

Don’t neglect that little voice inside you that’s saying "not yet." You just may not be ready.

You make good use of procrastination when—and only when—you’re able to find a better way to accomplish what you avoided by procrastinating. It can be a blessing in disguise, but it won't be unless you make it so.

Prioritize

When you decide to quit your day job and write full time, you’ll have to give careful consideration to your priorities. No longer will someone else be deciding what work you have to do and when you have off. Now it will be your responsibility. For some writers, this works great. For others, it doesn’t.

The first thing you’ll need to do is figure out when your peak thinking and writing times occur. Are you a “first-thing-in-the-morning” person, a midday person, or an evening person? Also, do your peak thinking times and peak writing times occur at the same time or at different times during the day? If yours are separate, you’ll want to focus more on the former, giving it top priority in your daily schedule. It’s harder to think out a piece of writing than it is to actually write it.

To help you set your priorities, you must first create a daily work schedule. You don’t have to stick tightly to it, but it should act as a guide. To begin, block out a schedule for the week, indicating when you’ll begin work. You may want to use the same schedule you used in your former job. Working from nine to five is good for a start. Next block out time for lunch, 30-60 minutes should do.

Now that you have your start and end times, plus lunch scheduled, you can lay in blocks of time for your work. If you know when you’re at your peak for thinking, block in time at the appropriate hour. Then lay in some time for writing and research. It helps to mix up your day by working on several projects in different stages. While you’re getting ideas for one, you may be working on the first draft of another, and starting research for a third. Doing this actually helps exercise your brain and prevents getting burned out by writing for hours on end. It pays in the long run to not write for more than two hours at a time.

And don’t forget to allow time to get more work. You’ll need to send out E-mail messages to editors, or perhaps call them on the phone. And when will you study new publications to see if you’re right for them? Many editors schedule staff meetings on Monday and often Fridays are wrap-up times before publication, so you’ll want to limit your editorial contacts to the middle of the week.

What many people who work for themselves forget is allowing time for other obligations. Do you have to take or pick your kids up from school? When do you do grocery shopping? Must you cook meals for your family? What about talking to friends on the phone?

It’s a real temptation to procrastinate when you work at home. You may say to yourself, “I’ll do that later,” but do you? If you have a tendency to procrastinate, you need to attack the problem head-on. Doing so will increase your production and your income immediately.

You should try to schedule time to write every day. Some days you may have more time while on others less, but writing every day will help you keep up the momentum. Be sure to divide your time adequately among important projects. If you know you have deadline coming up, be flexible enough to allow time to finish the project that’s due. This means you must be careful that deadlines don’t pile up on one another. And for some writers, having no deadline takes away the impetus to get things done.

To help you prioritize your work, create three lists—one for Top Priority items, one for Secondary, and one for Do at Leisure Tasks for each week? This will help you stay on track. You might plan on taking care of the items on the first two lists during “working” hours and leave smaller tasks, like filing, correspondence, and organizing notes for evenings or Saturdays.

And while it’s important to get your current work finished, it’s just a important to plan ahead for new work. Do you have days or evenings when you are systematically building your files, increasing your contacts, beginning speculative new ventures, adding to your catalog of possible topics, and promoting yourself?  How about the time it takes to read and answer your E-mail and check on your social media sites?

If you keep your priorities in order as you start out in your writing career, you’ll be in a better position to recognize and take advantage of golden opportunities as they arise. The more you priorities your work, the easier it will be to tackle really complex projects and do them without stress. And as your career progresses, you should have more and more work to do. There are only so many hours in a day, and you can’t squeeze more work out of them than you already are unless you set your priorities.

Plan diversions into your work schedule. Don’t be a workaholic. But do so with care. It's too easy to take time to have that extra cup of coffee.