The Plan
I wrote about my publishing schedule in a recent article.
Yesterday, I came up on a problem that I think I’ve talked about before, and one that a lot of writers constantly have to deal with: Plans getting derailed.
The whole point of a publishing schedule is to fix some accountability and measured progress into your writing career or hobby. When that plan gets derailed, you tend to lose the whole system, and your writing goes down like the Titanic.
We want to avoid this, so that is what this article is basically about.
Keeping On Track:the Simple Version
The easiest way to keep on track is to steadfastly refuse to do anything else but keep on track. Crying baby? Let it cry until you hit 5000 words for the day. Bank calling to reclaim your house? The only way you’re paying that back is if you work, so ignore them.
We can’t do that though.
So, off the top of my head, here are the three things you need to do.
One: Build Redundancy Into The Schedule
That sounds like a real nerdy statement.
If you write a schedule that has you working twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and having every single word you write be perfect and grammaticaly correct the first go around, you’re quickly going to have problems.
If you need to design your own photoshop covers or webpages along with writing your books and copy, then that is going to take longer than you think.
At some point, you’re going to have to do your tax return.
At some point you’re going to need to unexpectedly charge your laptop or get a new keyboard or something that will derail you for hours if not days.
You need to build time for these things into your schedule, otherwise you’re going to feel bad for things that you shouldn’t feel bad for.
Two: Hard Deadlines, Soft Deadlines
When I was back at University, there was a system whereby you had a week after the deadline to give your work in. If you gave your work in after that period, you couldn’t get a grade per se., but you’d be allowed to pass so you didn’t have to retake.
Essentially, you were capped at the minimum pass rate for being late.
In life, there are going to be times when you absolutely must have a project completed. There are also going to be times where your ideal project completion date is sometime ifferent. In fact, you should always have two deadlines. A hard deadline (when you tell your client they’ll get it) and when you need it done yourself.
For instance, if your turn-around time for an article for a magazine is two weeks, that should not be your personal deadline. Your personal deadline should be a week.
Something that blew my mind back at University was that many people took that second deadline as the deadline. They handicapped themselves because they wanted to put off the project.
Don’t be like them. There are practically no excuses for missing a deadline. Create your own deadline a week in advance and you’ll never have to have the “this project is over-running” conversation.
Three: Don’t Let Temporary Derailments Become Any More Than That
I read an amazing book on Willpower a couple of years back called The Willpower Instinct.
It’s a great book for taking control of your mind. A lot of processes which we don’t think consciously about sabotage us.
One of those things is allowing a temporary set back to turn into a permanent one. The example the book uses is a smoker. People try and quit smoking, but after a rough day decide to have a cigarette. The next morning, they figure that their new habit is broken, and so they take another cigarette.
This then leads to them going back to square one, addicted to cigarettes.
If you have a poor writing day, that is no reason to take a day off. If you plan to write a thousand words a day and you completely miss two days, technically, you can still write three hundred and sixty four thousand words in a year. That is a huge number.
But if you get discouraged and let that one or two days become one or two weeks, you have lost twenty thousand.
That significantly alters your schedule and your plan for your writing and life.