How Writing a Book Will Teach You Time Management and Productivity

Writing a book can be an intimidating task. Blank pages can stare at you mockingly for long hours that turn into days, weeks, and months before you make headway in your next chapter.

That is, of course, unless you work out a plan that has you making progress daily on your book. In fact, writing a book can help you manage your time more wisely and encourage productivity on multiple fronts. Here are a few things you can do to make more progress in shorter time when writing your book.

Consider Using the Pomodoro Technique When Writing

The Pomodoro technique is one in which you set a timer to promote short bursts of intense productivity. This method is effective because you operate in 25-minute increments. Set a timer for 25 minutes. During that period of time, focus on one single task. In this case, that task would be writing your book. Whether you’re blocking out a chapter or simply writing an outline for the next chapter(s). You don’t stop for anything other than house-fire types of emergencies until the timer rings.

Then you take a five-minute break before moving on to the next task, or chapter, as the case may be. After every four short breaks, you take a longer break. This gives you time to clear your mind, charge your battery, and refocus on the work ahead of you for the day. This is a key component in your efforts to stay focused on writing your book and stop splitting focus by multi-tasking and otherwise spinning your wheels all day long.

Prioritize Your Tasks

You have a lot on your plate on any given day. It can be easy to get caught up in minute tasks and quickly lose time to write during your day. The longer this continues, the more time you have to forget what’s going on with your book or abandon your book altogether. Steady progress is a much better way to go. Accomplish this by doing the following:

• Give up television time to write.
• Cut out unnecessary social media socializing. While some is necessary to maintain relevance with your audience, give yourself time limits for your favorite social media platforms each day.
• Get up early or stay up late to make time for writing.
• Set deadlines for getting specific writing done, then adhere to them. This can include deadlines for chapter outlines and chapter delivery. Editing deadlines. First draft. Second draft. Publishing. You get the picture.

Decide how important your book is to your professional future and consider prioritizing your writing over some work functions by delegating or bringing on another team member to help take care of tasks that take you away from writing.

 The reward for all this time management and productivity-enhancing effort is that you will discover you can write a book. How do you know? Because you just did. Now, it’s your turn to take a look and see what else you can do!