SPA Girls Podcast – EP167 – Scheduling To Save Time
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If you’re trying to find a few more minutes in your day for writing, then this episode is for you. We talk about how you can use scheduling to be more productive, free up time and get stuff done.
Each of the SPA Girls uses different kinds of scheduling to make certain repetitive tasks easier and faster, and we share them all for you in this informative episode!
SHOW NOTES:
WHAT IS SCHEDULING? WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
It’s easy to let the time fly away through your fingers, telling yourself it’s only five minutes on Facebook, a quick check on Twitter. But if you add up all the procrastination, the tiny bits of time each day that you spend doing nothing… It’s scary how much time you actually spend NOT WRITING.
Scheduling your day, your time is one way to claim back your writing time, to make sure you’re using your day to the best of your ability.
We’re all busy, have limited time in our day. Scheduling is the best way to claim back more hours in your day for what’s important. Writing!
There are several different aspects to scheduling. One is scheduling your day, planning out what you’re going to do. You could also schedule on a longer term basis, like how much you want to write that week etc. You can also schedule things like Facebook posts ahead of time, using blocks of time, instead of small amounts of time all over the show.
HOW DO YOU SCHEDULE?
There are different ways you can schedule. Here are a few examples:
- Chunking – where you plan your day in chunks of time, and do something for that period of time, then stop.
- Timed activities – You could do on the hour writing, so that at 9am, you start writing, until you read 1000 words, then you can stop and do something else (like washing, or marketing or whatever) and then at 10am an alarm goes off and you sit back down and write another 1000 words. Same again at 11am and so on.
- Plan big and then make it small – Get a diary, plan out what you want to achieve over the whole year, divide it into manageable weekly and daily chunks, and then use those goals in your daily work like.
- Write lists – Write daily lists and make sure you cross everything off the list
- Schedule social media in chunks – Instead of going in every day for a few minutes and then getting lost in the abyss of social media, try scheduling posts in chunks on one day a week. Sunday night, do all your posts for hte week, and then you just have to pop back in to check on comments.
- Working out a writing schedule
- Dividing the time allocated to your writing into writing time, and marketing time etc
- Work out when you do your best work – are you a morning person or an evening person? Monitor yourself for a few weeks, work out when you’re doing your best work, and then make sure you save that time for writing.
- Also collect data – each time you sit down to write, make sure you write down how much time you spent, how many words you wrote. That will help with planning your schedule.
- Know how you work best – work out your writing routine. (music, silence etc)
SETTING GOALS AND PLANNING AHEAD
- Set goals that will motivate you to stick to your schedule
- Parkinson’s law – things will expand to fit the time you have.
- Pareto rule – 80/20 – get the data
WHAT TOOLS CAN YOU USE TO SCHEDULE?
Facebook Scheduling
Keep a file with quotes or facebook pre-prepared tiles/Share others posts
To schedule a post:
Start creating your post at the top of your Page’s timeline.
Click next to Publish and select Schedule.
Below Publication, select the date and time when you want the post to publish.
Click Schedule
Twitter Scheduling
Keep in the same file as above and use the Facebook content that you have prepared/Share others posts
Use Tweetdeck which is a free app. https://tweetdeck.twitter.com
- pomodoro,
- Cut and paste document/outlook shortcut keys.
- writing with others
- Sprints, in person or online.
HELPFUL LINKS:
Bria Quinlin’s Author Life Planner: http://briaquinlan.com/authorlife-planner-is-now/
Audrey Ann Hughey’s 2019 Author’s Journal: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1790831105/
Marie Force’s blog: https://blog.marieforce.com/for-writers-how-i-doubled-my-productivity-this-summer/
Trello: www.trello.com
Pomodoro Technique: https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique
Online Time Trackers we’ve tried (free plans):
Hours Stack: https://hourstack.io/
Harvest: https://www.getharvest.com/
Toggl: https://toggl.com/
Officetime (paid phone app) : http://www.officetime.net/
Complete Guide to Bullet Journalling for Writers: https://writersedit.com/fiction-writing/complete-guide-bullet-journaling-writers/
SPA Girls Guide to: Kick Overwhelm To The Curb
https://www.getapp.com/p/sem/scheduling-software
