Time Management | Best Results Organizing

Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit

Posted on: February 27th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

In fields like science, medicine, and technology, surprising information comes out all the time, and with that, novel guidance and advice. In the world of organizing and productivity, however, there aren’t a lot of unexpected, planet-sized discoveries or wrecking balls to old beliefs.

Rather, in most aspects of organizing and productivity, we seek to find novel examples and tweaks to help people understand the best approaches for what they already know deep down. Today, I’d like to share three intriguing ideas I’ve heard recently, and an opportunity for you to discover more.

WORK AS HOBBY: OVERCOME PROCRASTINATION WITH A MINDSET SHIFT

The first concept comes from my friend and colleague Hazel Thornton. You may recall her from Paper Doll Interviews the Genealogy Organizers and when I profiled her new book, Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook, in Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources a few weeks ago.

I love Hazel’s blog, because she always offers practical yet warm insights. Earlier this month, she came up with an idea for a mindset shift for conquering procrastination, and it really got me thinking.

Usually, we approach procrastination from a practical perspective. For example, we look at how to use planning and scheduling, particularly time-blocking, to set expectations. Social science research, for example, has found that making a voting plan for when and where you will vote and how you will get there makes it more likely that you will cast a ballot.

We also look at tactical methods for getting ourselves into position to complete a task, such as using the Pomodoro Method, or enlisting accountability, as we discussed recently in Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity and Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to Amp Up Your Productivity.

Hazel, however, piqued my interest in suggesting something I hadn’t seen before in her post entitled Think of Your Big Project as a New Hobby. Now, I don’t want to steal Hazel’s thunder, so you should read her post in its entirety. But the basic concept is that when you find yourself procrastinating on a big project — as I recently found myself doing — a shift in mindset could ramp up your enthusiasm and make the work more appealing.

Hazel notes that the more often you do something, the easier it gets. Typically, we choose to do something repeatedly — like a hobby — because it’s fun. So, Hazel suggests approaching a project, particularly one about which you’re procrastinating, as if you were embracing a new hobby.

She notes that new hobbies usually require the acquisition of new skills and new information — just like projects do — and setting aside time to work on them. Hazel even offers a list of practical solutions (and even pointed people back to my body doubling posts — neato!) for hobby-fying a project.

If we perceive something as drudge work, we’re more likely to procrastinate on it, not set aside time to do it, and think about it as something to be avoided. We don’t get particularly excited about doing expense reports or preparing our taxes. But if we reframe a project and consider it as something that benefits us, or the people we love, or our community, if we re-set our expectations regarding how to approach something not-that-fun, our avoidance might fade away to nothing.

I think Hazel was right on the money. Over the last month, I’ve had a number of projects that were out of the ordinary for me, and one in particular involved employing technological skills that aren’t in my wheelhouse. I had to create a video (of which, more later), and as the days ticked down, I remembered my misery at completing the project last year, even though I was excited about the content. Shockingly, the video editing skills I learned in 1989-1990 in my graduate program in television production and management have very little application in 2023!

This year, I was eager to do the research and prepare my presentation, but anticipating the video production and editing was wearing me down. However, with Hazel’s blog post in mind, I started exploring ways to learn about new approaches with what Zen practitioners call, shoshin or Beginner’s Mind. It’s supposed to encourage eagerness, dispel anxiety and frustration, and yes, make procrastination less likely.

I hate being a beginner, but I psyched myself into beginnerhood for the “hobby” of making a visually-appealing, non-talking-head video. The same day I read Hazel’s post, I spoke with my accountability partner and all-around cool kitten, Dr. Melissa Gratias (whom I’ve also interviewed on the blog, in Paper Doll Interviews Melissa Gratias, Author of Seraphina Does Everything!).

Melissa had some amazing ideas that let me drop-kick PowerPoint and edit video content directly in Canva, the same platform I use to make the blog post banners at the top of every Paper Doll post. (Melissa also came to my aid every time I was stymied by an aspect of Canva that Googling didn’t solve.)

Hazel may not have realized she was channeling a key idea in Zen Buddhism, but by inspiring me to transform a hyperventilation-inducing project into one that was more hobby-like, she changed my entire outlook. I enjoy researching. I love learning new concepts. I particularly like developing skills that I can make systematic so they’re easier and easier as I do them more often. Hobbies for the win!

If you’re having trouble getting your mojo going on a project (or can envision that happening in the future), give the ideas in Hazel’s post a try.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BACKUP

If you’ve read the Paper Doll blog for a while, you’ve probably seen me promote the importance of backup. Usually, I’m touting computer backup, such as in Paper Doll’s Ultimate Stress-Free Backup Plan.

But I’ve also looked at backing up from the perspective of human backup, such as in Cross-Training for Families: Organize for All Eventualities. Those two posts reflect both a plan for backing up, and having a backup plan for life.

However, last week I heard about a different concept for backing up that’s worth discussing. At the start of the year, in Paper Doll’s 23 Ideas for a More Organized & Productive 2023, I mentioned that I was going to be doing Laura Vanderkam‘s annual 168 Hours Time Tracking Challenge. I enjoyed it so much that I also signed up for her Tranquility by Tuesday Challenge based on her book, Tranquility By Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. (I already knew I’d like it because she previewed the book at the 2022 Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit. See below)

For each week of the challenge, Vanderkam sends emails encouraging participants to put one of her nine lessons into practice. Last week was Lesson #5: Create a Backup Slot. Here, Vanderkam talked about how even the best of intentions are not enough when we try to create a schedule that allows us to be productive and accomplish all of the things that are important to us. Most tellingly, she wrote:

I have learned that anyone can make a perfect schedule. True time management masters make a resilient schedule.

Yes! Resilience is essential! A schedule is a map of our time. With a road map, sometimes there’s a crash up ahead, or a road is washed out, or someone gets car sick. If we want to accomplish what’s important to us, we have to be prepare for unanticipated calamities.

To this end, Vanderkam advises that we not fill our schedules from morning to night (of course!) but instead designate more times in our schedules than we plan to use.

Borrowing from my cross-training approach for human backup, I might schedule Monday afternoons for writing, but cross-train Saturday so it knows how to handle the task. (OK, we’re anthropomorphizing the days of the week. Just go with it.) You might plan to do your bookkeeping on Wednesday mornings, but if an all-hands meeting gets called or you have to pick up a sick kid from school, and your Wednesday morning blows up, Thursday needs to step in as backup.

Rather than searching your schedule for places where you can either cancel something or squeeze in one more task, if you already have backup slots scheduled, you’re prepared in the eventuality of your life falling tush-over-teakettle.

Rather than searching your schedule to cancel something or squeezing in one more task, if you already have backup slots, you're prepared for when your life falls tush-over-teakettle. Share on X

Vanderkam’s approach is wise but too rarely practiced. We see blank spots in our calendars and jump to fill them, to do more, to accomplish more, to achieve more. This can be aspirational, or it can be stressful. If the latter, harken back to my posts on toxic productivity from last summer:

If the idea of too much empty space on your schedule makes you nervous, try just one or two slots, maybe an hour or ninety minutes, on Thursday or Friday, where you’ll be the most likely to catch up on tasks that got displaced from earlier in the week. Think about designating themed slots, like for marketing or accounting or personal development. That way, if you get to your backup slot and don’t need it, you can use it either for something within that theme, or for something fun and rejuvenating.

If you find that you’re drop-kicking things that matter to you because something blew up your schedule, adding backup slots could help you master your time and life. And Vanderkam asks, “If life went perfectly, what would you use your open time for?”

Good question. After all, why are you doing all this work in the first place?

THE WORK IS NOT ENOUGH

I read a lot of email newsletters. (Seriously. It may be an addiction.) So, to remember to read blog posts and newsletters of people whose work I’m not regularly seeing on social media, I use an RSS feed. My preferred platform is Feedly, and I can segment the blogs I read by category like entertainment, finances, productivity, tech, etc. and do a deep dive into all the posts I’ve missed over a week or month, keeping my inbox less crowded.

One of the authors I read is Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study. The essay that caught my eye was a fairly personal one, The Work Is Not Enough. (Note, there is one not-safe-for-work vocabulary word in the essay. Please do not click through if you are likely to be offended.)

Petersen’s post dovetailed with Vanderkam’s lesson, because, starting a few weeks ago, her life and schedule sort of blew up. Her partner was ill, her doggie was sick, it’s tax season, and there were work kerfuffles. Each thing caused the dominoes to fall:

Losing a day, an hour, an afternoon — if that was time used to put things in place to keep them rolling through the week, and that time is lost, then you find yourself in a 17-task pile-up. … and pretty soon you’re in laundry apocalypse, and the only thing that’s going to save you is […] the next weekend.

Can’t we all relate?

Petersen notes that all of the tasks, in their own version of a sort of life laundry apocalypse, could have been handled individually, but together, her mind was whirling trying to figure out which enjoyable things she should have culled to avoid the apocalypse, or could cull in the coming days to get back on track. But she recognized,

I don’t need to stop taking care of my friends’ kids, or stop running, or stop having dogs, or stop skiing in order to make this all [waves hands wildly] fall into place. I just need to be vigilant about not taking on more work than I can reconcile with the rest of my life. The work matters; the work is important; the work is wonderful. But the work is not enough.

Petersen is recognizing that often, when we have to choose what to toss from our busy schedules to get back on track, we throw ourselves overboard.

For most of us, the thing that’s easiest to jettison is the thing that’s most precious to you — because letting it go ostensibly affects you and you alone. A hobby, a personal goal, a book club, a walk, a nap, all so readily sacrificed. But those are the things that allow us to stand up straight as we carry the weight of everyday annoyances and tasks. They are the counter-balance. They are essential. We cannot mistake the ease with they can be put down with disposability.

Wow. Seriously, wow. I wish I’d had this essay to share back when I wrote the toxic productivity series, and I’m glad I can share Petersen’s wisdom here. Yes, we should develop our skills to manage our time and tasks well, but let’s not do it at the risk of what makes our lives worth living — our relationships, our joys, or our humanity.

THE 2023 TASK MANAGEMENT AND TIME BLOCKING VIRTUAL SUMMIT

For the fourth year in a row, I’m participating in Francis Wade‘s Task Management and Time Blocking Virtual Summit. Francis is a fellow Cornell University alum — we actually lived in the same international dorm — founder of 2Time Labs in Jamaica, and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity: How To Protect Your Mind As Time Demands Increase.

In last year’s preview to the 2022 summit, I covered a lot of the reasons behind productivity struggles in Struggling To Get Things Done? Paper Doll’s Advice & The Task Management & Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2022, from external struggles like lack of structure and technology overwhelm to personal challenges and tool/user mismatches.

I recapped the gems from experts at the summit in Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022. So, if you missed all that, basically you’ve got a tons of wisdom (theirs, as well as mine) to review.

This year’s theme absolutely delights me: One-Size-Doesn’t-Fit-All. Now what? If you ever read my post, The Truth About Celebrity Organizers, Magic Wands, and the Reality of Professional Organizing, you know how how I feel about the inadequacy of one-size-fits-all approaches to organizing and productivity.

My own presentation by pre-recorded video (about which you’ve now heard) is Paper Shame — Embracing Analog Productivity Solutions in an Increasingly Digital World. (Pssst: Melissa Gratias helped inspire the title!) I’ll also be a panelist on Saturday afternoon (because Francis has his wife/co-founder Dale know I’m not a morning person). The topic? “Paper vs. Digital.”

That panel will be moderated by friend-of-the-blog and productivity dude extraordinaire Ray Sidney-Smith. We’ll be joined by Artificial Intelligence expert, Misha Maksin.

Each year, the summit is refined and improved. This year, 27+ experts are participating, and I’m excited that I know so many of them!

On each of the three days of the summit, attendees get 24-hour access to a selection of video recordings on topics with titles like:

Handling Multiple Projects with Ease: How To Remove the Friction and Handle the Details
Productivity and Neurodiversity: Should I Fit in Productivity’s World or the Other Way Around?
Mastering Productivity with Mindfulness in 5 Steps
Build Without Burnout: Setting a Schedule for Your Business and 9-5
What’s Really Driving Your Distractions?
From Micro to Macro: How to Make Time Blocking Work for You
3 Techniques to Level Up Your Time Blocking
Get a Game Plan: Three Steps to Designing Your Winning Week
Why You Aren’t Achieving Your Goals: Breaking the Cookie Cutter Approach to Goal Setting
Your Ultimate Productivity Tool: You Already Have It and It’s Not Paper or Digital

And that’s barely a third of the video options this year!

On Friday, the live portion of the TMTB Virtual Summit begins with Francis opening the event, followed by a full day of live panels and interviews. Another slew of video presentations will also be released.

I’m looking forward to Dr. Frank Buck interviewing his sort-of namesake, Dave Buck, as well as a live episode of The Productivitycast, with the aforementioned Ray, Augusto Pinaud, Art Gelwicks, and Francis. (Read more about this gang in Paper Doll Picks: Organizing and Productivity Podcasts.) I’ve been a guest on that podcast many times, and am sure it’ll be a hoot.

I’m also really excited about the panel discussion, “How Does Time Management Work Across Cultures and Countries?” and the interview with Mike Vardy about The Productivity Diet.

On Saturday, there will be more video presentations released (including mine!) as well as another spate of live interviews and panels. (You’ll enjoy everything, but if you want to see my panel, it’s from 1:45 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Saturday.)

There are also oodles of bonus offers and “swag bag” items.

The whole event takes place on a very cool interactive platform called Airmeet, allowing us to interact at digital “tables” in a sort of cloud-based ballroom and attend Zoom-like lecture rooms for official events. As with previous summits, there’s time for networking with attendees and these great speakers and geeking out on productivity.

When you register for a free e-ticket to the event, you get 24-hour access to each “chunk” of videos, plus all of the live interviews, panels, and networking events in the Airmeet Lounge.

Again, attendance is free, but you’ll have to carve out time in your schedule to watch the videos — it helps that Thursday is a video-only day! — and attend the live events, which run from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

If you want more time to absorb everything, you can purchase an All-Access Pass, which is basically a smörgåsbord of summit offerings and bonus extras, including:

recordings of all of the pre-recorded video presentations (including mine!)
recordings of all of the live panels, interviews, and events
an audio or PDF copy of Francis’ book
a 50% discount on Francis’s My Time Design Rapid Assessment program

(Be sure to pay attention to the resulting screen post-purchase so you know how to access your goodies.)

The full price for the All-Access pass is $249. But because I love you, I’ve got a super-nifty coupon link good up until the start of the summit that takes the price down to $99!

What project might you approach as if it were a hobby?

Where can you create a backup slot in your schedule?

How will you protect the elements of your schedule that give your life meaning?

Will I see you at the 2023 Task Management and Time Blocking Summit?

Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity

Posted on: February 20th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

In honor of Presidents’ Day, I thought it might be fun to look at some of the values various US presidents have embraced to help them not only get more things done, but get more of the right things done.

Be assured, this is completely apolitical content. Additionally, let’s agree that we’re all aware of the complicated lives and backgrounds of presidents (particularly those born prior to the 20th century); none of this should be taken as full-on endorsements of them as men (few of whom would compare entirely favorably with Mr. Rogers), but only as people who endeavored to accomplish much.

And I give you a Presidents’ Day guarantee: you will not be encouraged to purchase a mattress anywhere within the text of this post. (That said, the vast majority of presidents who had something to say about productivity spoke robustly on the importance of sleep!)

PUNCTUALITY

People who are on time are dependable. If you arrive on time (or a little early), then those you are meeting need never fear that they are in the wrong place, that they are late, that you met with some misfortune, or that you forgot them.

Being somewhere on time shows respect for the value of other people’s time. It proves that you don’t consider what you were doing beforehand (or whatever made you late) to be more important that the activities of the person you are meeting.

But from a productivity standpoint, punctuality is efficient. If you’re on time, and if everyone else is on time, then you can stick to the agenda without apologies, hurt feelings, or distractions due to late arrivals or missed information.

George Washington was a stickler for punctuality. As a teenager, he carefully read and took notes on more than 100 rules about civility put together by 16th-century Jesuit priests. From there, Washington developed his Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.

While an inordinate number of these would fall under Miss Manners-type advice, like keeping your nails clean and not taking off your clothes in front of company, one particular guiding principle caught my eye.

82. Undertake not what you cannot Perform but be Careful to keep your Promise.

That includes showing up when you said you would.

I’ve heard half a dozen stories about Washington’s keenness for punctuality. Allegedly, he dined daily at 4 o’clock; when he invited senators or representatives to dine with him, if they arrived late, they found the president midway through finishing his meal or even having completed it. “We are punctual here. My cook never asks whether the company has arrived, but whether the hour has come.”

By 21st-century standards, this may seem inflexible. After all, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” But the word “foolish” carries a lot of weight here. Habit and ritual have value, and they help presidents and fourth-graders alike to get more done.

Once, Washington’s secretary kept POTUS #1 cooling his heels. The secretary blamed a malfunctioning watch for his delayed arrival. Displeased, Washington replied, “Then you must get another watch, or I another secretary.”

Diplomatic, at least on these occasions, Washington was not. But hewing to strict rules and not letting anyone else mess with his temporal boundaries meant he could accomplish more of what he had planned.

Be assured, I understand that we all have different obligations. A doctor may be running late because a patient earlier in the day had a medical emergency. (Having once been that medical emergency, I am much more sympathetic in this regard.) The person meeting you may lack the (financial and human) resources you have, so when a caregiver or babysitter cancels, or transportation breaks down (or public transportation runs late), it’s important to have some empathy.

And if someone is chronically late (and you’re sure it’s not some kind of narcissistic power play), it may be due to neurological challenges related to any of a variety of executive function disorders or ADHD. Yes, it’s frustrating. And if that chronically late person is you, well, we know it’s frustrating for you, as well. But there’s hope.

Punctuality is often seen as a static personal characteristic rather than a skill set, but you can improve. For example:

Know how long it actually takes to accomplish your most common tasks. Be realistic.
Do not over-schedule yourself. Ever brain needs time to refresh and re-set.
Schedule buffer time, recuperative time, and travel time. If you don’t schedule time to transition between tasks and/or locations, you are likely to fall further behind. In middle and high school, we called it “passing time,” as you had to pass from classroom to classroom. Do not engage in the magical thinking that you can start one meeting or appointment at the same time you are ending another one, even when video conferencing. Try the therapy model of 50-minute hours when scheduling Zooms.
Don’t depend on willpower. Your lateness is likely not because of laziness but attempting to do “just one more thing.” Curbing that instinct will take effort and support.
Set alarms. When the time is up, the time is up. For some people, it can be emotionally uncomfortable to stop and transition, but consider the emotional discomfort both you and the other person will experience if you are late.
Accept/request help from others to move you along.

Schedule buffer time, recuperative time, and travel time. If you don't schedule time to transition between tasks and/or locations, you are likely to fall further behind. Share on X

If all you remember of Washington is false teeth and cherry trees, you might enjoy reading You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe. It’s less worshipful than other biographies (or Christopher Jackson’s portray of General Washington in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), but it’s compelling reading.

BACKUPS, OPEN TABS, AND SWIVEL CHAIRS

Whatever one might say about Thomas Jefferson (good, bad, or … let’s be real, it’s never indifferent), there’s no getting around the fact that the guy loved his gadgets for getting things done.

Jefferson wrote a lot of letters; historians estimate that he sent approximately 20,000 letters over the years to friends, family members, and colleagues, not even counting official diplomatic or presidential correspondence. (He also wrote some nasty poison-pen newspaper editorials under false names.)

Nowadays, to keep track of our email trail, we might thread the conversations, or sort by sender, or develop complex archiving and tagging systems. Thomas Jefferson made use of a polygraph.

No, not that kind of polygraph. This isn’t an episode of Law & Order: Monticello.

Annotated engraving of Hawkin’s Polygraph from Rees’s Cyclopædia, ca. 1820

Over the years, Jefferson acquired increasingly refined versions of a polygraph device that allowed creation of simultaneous copies of the letters he wrote — as he moved the pen, another pen, on another sheet of paper, wrote in parallel. He needn’t be attended by a secretary, nor did he have to worry about the security and privacy of his letters. Thomas Jefferson made use of a low-labor method of backup.

Jefferson also understood that — in an era before Google, 2-day delivery, or Boolean Search — having quick access to his resources helped him research and write more quickly. He oversaw the creation of a revolving bookstand, modeled on a sheet music stand, that allowed him to access any five books at once with a simple spin. You can even purchase a table-top model from the Monticello store.

While I’m loathe to promote multitasking, unlike our modern browsers, at least his number of open tabs was limited to five!

And that’s not the only way he set his productivity in motion — Jefferson invented (some say “refined”) the swivel chair! While drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson used the popular and oh-so-British Windsor chair. (You’d recognize one immediately — a wooden seat with four legs attached below and a bunch of wooden spindles slotted into the seat from above form the back of the chair.)

Jefferson Swivel Chair

The traditional Windsor chair was too confining. Jefferson added an iron spindle between the top and bottom halves of the seat, enabling the chair to rotate on doohickeys he repurposed from window sash pulleys! Later, he replaced the original legs of the chair with bamboo ones and added a writing desk. Considering the writing desks are ubiquitous in college classrooms worldwide, this was quite a special invention.

For what it’s worth, productivity-wise, Thomas Jefferson was also a proponent of rising early, stating, “Whether I retire to bed early or late, I rise with the sun.” While Paper Doll doesn’t personally abide by the notion of The 5 a.m. Miracle, Jefferson’s consistency in his schedule — rising early, hosting a hearty breakfast for his guests, and spending the morning writing letters to get his creative juices flowing before working on other projects — reflects the same kind of time blocking that we know helps people build successful productivity habits.

How can you put Jeffersonian wisdom to work?

Back up everything so you always have a safeguarded copy. For tips, look at Paper Doll’s Ultimate Stress-Free Backup Plan.
Experiment with ways to keep your resources front-and-center. That doesn’t mean letting your mess pile up. Earmark part of a shelf next to your desk for resources supporting projects you’re working on right now. For digital resources, embrace technology that makes your resources easily searchable, like Evernote.
Develop consistency in your own schedule by creating blocks to ensure there’s ample time to accomplish what you most value.

EFFICIENCY VS. EFFECTIVENESS

If his diaries are any indication, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, really understood the paradoxical nature of how some people, although working very hard, often fail to achieve their goals.

Before he was even president, John Quincy Adams was Secretary of State, and of that period of this life, he said with dismay,

Every day starts new game to me, upon the field of my duties; but the hurry of the hour leaves me no time for the pursuit of it, and at the close of my Career I shall merely have gone helter skelter through the current business of the Office, and leave no permanent trace of my ever having been in it behind.

He saw that without foresight and planning, without identifying the most worthy pursuits, he would be busy without being productive.

Even in John Quincy Adams’ early years, he bemoaned,

I find it easy to engage my attention in scientific pursuits of almost any kind, but difficult to guard against two abuses — the one of being insensibly drawn from one to another, as I now have from Chronology to Astronomy and from Astronomy to Logarithms — the other of misapplying time, which is essential to the business of life; public and private.

Long before we talked about “going down the rabbit hole” as we surfed the internet, linking from article to article, or followed social media links hither and yon, JQA recognized how easily time can control us if we don’t seek to control it, or at least our use of it.

Vintage Alarm Clock (Public Domain)

He admonished that we should wisely plan our time to include what is necessary for our work, appealing for our personal interest, and meaningful for our personal and professional growth. To that end, you might:

Identify what are your highest priorities (whether they are externally-driven, like a paycheck or attention from prospective clients, or internally-driven, like gaining a deeper understanding of a subject or investing in your physical health).
Time-block for the categories of your life/work so nothing vital will fall through the cracks.
Take note of your bad habits and work on improving your good ones to give yourself more focus on those higher priorities. Check Paper Doll Helps You Find Your Ideal Analog Habit Tracker to see ways to do that.
Set alarms or plan catch-up calls, or use accountability methods to make sure you’ve maintained focus and haven’t strayed. For useful guidelines:

Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity

Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to Amp Up Your Productivity

Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek

PLANNING AND PREPARATION

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

This is a phenomenal quote, portraying the importance of facing every problem by focusing on planning, preparation, and identifying the right resources.

Unfortunately, just as with Washington’s cherry tree, Abraham Lincoln never actually made this statement. It was, apparently, an old loggers’ saying, fitting in with folksy wisdom like “measure twice and cut once.” Although it’s often been erroneously ascribed to Lincoln, the quote first appeared in an agricultural education textbook in the 1950s and the first association with Lincoln came in 1960, ninety-five years after his fateful night at the theater.

And you may have heard the so-called quote as minutes instead of hours. As a 21st-century suburbanite, I’ve no idea how long it should take to chop down a tree. But even though we have no reason to believe Lincoln said this, we would not be surprised that he might agree with it. Nor do I imagine he’d take umbrage with a quote from a similar 1901 comment in “The Times and Young Men” by Josiah Strong:

He will see that the necessary time spent in preparation for his life-work is better spent than as if he had rushed into it ill-prepared. Time spent in sharpening the axe may well be spared from swinging it.

Honest Abe didn’t ignore concepts of time and project management. In his first inaugural address (in 1861), he said,

Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it.

This was not a call for procrastination. Certainly, he was talking about caution on the precipice of Civil War. But the lessons from both the real quote and the false one are the same. We must be cautious and consider our situation. So:

Add planning time to your days, perhaps the last 15 minutes of each workday, to check the next day’s schedule and verify that you have all of your essential resources (whether that means Zoom links or a child’s cardboard Medieval diorama for school).
Add planning time to your weeks. Laura Vanderkam is a proponent of planning the next week on Friday. So is Paper Doll.
Build review time into your years so that you have a better sense how your dreams and visions measure up against your realities. Review Organize Your Annual Review & Mindset Blueprint for 2023.

I should note, Lincoln is also alleged (probably erroneously) to have said, “The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.”

This notion is one we should embrace as we seek to be more productive. We don’t need to be fearful, overwhelmed, or cowed by what is coming. We have time to plan.

The future isn’t a cartoon anvil or speeding train, but a knock on the door each morning. If we schedule time to work on something a little bit every day, whether it’s a 10th grade Social Studies report or a presentation for work, Pomodoro-by-Pomodoro, bit-by-bit, we can achieve our goals.

PRIORITIZING

Often, the problem isn’t that we aren’t getting things done, but that we’re not getting the right things done. This happens when we treat every sensory input as urgent and important, even though it might be only one or the other — or neither.

Before Dwight D. Eisenhower became the 34th president, he was a 5-star general in the United States Army. (Trivia note: only 5 people have ever held this rank, which has now been eliminated. But they didn’t become presidents, so you won’t be tested on their names today.) We can be fairly sure this was a guy who needed to manage his time well.

In a 1961 address after he left office, Eisenhower said,

Who can define for us with accuracy the difference between the long and short term! Especially whenever our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future.

He also reflected these thoughts in his first presidential term when he quoted a university president (whose name has been lost to history), saying,

I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

While this may have (mostly) been true for the university president, it was almost assuredly not quite that simple for Ike. However, by championing evaluation all of those sensory inputs before taking action, Eisenhower inspired many, including Stephen Covey of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People fame.

Covey took Eisenhower’s wisdom and distilled it into an easily-understood, accessible chart to help you:

pause and consider the value of a task or situation
avoid giving urgency a leg-up on importance
drop-kick the fluff and time-wasters from your life, habits, and schedule, and
help clear your mind so you can focus on your real priorities

Covey gave Eisenhower the credit. Unlike the Lincoln quote, it’s not made up from whole cloth, but the Eisenhower Decision Matrix (also known variably as the The Urgency-Importance Matrix, The Eisenhower Method, yadda yadda) is really the work of Covey.

Importance is something that has a high degree of value in terms of whether it helps you achieve your goals, particularly long-term. Note: some things are important but not important enough for you to do them!

Urgency refers to the speed at which it must be dealt with to avoid unfortunate circumstances. True urgency means fire, flood, smoke, blood, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Things aren’t urgent just because someone is yelling.

True urgency means fire, flood, smoke, blood, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Things aren't urgent just because someone is yelling. Share on X

Urgent and important tasks will have a high impact on the achievability of your goals and must be competed with alacrity. They have quickly-approaching deadlines. Do them!
Important but not urgent tasks require you to stop — calm down — and start making decisions. Schedule when you can do the task in the future, assuming it’s an important task that you can’t comfortably delegate. Break the task into smaller component elements to make it easier.
Urgent but unimportant tasks may still need to be completed, but they may not need to be completed by you. The solution can involve anything from outsourcing a task for pay or delegating to an employee, a child, or laterally (to your spouse or co-worker, though you’ll want to call it something that sounds less bossy).
Neither important nor urgent tasks might be anything from social media (when it’s not part of your job) to keeping up with certain trends. Not everyone has to know the latest TikTok dance or what’s going on with AI.

Of course, as Eisenhower would have understood, the world is in flux. Getting your taxes completed is important (for legal and financial reasons), but is not particularly urgent in July. By April 14th, the urgency is at its pinnacle. Having to use the rest room is urgent, and assuming you do so today, in 2033 you won’t likely reflect on that bathroom visit as important.

The number 10 can be a highly useful way of determining something’s importance. Ask yourself:

Will this matter in 10 minutes?
Will this matter in 10 days?
Will this matter in 10 years?

The Zoom call that seems so important may long be forgotten a month from now, but the dinner with your friend or promised tea party with your child that you blew off to attend it? That could have a long-lasting impact.

The Eisenhower (By Way of Steven Covey) Decision Matrix gives you a framework for evaluating the decisions you make about the way you spend your time and attention. But it’s only a framework. Only you know what you truly value. You are the President of your future.

This post was originally written for Presidents’ Day 2023. Although a few sentences have been tweaked, the timeless advice remains the same.

In these contentious times, I tried to be as ideologically balanced as possible, picking presidents from the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

I selected one Democrat (Obama), one Republican (Eisenhower), one Democratic-Republican (Jefferson), one unaffiliated president (Washington), and two presidents affiliated with multiple parties. Abraham Lincoln was Republican and re-elected as a National Union candidate, while John Quincy Adams was, at various times, a Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, Anti-Masonic, and Whig.

This covers all political parties with which elected presidents were affiliated.

Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources

Posted on: February 13th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 14 Comments

Given that it’s Valentine’s Day week, I wanted to give all of my Paper Doll readers some treats. In this post, we’ll be looking at three books covering organizing, motivation, and productivity, as well as an upcoming video interview series for taking a proactive approach to productivity in leadership.

GO WITH THE FLOW! (The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook)

If you’ve been reading Paper Doll for a while, the name Hazel Thornton won’t be new to you. We’ve been colleagues and friends for many years, and I’ve shared Hazel with you when I interviewed her (along with Jennifer Lava and Janine Adams) for Paper Doll Interviews the Genealogy Organizers and when I profiled her stellar book, What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy in my 2021 holiday gift list post.

Hazel is a delight and full of wisdom — and how many other professional organizers do you know who are experts on photo organizing, genealogy, and family legacies and who served on the jury in the famed Menendez trial?

But Hazel is pretty famous for one other thing — flow charts. If the topic of flow charts even comes up in any organizing circles, Hazel’s is the first (and sometimes only) name that gets raised; she’s that much of a subject matter expert. So, it made sense that Hazel would take her favorite creations from her wealth of flow chart wisdom and leverage them into a resource.

Hazel’s newest book, published just a few weeks ago, is Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook. And it’s a whopper for anyone looking for some turn-by-turn directions for getting organized, from where to start to how to progress logically so you don’t get stuck.

This 170-page, 8.5″ x 11″, portrait-oriented paperback workbook includes 17 charts covering all different kinds of clutter:

clutter in your spaces (closet, garage, kitchen, office)
daily clutter (to-do lists, general paper, kids’ paper, cash flow, mental clutter)
legacy clutter (keepsakes, ancestry, photos)
life event clutter (holiday activity, holiday décor, occupied staging)

There are even flow charts to tell you which clutter flow chart you need and to help you get back on track if you’ve had some backsliding in the decluttering process.

(You won’t be surprised that Paper Doll‘s favorite flow chart was the one on dealing with paper clutter. But I suspect one of the most useful flow charts overall might be the one on keepsakes.)

Of course, the book would be pretty short if it only had flow charts. In each section, Hazel follows the flow chart with detailed answers to four questions.

What is clutter? — You might think you know what type of clutter you’re dealing with, but the book helps you identify items you may not have even considered. In each chapter, this section asks pertinent questions about how you interact with the item (tangible or otherwise) and feel about it, probes whether it needs to be in your life, prompts you to consider its condition or situation, and leads you to make wise decisions regarding whether it still fits you and your life. These are the exact questions we professional organizers gently pepper clients with when we work together.
Why can’t I part with my clutter? — As a veteran professional organizer, Hazel doesn’t just tell you to “buck up, buttercup!” but employs the analysis of the “what is clutter?” sub-questions to dig deeply into why the reader might be experiencing challenges in letting go.
What should I do with my clutter? — With each distinct category, the book offers clear suggestions as to where that clutter can go so it will really, truly leave your life in the most beneficial way possible.
What if, despite my best intentions, I am still living with clutter? — Nobody’s perfect. And Rome wasn’t built (or decluttered) in a day. So, the book has guidance for continuing to make progress and for getting support.

There’s bonus material, like resources for getting help organizing and decluttering and blank clutter worksheets to help you identify answers and track efforts. (Be sure to read the content in the clutter worksheet examples, because Hazel’s down-to-earth sense of humor shines there!)

In addition, there’s a special section advising professional organizers how to use the content of the workbook with clients.

Go With the Flow! is subtitled The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook, and for those who are feeling stuck with (or stymied by) their clutter, this can be the catalyst to actually make progress by working through the clutter instead of just reading about it. The combination of the flow charts, where their visual approach to “If X, then Y” fork-in-the-road decision trees, with straightforward prose coaching through the what’s and why’s of decluttering, offers a one-two punch for knocking clutter out of your life.

Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook is available for $27.50 at Amazon. If you’re in Australia (to which Amazon/KDP will not market books with color images), or if you desperately want a landscape-oriented version of the book, you can purchase a PDF copy directly from Hazel’s website. (It’s a slightly finicky process, Hazel reports, so do follow the instructions.)

DO IT TODAY

You’ve got dreams that sparkle. Friends see your eyes light up when you talk about your big, bold visions for the future. You know you’ve got fabulous ideas inside of you that can make the world smarter, happier, healthier, weirder (in a good way), or just plain better.

So why aren’t you working on them?

Why aren’t you getting on that stage, giving your TED Talk or taking a bow for your award-winning creation? Why are you scrolling through social media or counting your excuses or being held back by fear?

Once I got Kara Cutruzzula’s Do It Today: An Encouragement Journal in my hands, I realized I’d never seen a journal like this. It’s colorful and beautiful, with each turn of the page yielding a vibrant new palette, but the aesthetics are just the frosting on this empathetic, wise cake, a combo of a journal and motivational coach.

Friend-of-the-blog Kara Cutruzzula is a writer and editor, and I start my day reading her newsletter, Brass Ring Daily. BRD is pithy, perky, and just philosophical enough to get you out of your bed and headed to the coffee maker. (Kara is other things: a musical theater lyricist, playwright, podcaster, and fellow Gilmore Girls aficionado. But the rest I’m saving for an upcoming interview, so you’ll just have to be patient.)

As a follow-up to her Do It For Yourself, the first in her Start Before You’re Ready series, Do It Today offers gentle motivational coaching. Read straight through and tackle the guided motivational exercises one by one, or devour the section-starting essays and then ping-pong through exercises that resonate most with you on that day.

(Or, perhaps start each day with the journal, using an exercise as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way-style morning pages?)

Personally, I’ve started using Do It Today to help me avoid procrastination by — you guessed it — procrastinating with the journal. When I find myself doing everything except the writing or project I really know I should be working on (to reach my own goals), I settle in to reread one of Kara’s essays and then tackle a journal entry. (In full disclosure, the journal is so beautiful that I can’t bring myself to actually write in it, and tend to type my responses so that I don’t obsess about my ever-more chicken-scratchy handwriting.)

To give you sense of the approach, the chapter-starting essays include:

Go Toward Your Nerves
Start Before You’re Ready (I’m sensing a theme here!)
Don’t Be Productive, Percolate Instead — Worth the price of admission!
Stamina, Courage, and Mirages
Sweet, Sweet Rejection — Trust me, whether you fear failure (or, like me, fear mediocrity), Kara’s stance here will conjure up the best kinds of attitude adjustments.
Weave a Generous Web
Do It Today

It would be hard to pick, but the chapter on percolation is probably my favorite. Maybe because Kara’s writing here dovetails with what I wrote in my series last year on toxic productivity, I was prepared to embrace what she had to say. Or maybe it’s because she illustrates (through a tale of John Steinbeck and examples you’ll recognize from your own life) that percolation is a brilliant cheat code.

Have you ever circled an idea for a while, finding the tendrils of a concept while never locating key to actually getting started?

Percolation is “…giving yourself time and space to think without the extra pressure to track your performance…allowing yourself to enjoy reflecting and exploring your options.” Instead of coming up with ready-for-Prime-Time ideas, Kara helps you find your sources of inspiration, ideas, and solutions, areas you may have closed yourself off from by focusing on the perfect end result. Long story short, when you’ve focused too long on the checkmark at the end, Kara reminds you to focus on the joy of creation and accomplishment.

In each chapter of Do It Today, Kara has interspersed pop-art messages to uplift, free-writing journaling prompts, and list templates to get you thinking.

Some of my favorite, deceptively astute lines and what they mean to me:

You are more powerful than your productivity — battering toxic productivity’s lie that your worth comes from what you deliver
Everyone is just trying their best with the information they have — reminding you that none of us are perfect and prompting us to start now (because you can’t edit a blank page)
Look at all you have — focusing on gratitude as well as noticing the bounty we possess rather than the short stack and what we lack
Do, don’t overdo — I think I resemble — I mean, resent — that remark. I feel seen.

In terms of journaling prompts, in the section on starting before you’re ready, there’s a page that asks, “Is there one conversation you’re not ready to have? Even if you don’t know how to say it, begin here by writing a few possible opening sentences.” Down deep, you know this works. You’ve felt a sense of ease after telling your BFF about a problem at work and how you dread dealing with it. But by letting yourself stop thinking of the issue, and just giving yourself a few minutes to think about it, in context, you’ll find the weight is lifted!

I suggested one of the prompts from the Courage chapter to a client who wanted to apply for an opportunity but feared putting herself forward. Kara writes, “Have you ever had to ask someone to write you a letter of recommendation? What if you wrote one for yourself, highlighting your strengths and what you would bring to your next opportunity?” It worked!

The list-making prompts are incredible in their powerful simplicity. If you’re feeling like a slug, unable to clarify your thoughts, Kara encourages that you write a list of ten ideas completely unrelated to your current project, and offers some examples. The key is that taking your focus off of a lack of productivity hoovers up all the cobwebs.

Other list prompts help you strengthen your arsenal of motivation-boosting weapons of stress-destruction, like noting people who’ve historically provided safe spaces for you to share your works in progress.

I can’t do justice to this creative, colorful guide to getting un-stuck, but I’d describe it as being like meeting your most inspiring friend for brunch and leaving full of waffles and excitement.

Do It Today is available in paperback for $16.99 or Kindle for $9.99 at Amazon, as well as at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop, Powell’s, and Indigo. You can also purchase directly from the publisher, Abrams Books.

PRODUCTIVITY FOR HOW YOU’RE WIRED

My longtime colleague Ellen Faye is a consummate professional and ridiculously unflappable. She’s a Certified Professional Organizer®, Professional Certified Coach, and Certified Productivity Leadership Coach. She’s even been the president of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals!

Ellen recognized that there are far too many books out there by coaches telling readers how to be successful they way they, the coaches, have done it. Ellen, however, saw that her clients needed productivity solutions and systems that worked for them, not merely for her. That realization of the need for customization inspired her to write Productivity for How You’re Wired: Better Work. Better Life.

Front cover of Productivity for How You're Wired by Ellen Faye

Ellen’s book is designed for people seeking to be “more intentional about how they use their time and live their life,” and the book approaches this concept in three main ways.

First, she wants readers to understand how they are truly wired with regard to how they deal with time and productivity. Ellen recognizes that individuals have different needs and ways of thinking in terms of structure preference as well as productivity style.

In the first section of the book, Ellen guides readers to identify how their brains work best. She explains far better than I could even attempt, but the key is that you have to understand whether your priority focus is tasks vs. relationships, and then really comprehend what kind of structure (low, medium, or high) you need in your work and life — that’s situational structure. Through clear examples and charts, she walks you through identifying where, given your focus and structure preference, you’ll thrive or feel overly confined, struggle or succeed, power up or feel lost.

Meanwhile, Ellen’s take on productivity style borrows from, and refines, other research on the topic, and the book helps you isolate which productivity style (Catalyst, Coordinator, Diplomat, or Innovator) best fits you, laying out the characteristics and best work process approach for each. It’s really eye opening.

This section also illustrates how understanding challenges like perfectionism, procrastination, chronic stress, and burnout plays into making positive changes.

In the second part of the book, Ellen teaches the reader how to create a productivity flow framework to transform current unworkable systems into customized pathways to success. Productivity for How You’re Wired walks you through setting your goals and intentions, using a time map, defining the essential structures, creating a priorities task list, and doing your daily and weekly planning.

Productivity books often have one uniform approach to everything and then vague pointers for understanding how to begin and continue; you have to find where you fit in. Instead, Ellen provides detailed guidance so that no part of your life is going to fall through the cracks. Basically, it’s like having Ellen as your coach, sticking by you step-by-step, so you can get clear on your priorities and focus on the essentials elements for achieving what means the most.

The third part of the book combines the deep understanding you’ll gain regarding the right approach for you and the overarching framework you developed so you can apply the concepts to your own life and work demands. Using the right structure preferences and productivity style, you’ll see how to deal with meetings, email, decision-making, remote work, team leadership, and more.

I particularly liked that Productivity for How You’re Wired‘s chapters start with “Highlights,” overviews of what’s coming so that you can find your place. (I like to know where I’m going when I read so I have an “ah-ha” when I get there!)

The book has myriad real-life stories to help you see parallels between your situation and others who’ve been through it and achieved success. To that end, each chapter also has “Making It Fit” charts so you can make decisions using your own structure preference and productivity style and know what to do in the situation described.

You can use the Productivity for How You’re Wired as a bit of a workbook, as each chapter ends with a place to note those “Takeaways” you don’t want to forget and commit to the “Actions” you’ll take to help you develop your own systems.

The only drawback to the book is that some of the material on the charts can be hard to read (due to the confines of a tangible book); however, there are colorful versions of the charts available online, which allow you to expand the charts so you can see them more clearly. There are also supplemental resources on the website.

Productivity for How You’re Wired is fluff-free. This is just about the meatiest book I’ve ever seen on achieving personalized productivity. This book is a real commitment — to yourself and the material — but short of working in person with Ellen herself, it’s an amazing way to tweak every detail of your approach to work and life to fit in everything important to you. If you make the commitment, I think you’ll be impressed with what you get out of it.

Productivity for How You’re Wired is available from Amazon for $17.64 for paperback or $9.99 on Kindle.

CREATING ORDER AMONG CHAOS

Starting February 15, 2023 and running through February 28, 2023, I’m participating in the adventurously titled Creating Order Among Chaos: How To Effectively Manage The Everyday Whirlwind Of Responsibilities So That You’re Empowered To Do More Leading & Less Reacting!

This free online video retreat is headed up by personal coach and business consultant Robert Barlow from Perpetual Aim. You might recall his name from when I did Robert’s The Leader’s Asset series on prioritization and leadership last summer.

If you’re a solopreneur or small business owner, you know what it’s like when you’re constantly reacting instead of acting, always putting out fires (that often turn out to be fireflies) instead of setting off your own carefully planned fireworks. Simply put, it can feel impossible to feel like you’re running the show, and instead everything (and everyone, and every sensory input) is distracting you from achieving success.

It’s hard to lead when the ducklings behind you keep getting out of line. It’s hard to make progress when the phones won’t stop ringing about yesterday’s efforts (and other people’s priorities). That’s where the video retreat comes in!

Robert has gathered 14 speakers, myself included, who all share a passion for empowering small business owners and professionals to work more on their businesses instead of in their businesses (to borrow from Michael Gerber’s now-classic The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.)

Each of us participating are bringing our knowledge and expertise to these short but powerful video interviews with Robert, and you can anticipate that each will leave you with actionable options to achieve your priorities. Topics covered will include:

How to manage juggling responsibilities
How to lead and delegate to others
Ways to create stronger boundaries so that you are less overcommitted and overwhelmed
Tips, tools, and strategies that move you forward in life
What thinking patterns are keeping you mired in place
How to stay connected with your vision, goals, and ideals
How to manage your time on a day to day basis to accomplish what you desire.

This two-week video series is virtual; that means you can watch it at home, in the office, on your commute (provided someone else is driving the car/bus/train), or wherever you can get away from the hubbub.

I think we’d all love the opportunity to pick the brains of experts in productivity and leadership, and have conversations to help guide professional success. I’m excited to not only have contributed my thoughts, but I can’t wait to hear what the other experts have to say. Participating experts include:

Dr. Frank Buck, long-time friend-of-the-blog, with whom I’ve shared many virtual stages. (You might recall that Frank interviewed me on his podcast last year, and I’ve referenced him often on these pages.)
Alexis Haselberger is a fabulous coach and consultant whom I fist met when I spoke at Ray Sidney-Smith‘s 2019 Productivity Summit. I love her motto: “Do More, Stress Less.”
Steven Dossou is all about personal transformation. His background in marketing leadership, his executive and life coaching experience, and what I’ve heard him say about fear, self-doubt, and self-esteem, has me really intrigued about what he’ll discuss in his interview.
Rudy Miick, founder of the Miick Method for purpose-driven creating, maintaining, and expanding excellence, should bring some fascinating ideas to the table.
Stephanie Paillé is a leadership coach specializing in mindset shifts and high performance culture.
Gill Tiney, an expert on the power of collaboration, should have an amazing take on how we can do more (even with all those distracting inputs) by working together.

And that’s only hitting half of the presenters!

I have a complimentary ticket for you to attend. Just click on https://perpetualaim.com/JulieBestry to register for this free, online two-week “retreat,” and you’ll start getting emails to take you to each daily interview. I hope you’ll attend, and if you watch my interview with Robert, feel free to come back and share your thoughts on what I’ve said about conquering overwhelm and achieving prioritized focus for improved leadership.

Happy Valentine’s Day, my wonderful readers. I hope these books and the video series will help you achieve your organizing and productivity goals.

Much (productive) love,

Paper Doll

Paper Doll’s Guide to Picking the Right Paper Planner

Posted on: December 19th, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

With two weeks until the new year, you’ve probably already started planning for 2023. But if you’re agitated about next year not being any more orderly than this one, you might be hesitating about committing to a planning system. Today’s post is designed to put you more at ease, and give you some guiding principles.

WHY USE A PAPER PLANNER?

There’s nothing wrong with using a digital calendar. I use one myself, though not for scheduling. I use my digital calendar so that when I get an email with Zoom logins, or have a telephone consultation with a prospective client, I don’t have to go looking for the emails to find the links or phone numbers.

In Outlook, I can create an appointment or task directly from an email, and the system will prompt me at a pre-set time with all the key details. It’s like having my own personal Jeeves pop his head into the room to let me know the countess and duchess have arrived to join me for tea.

But honestly, I never use my digital calendar to plan my life. I’m a Paper Doll, so it stands to reason, I prefer a paper planner. But how do you know what’s best for you?

Let’s start with the mindset, and the different advantages and disadvantages of paper planners vs. digital calendars.

Learning Curve

If you are over the age of eight, you already know how to use a paper planner. On the monthly view, there are boxes for the days of the month to put major events, deadlines, and vacations. On the weekly and/or daily views, you can time block for tasks and list appointments.

Digital calendars aren’t complicated, per se, but they are not always intuitive. There might be a generational schism at play, but I’ve had clients try once, twice, even three times to input an appointment, only to have some technical or user kerfuffle lead them astray.

Why does this matter? Digital fatigue creates friction, and friction prevents people from completing a task, whether it’s removing the lid to the laundry hamper to toss clothes in, or schedule an appointment when the system isn’t working.

Woman With Planner Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash

Digital fatigue creates friction, and friction prevents people from completing a task, whether it's removing the lid to the laundry hamper to toss clothes in, or schedule an appointment when the system isn't working. Share on X

Control vs. Convenience

At first, the ease of clicking to accept a meeting invitation would seem like an advantage for digital calendars. But is it?

When I train clients to improve their productivity, we focus on identifying priorities so that we can protect boundaries around them. On a digital calendar in your phone, you generally see the month with blobby dots signifying appointments on particular days.

You have to click through to look at the individual date to schedule the meeting, but then you’re losing the surrounding context because you’re just seeing one appointed after another another in a list. Again, you can’t see time.

When we brainstorm ideas, schedule appointments, break projects into tasks and plan when we’ll do them, we’re thinking about context. When we see a whole month of appointments on the printed page, we instinctually know we have to give ourselves (and our brains) some recovery time. That’s less obvious when we only see the one time slot and the computer merely tells us if there’s a conflict. (Also, on the digital calendar, it’s less clear that you haven’t scheduled time for a potty break or commute.)

Many people — children, college students, people with ADHD, overwhelmed professionals —often suffer from a lack of ability to visualize the passage of time. An analog planner involves more tactile interaction with the appointments and tasks we schedule. As we deal with finding a reasonable time for each time, we gain mastery, not only over our schedules, but our comprehension of time.

Cost

Basic digital calendars are built-in to our phone and computer systems, and most apps are inexpensive. Conversely, paper planners may run you from $20-$50. But when it comes to our planning tools, cost does not necessarily equal value.

Yes, there’s a dollar value to the purchase price of an app vs. a paper planner. But there’s a time value related to mastering a new calendaring system. Are you prepared to commit yourself to learning the intricacies of a new app or the same app every time it updates?

Privacy vs. Searchability

This is another close call. Your paper planner is completely private, as long as you don’t leave it unattended; a digital planner generally syncs across all of your digital devices, which means that while it should be private, there’s never a 100% certainty that there are no prying, hacking eyes.

Conversely, your digital calendar is usually searchable. You can type a keyword or person’s name to find a scheduled appointment or task. Your planner can only be searched by trailing your gaze across each page, and the less careful you are with entering data, the more you risk losing the information when you need it.

Visual vs. Visual+Tactile

When you drive, do you think in terms of linear directions, or are you more inclined to recall what to do when you reach landmarks? If you prefer linearity, go digital; if you like touchpoints and landmarks, paper will likely resonate more.

Hand in Water Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash

Does digital time “feel” real to you? On a digital calendar, every item appears in the same font and size. You can often color-code items, but digital entries have a vague sameness about them.

If you write something down, you can stop thinking of it, per se, and start thinking more robustly and contextually about it. Somehow, dragging an email into Outlook to set a meeting, or typing an appointment into your phone, leads to an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation for many. But with a tangible paper planner, every time you eyeball your month or your week, you are speedily, comfortingly reminded of the important aspects your life.

Similarly, your fine motor skills applied to the task tend to be the same; you could be typing a grocery list or the key points for an interview (then buried into the notes section of a calendar event). With a paper planner, your tendency to print some things and handwrite others, your ability to use a particular color pen, to draw arrows and circles and adjust the size to shout or whisper on the page, yields a unique temporal language that makes sense to you.

Will a weighty paper planner “feel” more real to you vs. that free app (among dozens) on your phone?

Only you know for sure. For me, it’s a paper planner, all the way. But not all paper planners are created equal.

WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN PICKING A PAPER PLANNER

Anxiety over making the wrong planner choice is common; it’s one of the reasons people give up one planner and buy another mid-year. You don’t want to plunk $30 or $45 on a pile of paper that will sit like a lump on your desk because you’re afraid to “mess up” a pretty planner. This keeps people from committing to their planners and being successful at scheduling events and tasks.

Some users want simplicity; others desire flexibility. Some clients want aesthetically pleasing planners to inspire them, while others seek a serious, “professional” look. There’s no one perfect planner for everyone, but there are clues in how you feel about potential features.

Page Design

Adequate space — to show appointments and key information, especially on the monthly view. If you’ve got loopy handwriting, will small monthly view boxes cramp your style?
Layout for monthly/weekly/daily views — Understand how you “see” time. Also, depending on your life and lifestyle, consider whether you need an academic or full-year calendar, or a planner with lots of extra space for weekend and night activities.
Creative fields — Modern planners may give you spaces for more than just appointments and tasks. Do you want bubbles or fields or pages for note-taking, brainstorming, mind-mapping, or gratitude journaling?
Practical fields for tracking metrics — On the flip side of those creative attributes, there are planners with spaces for habit tracking, budgets, meals/nutritional logging, goal-setting, and other countable, observable elements.
Bonus features — Are you drawn to daily motivational quotes, religious references, or cartoons? I never loved my Franklin Planner so much as the year I was able to get one with a New Yorker cartoon each day. I’ve enjoyed my colorfully-tabbed Emily Ley planner for the last few years, but miss daily quotes and bits of wisdom.

Planner Quote Photo by Bich Tran

Planner Design

In addition to features on the page, you might care about the design specifics of the planner itself:

Size — Do you think you’d like an executive, classic, or condensed planner? The largest sized planner may not fit in your bag, or may take up too much real estate on your desk, but the tradeoff of picking the smallest option will be losing writing space.
Weight — Does a hefty paper planner give you a greater sense of gravitas so that you’ll take your schedule seriously? Or will the bulk make it inconvenient for you to carry around?
Binding — There are ring binders (usually with 7 rings), which let you choose how many pages you want to carry with you at any given time. (I like all the monthly pages, but prefer only last month, this month, and next month for weekly/daily pages.) Coil binding won’t let you remove or add pages, but tends to be more condensed. Both ring and coil binders assure your planner will stay open and lay flat; stitched binding may flop closed when the planner is new, and “perfect” binding (glued, like with a paperback book) can deteriorate with rough handling.
Cover Style — Do your want your planner to have a leather (or “vegan leather”) cover for a fashion statement? What about a zipper? Are you good with a plastic or stiff paper cover? Will a simple planner cover help you take your planning more seriously or bore you? (Or are you willing to upgrade a staid cover with artwork or washi tape?)

Also remember that your planner is mostly about knowing what you have to do and when. If you need help with project management at the more granular level, take a peek at last year’s Checklists, Gantt Charts, and Kanban Boards – Organize Your Tasks.

PLANNER FORMATS: FOR WHOM ARE THEY REALLY DESIGNED?

As I research planners each year, I find that most planners fall into one of a few general categories:

Basic Planners

Think back to before the computer era, when you’d go to the dentist. Before leaving your appointment, the receptionist would consult a big, black-covered planner with neat columns, flip forward in the book, and write your name for a particular date (column) and time (row). That’s the what you’ll get when you seek various office supply store-branded calendars: columns and rows and not much else.

Basic planners offer a variety of the planner design elements above, but relatively few extra page design options. Popular examples:

At-A-Glance — is the most like that dental office planner in the days of yore. It’s efficient and practical. If you’re easily distracted by colorful design elements, this style should keep you on the straight and narrow.

Franklin-Covey planners in the ring format are customizable. You not only get to pick your planner size, but also choose from a variety of themes. There are spaces for appointments, tasks, and notes on the same page; others have little boxes for tracking expenses. You can also purchase pages for contacts, more notes, budgeting, and a number of other extras.

Levenger Circa SmartPlanners come in junior and letter sizes and some DIY customization. They use ring-like discs, such as we discussed in Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 4): Modular, Customizable, Disc-Based Notebooks.

Moleskine planners comes in a wide variety of sizes, colors, bindings and styles for monthly, weekly, daily, and combination views. Much like Moleskine notebooks, these are well made, with curved corners and elastic closures. These are often suited to creative souls who still want to stick to a simpler style and format.

Planner Pads are the planners I recommend the most often to the widest variety of clients. There are monthly calendar pages, but the heart of the system is the weekly pages divided into three sections (projects/tasks, daily scheduled tasks, and daily appointments), which “funnel” the overall projects and tasks to where they belong each day. However, cover choice is limited to black and a sort of seafoam green. I’ve said it for years, but Planner Pads is missing a great marketing opportunity; they already have the best basic planners — why not make them a little more attractive?

Passion Planners are still pretty straightforward, with columns for each date and sections for work and personal tasks and for notes, but they add weekly sidebars for focus areas and a place to jot down the “good things that happened” that week. The covers are faux leather and come in a variety of sumptuous colors; choose cover design, pick one of three sizes, and decide whether you want your week to start on Sunday or Monday.

Basic planners are the best for time blocking. (For more on this, see my Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity from last year.) They tend to be promoted as gender-neutral options, with rare prompts for life goals or touchy-feely stuff.

“Fancy” Planners

For want of a better term, these are a step up from the basics. It’s worth noting that fancy planners marketed to women tend to focus on aesthetics and tracking emotional/psychological factors; planners marketed to men tend to include more tracking of quantifiable action-based metrics.

There are a handful of smaller sub-categories I’ve noticed in this realm.

The Animal Planners

Panda Planner — In addition to scheduling tasks and appointments, it covers inspiration and goals in sections labeled “Today’s Priorities,” “Morning Review,” and “Things I Will Do to Make This Week Great.”

There are also sections for weekly reviews and weekly planning and focus on a daily habit. You can get three-month or yearly versions in a few different sizes, and there’s a cute panda embossed on the faux leather cover.

Clever Fox aims for the person shopping for a planner by personal aesthetic. Planners come in a rainbow of colors and have spaces for scheduling, identifying goals (broken down by health, career, family, finances, personal development, etc.), listing priorities, and tasks/to-dos. There are lots of “feelings” pages for gratitude, daily affirmations and creating vision boards. And, there’s something that appeals to everyone who fondly remembers seventh grade, stickers!

Simple Elephant Planner is similar in style and approach to Clever Fox, though in fewer colors. It comes with a mind map and vision board pages, but is undated. It’s my belief that undated planners lead users to avoid to fully committing to their planners, leading to system breakdown. Your milage may vary.

Life Coach/Celebrity Planners

Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map Planner is full of “truth bombs, sacred pauses, gratitude, body & wellness, and “core desired feelings.” If you are a fan of life coach LaPorte and these words delight, you may be inspired by the year-at-a-glance, monthly calendars with goal prompts, vision board, goal mapping sheet with monthly action plan pages, and journaling pages for “notes and insights.”

Michael Hyatt’s Focus Planner leans more toward the tone of “basic” planners with some of the attributes of “fancy” ones. The top of each page helps you track whether you’ve done your morning/evening/workday startup/workday shutdown rituals. Larger sections focus on “Big 3” goals for the day, schedule, and a task/note column reminiscent of a bullet journal with a key to tracking how to mark each item to track what you’ve done, delegated, and deferred, as well as important aspects, questions, and items awaiting replies. You can get the planners with linen or leather covers in solid, mostly dark neutral colors, in pocket or portfolio sizes. Although the content is gender-neutral, it has a very masculine tone.

Brendon Burchard’s High Performance Planner is a combination planner and journal Burchard developed based on the study of how high performers plan. The planner’s features include mindset journaling prompts, daily goal boxes, evening scorecards based on the day’s results, weekly habit assessments, monthly project planning, and what he calls “whole life balance sheets.” It comes in six cheery colors, but is another with a very professional, serious feel. Unsurprisingly, there are no fun stickers.

The fancy planners, whether animal based (seriously, what is it with the animals?) or celebrity coach-driven, are better suited for those seeking to capture their entire lives in one place. That’s orderly, but it’s a lot of pressure to “get it right” and fill in lots of blanks.

Do you want your planner to feel like homework?

DO IT YOURSELF PLANNERS

DIY planners offer the best (or worst) of both worlds because you can make it whatever you want. The problem? The structure, as well as the execution, depends on you.

Bullet Journals still confuse me and cause anxiety. They have their fans and their detractors. All I can say is that no matter how many times I’m told I don’t have to make one look artistic or cool, any attempt on my part feels both too unstructured and too “uncool.”

James Clear’s Clear Habit Journal via Baron Fig is a combination daily journal, dot grid notebook, and habit tracker, but it’s not really a planner. Use it in conjunction with what you learn reading Atomic Habits, but I encourage you to embrace a planner that gives more structure to know when you do should things and not only track what you’ve already done.

Agendio deserves a blog post all its own. Basically, though, you use a digital platform for customizing the exact paper planner you need, controlling for everything from section categories to line spacing!

DIY planners may be best for the most advanced planner, not for the most creative one. While they may seem ideal for the Sally Albright (“I’ll have it on the side”) character in When Harry Met Sally, too many planning options can cause overwhelm, leading to avoidance and guilt.

Specialty Planners

Again, this could be an entire blog post for each of the fields and personalities that need unique planning options. What I will tell you is that if you are (or have) a student, I’ve seen nothing better than my colleague Leslie Josel’s Academic Planner, about which I’ve written many times.

WHAT ABOUT A HYBRID PLANNING SYSTEM?

As I mentioned in the beginning, I use a paper planner, but I also have a digital calendar. Yes, I’m using my Outlook calendar to keep me aware of the passage of time (with alerts) and prompt me when it’s time to make a transition between tasks.

The main problem with having a hybrid system is that you may get in the habit of putting information in one place and not both, creating a conflict. If you want to use a hybrid system, incorporate a weekly, if not daily, check-in to review both schedules and catch any conflicts.

HOW CAN YOU MAKE A PAPER PLANNER WORK FOR YOU?

Planners won’t make you do the work any more than buying exercise videos or cute new outfits will make you work out. But having a paper planner assures you that there’s a “home” for your activities and makes time feel more tangible.

Improve your planner use by time blocking, scheduling “executive time” each day to review your schedule for the next day — set an alarm until it becomes a habit — and having an accountability partner provide support.

In the end, the best system is the one in which you can feel confident, because the key to the success of any system is commitment, and nobody fully commits to a system in which they have shaky confidence.

Are you digital, paper, or hybrid planner? What planning system will you use in 2023?

Organize Your Writing Time for NaNoWriMo 2022

Posted on: October 31st, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 8 Comments

Have you ever imagined writing the Great American Novel?

Does the idea of getting revenge after the end of a turbulent relationship by (barely) disguising your ex as the villain (or victim) in a mystery appeal to you?

Maybe you’ve figured out exactly what Billy Joel was talking about when he sang that “Paul is a real estate novelist” and you’d like to be one too?

(If not, don’t skip out. There are treats here for anyone who wants to organize their time to achieve a goal.)

NaNoWriMo gives you the opportunity to follow your dream.

WHAT THE HECK IS NANOWRIMO?

In the weeks leading up to Halloween, and then all throughout the month of November, you may see #NaNoWriMo pop up in your social media feeds. NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month.

If you’ve ever done a month-long challenge (plank or do yoga every day of January, keep a journal for mindfulness, give up Facebook for a month, etc.), you’ll be familiar with this kind of effort. Except, at the end, instead of a fit core, increased self-awareness, or the calm of not knowing that people with whom you went to high school are bringing about the downfall of civilization, you’ll have written a book!

Each year, NaNoWriMo participants commit to writing a 50,000-word novel between November 1st and 30th of the month. That amounts to an average of 1667 words per day, but it’s only the final count that matters. (Because nobody actually writes on Thanksgiving Day. Too many carbs.)

Sign up on the website, maybe join some supportive forums, and then start writing. You can log your daily count and even get cute little badges for your progress.

Officially, there are opportunities to prep your novel during September and October, and get guidance for developing a story idea, creating complex characters, constructing a detailed plot outline (because outlines, like maps, get you where you want to go), and building your story’s world.

All of these tasks are popular with plotters (people who create detailed outlines and prepare for the NaNoWriMo experience). Of course, there are also pantsers, authors who prefer to write by the seats of their pants and plan very little.

On a related note, there are also rebelsm with or without a cause. Although it’s designed as National Novel Writing Month, nobody is going to kick you out of the clubhouse for writing your dissertation, a graphic novel, your memoir, or whatever else you feel called to write. You may have noticed that I write really long blog posts — some topping 3000 words! One year, I used November to write most of a dozen blog posts and several articles.

It’s not cheating, it’s rebelling. (Doesn’t that sound a lot cooler? You can just imagine the leather jacket and the motorcycle.)

At any point, you can upload your novel to the NaNoWriMo website and it will verify your word count. When — let’s be confident! “if” is so iffy! — you hit that 50,000 word count, you can say that you’ve “won” NaNoWriMo for the year.

Winners get a certificate and a banner for display on social media accounts or any other web real estate, and you can purchase a T-shirt and other merchandise in the site’s store. Whether you actually publish or not — even if you never show your novel to anyone else — you’ll still know that you took on a challenge (one that didn’t involve surviving a global plague or not strangling any relatives at the Thanksgiving table) and triumphed.

GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM YOUR NANOWRIMO FRIENDS

Paper Doll readers know that I am all about mutual support, collaboration, and accountability, and so is NaNoWriMo. Throughout November (and actually, all year), you can avail yourself of a variety of writing assistance and support:

Discussion Forums — for covering everything from navigating genres to developing storylines to filling plot holes and punching up dialogue
Writing Groups — for writers seeking camaraderie with people of specific geographical regions, writing styles, or needs. There’s a group for writers with ADHD, authors who write fanfiction, and one called “Rom-Com Writers with Procrastination.”
Regional Support — from as wide a swath as the whole of Africa to as narrow as a neighborhood near you, you can find people to share your journey
Writing Buddies — NaNoWriMo makes it easy to find writing partners with whom you can trade ideas (or tales of woe)

As a Paper Doll reader, you already know the importance of accountability, but these two posts may also suit you well on your NaNoWriMo path.

NaNoWriMo are offers both new and archived Pep Talks from professional writers. I mean, if Outlander author Diana Gabaldon, Alex Cross mystery creator James Patterson, young adult novelist John Green, and MacArthur Genius-winning sci-fi writer N.K. Jemison can’t inspire you to write, who can?

If you need more motivation, NaNoWriMo sponsors offer some amazing prizes for both participants and “winners” who meet the 50,000 word goal. These include discounts for writing software (including Scrivener, Pro Writing Aid, NovelPad, and Plottr), digital devices, and writing/publishing support, and more.

So, you’ve decided you’re going to do this. You register, you post a banner and share your goal on social media, and now you’re watching the clock tick down to November. Now what?

ORGANIZE YOUR WRITING TIME

Last week, I was approached by someone who wanted advice on carving out time to write while still working a full-time job. I was honest; there’s no way to have more than 24 hours in the day, and contrary to what gets thrown around on social media, we do not all have the same 24 hours.

If you’ve got a full-time job (or multiple part-time ones), are raising kids, have a chronic illness, are caring for one more senior parents, or some combination of any of the above, you’re going to have less disposable time (like a temporal disposable income) than a single, healthy twenty-something. Time is not going to freeze and make time for you to write. So, consider stacking a few of these options to achieve your writing goals.

Accept that you have to dedicate specific chunks of time to writing.

You may be a pantser, but that’s about figuring out what you’re going to write. There’s no way to achieve any writing goal, whether writing a novel or finishing a term paper, without deciding when you’re going to write.

If you’re the kind of person who has to feel motivation to do something, I’ve got news for you:

Action precedes motivation.

You have to do something before you’re ready. Your 50K-word novel doesn’t have to be perfect; it doesn’t have to be polished. It doesn’t even have to be good. Your November writing project can be a hot mess!

But here’s my favorite truth about writing. You can’t edit a blank page.

Your 50K word novel doesn't have to be perfect; it doesn't have to be polished. It doesn't even have to be good. Your writing project can be a hot mess! But here's my favorite truth about writing. You can't edit a blank page. Share on X

So feel free to write whenever you feel inspired. Nobody’s going to stop you from grabbing your notepad or keyboard or a quill pen (except, maybe the bird from which the feather was plucked). But schedule time to ensure that you have dependable time to write.

The same is true of organizing or anything else you do. Nobody will arrest you for jumping up during a commercial break in Grey’s Anatomy to load the dishwasher. But if you consider dinner tasks to include meal planning, cooking, clearing the table, and loading the dishwasher, and that “dinner isn’t finished until the dishes are done,” then you won’t ever have to dread walking into the kitchen.

Know what you’re going to write.

Even if you’re pantser and don’t know (or want to know) what you’re going to be writing on November 17th, let the back of your brain ruminate while you’re doing mindless tasks like bushing your teeth to get a sense of what you’ll be working on in your next writing session.

If you don’t know what you’re going to write, you will avoid sitting down to write. If you procrastinate and avoiding writing…you will not have written! Sad but true.

And if you do manage to sit down to write with no idea what you’re going to write about, you’ll get distracted. You do not want to get distracted, or you’ll end up with something like this:

Good, great, excellent pic.twitter.com/415p8iwDGH

— Writers’ HQ (@writers_hq) July 13, 2022

If you can’t stand the idea of knowing what you’re going to write ahead of time because you feel like that would mess with the mojo of your creative muse, there’s an alternative to an outline.

Grab a stack of index cards and write down key words or concepts: character’s names, key plot elements, essential conversational high points. Then stuff the carnds in a jar or a hat, and when you sit down to write, grab a card to use as a writing prompt. Yes, you’ll be writing out of order and will have a harder job later on, cutting and pasting, but you’ll be writing!

Block your time…and put some blocks on ice.

Start with my post Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity to re-familiarize yourself again time blocking.

Look at your schedule (and if you don’t have one, pull out a paper or digital calendar and hour-by-hour, day-by-day) and write down everything that’s already an obligation. That may be work, school, childcare, other-care, scheduled self-care and personal growth (like yoga or practicing a language or instrument).

What do you use, a to-do list or a schedule? pic.twitter.com/UEG2dH1ES0

— Sarah Arnold-Hall (@saraharnoldhall) September 28, 2022

Then write down all the things you do that aren’t ever scheduled, but which you have to do, from sleeping to grooming to housework and grocery shopping.

Identify blank spaces — if you have any. Those are your first options for writing time. If you’ve got blank space, you might be able to use it to write. (I say “might” because nobody can have all their waking time occupied. We need time to veg out, as I discussed in Toxic Productivity Part 2: How to Change Your Mindset. We can’t create without downtime.)

What if you don’t have any blank spaces? Consider whether you can remove some responsibilities for the duration of November. It’s about priorities. (This is true no matter what life goals you are trying to reach.)

Can you do one big grocery shop for the month and delegate the urgent milk-and-bread runs to another member of the household? (Or delegate all November grocery shopping and housework to someone whom you support in all of their goal achievement practices?)
Hire a babysitter for a handful of hours each week?
Are you willing to get up 45 minutes earlier, or stay up an hour later to get some writing time?
Can you cut out scrolling through TikTok of your November (or limit it to when you’re standing in line at the store or hanging out anyplace where that you couldn’t otherwise sit down and write)?
And, as a former broadcasting professional, I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but could you cut an hour of TV viewing out of your life?

When it comes down to it, there some things you have to do in November: eat, sleep, hydrate, groom, work for pay, take care of dependent humans, and vote. (Please, please remember to vote!) But for 30 days, can you vacuum less? Binge fewer shows?)

What if you have blank spaces, but they’re short or weird? It’s possible you have lots of writing opportunities, but none are expansive chunks of ninety minutes or two hours. That’s OK. If you have a good outline (that’s where being a plotter has the advantage over being a pantser), you don’t need long blocks of time.

If you have 15 minutes between when you get home from work and everyone else gets home, focus on just one small part of your outline. Are you stuck on the dialogue for a scene for a pivotal conversation between two characters? Play-act the conversation while you’re in the shower or while driving; it’ll help you get the language and tone right; when you’re getting close to how it should sound (and are out of the shower), use the voice memo on your phone or dictate it into a text to yourself to capture the wording. You can transcribe or copy it into your manuscript later.

Rejoice in exploring short writing blocks. It’s less time to dither or second-guess your writing. Focus on getting words on paper. Consider having 25 minutes (one whole glorious pomodoro) the perfect amount of time to work on two or three great paragraphs.

Can you get up 15 minutes earlier and skip 10 minutes of Twitter scrolling to get those 25 minutes? There’s one writing block.

Can you bring your lunch to work so that you use half your lunch hour for eating and relaxing and the other half for writing?

Can you convince your significant other to take over an evening task like laundry, just for November, to give you 25 minutes every evening?

Boom! There’s your writing time!

Let NaNoWriMo figure out your best writing schedule.

NaNoWriMo has a cute social media-style quiz for figuring out the best schedule for your personality and lifestyle. It’ll only take about thirty seconds, and may yield some insight.

Guard your writing time.

Several ago, I wrote R-E-S-P-E-C-T: The Organizing Secret for Working At Home, and many of the concepts apply to helping others in your space respect your time and boundaries. But there are also tips for respecting your own time, staying focused and on-task, and not letting other’s non-emegencies squeeze your time.

Consider what motivates you.

Obviously, you shouldn’t do NaNoWriMo if it doesn’t appeal to you. But before the month even gets started, make a list of all the reasons why you want to do it.

Whether it’s to get back at your 11th-grade English teacher who was dismissive of your creative efforts or to give you confidence that you can step out of your comfort zone, come up with ten big and small reasons you are inspired to write a 50,000 word draft of a novel.

Then write ten more reasons. And ten more after that!

Read one of those reasons aloud at the start of every day in November. Give yourself a fighting chance to overcome inertia and achieve your goal!

Currently stuck in nocturnal. Where are you? pic.twitter.com/9ppvAultN0

— Writers’ HQ (@writers_hq) January 31, 2020

Track Your Progress

Every time I write about NaNoWriMo, I like to share David Seah’s Word Counting Calendar. Print out the black-and-white or color versions. Every day that you write, just log your total word count and then color in the appropriate boxes.

Post the calendar near your writing space to keep you motivated as you progress toward your goal.

EMBRACE THESE RESOURCES

You could write a book (or several) about all the resources available for supporting a writing project. Here are just a few classics and new-for-2022 to help you organize your thoughts, your research, your writing, and your November.

10 Steps to Get Started with Scrivener for NaNoWriMo — Updated for 2022, this list from the ultimate writer’s tool walks you through how to make the software serve your NaNo needs.

Your Essential Guide to Completing NaNoWriMo in Evernote — As an Evernote Expert, I’m constantly finding (and sharing) new ways to use Evernote to support work and personal goals. Anthony Bartlett has gathered some great advice, including linking to essential Evernote templates for creating character profiles, plotting your novel, story premises, and 3-act structures.

12 Creative Writing Templates for Planning Your Novel — Speaking of templates, Forrest Dylan Bryant walks you through a dozen templates, from those listed above to writing trackers to plot and character templates. Don’t reinvent the wheel when you can use Evernote templates to support your writing and story development.

A Novel Strategy: How to Organize Big Writing Projects — Speaking of Forrest, about five years ago, he wrote this nifty post about how to use Evernote to organize your notes for writing a novel.

(P.S. Combining all of the info above, if you’re thinking of using Scrivener, know that you can import your Evernote notes into Scrivener and see your notes and writing area side-by-side. Cool beans!)

What is NaNoWriMo? And How to Win in 2022 — Updated every year, this masterful post from Reedsy has dozens of tips for managing your time, developing your writing ear, and keeping up your motivation.

Write a 50,000-Word Pulp Novel Before Breakfast: My easy no-outline way of writing short novels in four weeks by Amethyst Qu

How to Survive NaNoWriMo in 2022: 17 Top Tips for Success — Self-Publishing School offers a list of winning habits to help make the most of your November.

Although I don’t write about NaNoWriMo every year, there are several posts in the vault, including those from 2017, where I created NaNoWriMoMo and wrote advice for organizing yourself for NaNoWriMo every single Monday of that November. Just type “NaNoWriMo” into the search sidebar on the left of this site to find them.

Whatever you choose to do with the coming month, I hope you take time to plan and organize to help your dreams come true.

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Archive for ‘Time Management’ Category

Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit

WORK AS HOBBY: OVERCOME PROCRASTINATION WITH A MINDSET SHIFT

A DIFFERENT KIND OF BACKUP

THE WORK IS NOT ENOUGH

THE 2023 TASK MANAGEMENT AND TIME BLOCKING VIRTUAL SUMMIT

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EFFICIENCY VS. EFFECTIVENESS

PLANNING AND PREPARATION

PRIORITIZING

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GO WITH THE FLOW! (The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook)

DO IT TODAY

PRODUCTIVITY FOR HOW YOU’RE WIRED

CREATING ORDER AMONG CHAOS

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Paper Doll’s Guide to Picking the Right Paper Planner

WHY USE A PAPER PLANNER?

Learning Curve

Control vs. Convenience

Cost

Privacy vs. Searchability

Visual vs. Visual+Tactile

WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN PICKING A PAPER PLANNER

Page Design

Planner Design

PLANNER FORMATS: FOR WHOM ARE THEY REALLY DESIGNED?

Basic Planners

“Fancy” Planners

The Animal Planners

Life Coach/Celebrity Planners

DO IT YOURSELF PLANNERS

Specialty Planners

WHAT ABOUT A HYBRID PLANNING SYSTEM?

HOW CAN YOU MAKE A PAPER PLANNER WORK FOR YOU?

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Organize Your Writing Time for NaNoWriMo 2022

WHAT THE HECK IS NANOWRIMO?

GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM YOUR NANOWRIMO FRIENDS

ORGANIZE YOUR WRITING TIME

Accept that you have to dedicate specific chunks of time to writing.

Know what you’re going to write.

Block your time…and put some blocks on ice.

Let NaNoWriMo figure out your best writing schedule.

Guard your writing time.

Consider what motivates you.

Track Your Progress

EMBRACE THESE RESOURCES

Paper Doll Post:

Like this: