How to finally start finishing things? All those ideas, unfinished stories or drafts, abandoned books, projects that never saw the light of day, half-baked essays, bits of future poems, unwritten songs, brushes and canvases, harmonicas and guitars collecting dust in the attic. It cripples us — all of us — from time to time. One of my writing friends recently asked our group to share some ammo for battle against commitment and consistency issues. Here is what I answered.
Frankly, I’m a mess now when it comes to schedule and self-organization. Still, I have some tools and tricks that have worked for me before and helped me be on the top of my game and juggle day time job, writing gig, creating and launching my freelance website, writing for the blog, writing short stories, getting into writing workshop series and having a newborn in the house. During the workshops, the curriculum pretty much shaped my writing schedule, which is a blessing and a curse. Now, I’m trying to get back on track, so these are the things that I’m going to use myself.
Monthly, weekly and daily objectives
I have found monthly plans hard to use — not to mention yearly plans, I’m getting there — but I can lay out the projects I’ll be working on in the upcoming month. This way I can prioritize things since it’s impractical to list more than 3-5 big projects.
Then, every Sunday, I’d sit down and create daily plans, things I plan to do each day of the week, knowing my schedule and life situation this week. I try to be reasonable but optimistic and plan a bit more than I can chew, so I’ll stretch with time. It doesn’t have to be big: finishing a book I’m reading can go there as well as sending out short story pitches to journals. If a task has multiple steps or I can’t do it in one sitting, I’ll break it down between several days.
I’ve found that “writing a killer script” is a bit too much, and things like that can go on the list of projects I’m working on this month. But doing research or working on a vomit draft can be a task or a series of tasks that I will cross off my list in the evening.
Weekly and monthly reviews
Every Sunday, before planning the next week, I’ll go over the previous week to see if I finished everything and where I need to step it up. It’s never happened to me, but it’s theoretically possible to do all of planned things, and that would mean that I probably need to include more stuff in my next week’s plan.
It’s also wise to think about what I can do to plan better and work better. Maybe there is inner resistance I can work on, an obstacle I can think about overcoming, or some flaws in the way I approach things. Sometimes changing the order of tasks within the day can make all the difference.
Satisfaction tracker
It can be life-changing in some cases, but it’s undoubtedly a great tool to find the best process of scheduling your day and fine-tune it later. Every evening I’d write everything I’ve been doing that day with approximate timing. And I’d rate the day based on my gut feeling: how would I like every day of my life to be like that?
You can come up with a rating that is comfortable for you. I use the scale from -2 (“make it stop!”) to 2 (“turn on the Groundhog Day mode”), with 0 being a typical neutral day. It takes a lot to get used to, and also, you will need to stick to this practice for at least a month to have workable data, but for me, it’s always worth it.
To simplify things, you can use Excel or Google Sheets and put in columns to track habits you want to adopt and habits you want to change. So one day will be a row with checkboxes, a cell with the description of a day and maybe some notes. After a while, you will see how doing or not doing some things makes you feel at the end of a day, and whether some things give you energy or drain it.
Thorough time tracking
It’s a micromanagement technique, and I use it as a tool to get into a super-productive mode sometimes, but I’ve found great insights into my life and routine while doing this exercise for a week or two. It’s cumbersome and tedious but practical and informative. It’s simple: I write down everything I do and time it. Including bathroom breaks, brushing my teeth, commuting, daydreaming, and pleasuring myself. I time everything.
After a week, I like to group things into categories: what’s work, what’s valuable studies, what’s pure entertainment, what’s miscellaneous stuff like taking a shower or shaving my head. Then I can see what’s going on during my day and how little things can pile up and turn into hours. Having that information can help me to make all kinds of decisions. It also informs good planning because now I know how much time I can realistically use.
Dealing with distractions
I procrastinate a lot. My wife says she envies my self-discipline, but I think I’m a mess. Yeah, I can get up at 5 AM or talk myself into eating healthy because it’s good for me, but I have trouble doing important stuff and doing it consistently. These workbooks from the Australian Center of Clinical Interventions were a tremendous help in understanding the roots of my procrastination and dealing with it. t’s also a positive thought that an Australian government is concerned with things like that.
But the single most effective tactical tool for me is the Ten Minutes Rule. When I feel the craving to procrastinate in any way (for example, cleaning instead of writing), I say to myself, “OK, I will do that in ten minutes if I still want to. Now I’ll sit for ten minutes and observe this craving.” If I still want to clean instead of writing in ten minutes, I’ll do that. But it never happened to me.
What if I get stuck?
Journaling, listening to music, reading good literature, watching great shows or movies, playing music, going for a walk. These are some things that I used in the past. All of them can be effective, but lately, I’ve been experimenting with a new approach that works surprisingly well.
My physics teacher in the university was an eccentric old lady, and she had a habit of teasing our brains and messing with us. One time she stormed in the auditorium and blurted out the question like it was the single most crucial thing that tortured her the whole week: “What’s the best way to get yourself out of the corner?” We threw at her everything from obvious “backing up” to New Age semi-creative “flying away.” She looked at us like a happy mother canard must be watching her ducklings fly away and told us her version: “Never get into one.”
I thought about it for a long time, fought with it, but the answer has stuck with me. Now I start to understand what my teacher meant. I put myself into the corner, thinking, “I should come up with the best twist” or “I need to figure out the best conflict.” And I can stop doing that. If the twist is tough, I can move to something else and come back to it later. If the conflict doesn’t come to me, I can turn to other design parts. Or I can grab a version that I have right now and run with it, believing that I will find a better one down the road.
It now strangely coincides with me learning about ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) that puts a big emphasis on the willingness to act in the presence of physical or emotional pain instead of fighting it and trying to get rid of it. In ACT’s terms, it’s not that I can’t move forward with imperfect design. I’m not willing to. And that’s within my power to say: “Hmm, that conflict isn’t coming along, but I’m curious to see what will happen if I continue to work anyway.” That approach is helping me to overcome perfectionism and fear, as well as moodiness and grandiose expectations.