Scott Oldford Site

Tag: be more productive

  • Practice Good Writing Habits With Help From Habitica

    Practice Good Writing Habits With Help From Habitica

    Most writers don’t crank out 10,000 words a day.

    Most writers struggle to find the time, energy and discipline to write.

    This productivity tool will catapult you toward your writing goals in the best way possible: By gamifying your life.

    Meet Habitica.

    Habitica, formerly HabitRPG, is a free online game that revolves around you and your productivity in life.

    It rewards you for achieving the goals you set.

    It punishes you for skipping daily chores or tasks you entered.

    And it has built-in community features that help you stay accountable.

    How Habitica works

    When you sign up for the game, you  create an avatar. You can choose skin color, hair style, glasses, background and even a wheelchair if you’re so inclined.

    Now, armed with your avatar, you begin to define your goals.

    There are three types of goals: habits, dailies, and to-dos.

    1. Habits: Create a habit when you’re trying to encourage yourself to do an activity on a loose schedule. You can hit the habit’s plus button to give yourself a reward.
    1. Dailies: These tasks must be completed every day. If you miss a daily, you will be penalized by losing health points (HP). Don’t worry, though — there are ways to heal, especially by leveling up.
    1. To-Dos: This is the home of your non-daily tasks, which may or may not have a deadline.

    When you complete your habit, check off a daily or complete a task, you will be rewarded with experience points (XP). The more XP you have, the closer you are to leveling up. The higher your level, the more you get when you complete a task or daily, and so on.

    There are more features, which unlock when you reach level 10, but the basics remain the same: You get rewarded for doing what you consider worthy, and penalized when you shirk your duties.

    Habitica’s armor, weapons and other rewards

    When you complete a task, you receive some in-game money. That money can be spent on getting better armor and weapons, which enhance your in-game abilities.

    But.

    If rewards like armor and weapons don’t make you drool, you can define your own awards and set their prices.

    For example:

    • 10 gold coins for taking a 10-minute break.
    • 25 gold coins for writing at a cafe instead of at home.
    • 50 gold coins for half an hour of reading whatever you want.
    • 100 gold coins for buying a book off your Amazon Wishlist.

    Guilds and groups

    Form an accountability group with your friends, and fight monsters together! Each task you complete will harm the monster, and any incomplete dailies will hurt not only you, but the rest of your team as well.

    Talk about peer pressure!

    Join the Wordsmiths or Writers guild, and pick up some accountability and inspiration challenges! The Wordsmiths guild has an “Accountability Club”, where you declare your weekly goal before the entire group, and a week later report back on how well you did. Follow through the challenge for an entire month (even if you don’t achieve your set goals), and you might win some in-game gems, as well, for those extra-special prizes!

    Socializing on Habitica adds a whole new aspect to the game, and it’s much more fun than playing alone. (Though the latter is definitely an option, if you’re so inclined.)

    Recommended settings

    Include “Writing” as a habit you want to encourage. Click the plus button whenever you manage to write, and click the minus button if you haven’t written all day. Habitica will track for you how many times you’ve clicked each button.

    Include “Procrastination” as a habit you wish to root out. Every day you procrastinate, hit the minus button to (moderately) punish yourself.

    Set yourself a daily writing task of X words, but keep it sane and doable.See how long you can keep a positive streak — Habitica tracks that, too!

    Join the Wordsmiths or Writers guild, and browse their challenges.

    Create tasks for special writing milestones: completing 10k words of your novel, 20k words, and so on. There are challenges such as the Wordsmiths’ “Writing Across Middle Earth” that help you set such goals in a creative, fun way.

    Back from a long break? Try the “Write, Kid!” challenge to get you back into the habit of writing.

    Here’s the caveat

    It’s tempting to start managing your entire life on Habitica. It helps to keep your head clear about your goals and dailies.

    But.

    Many people report that when they track everything in Habitica, writing becomes a secondary goal and suffers for it. Because playing Habitica upgrades the priority of whatever it is you have to do — for example, cleaning the kitchen — you will find yourself doing all the cleaning dailies in time, but writing less.

    Keep Habitica dedicated to the things that really matter: writing, editing, and getting published.

    Just don’t forget to eat simply because there’s no daily for it!

    Habitica has turned my life into one big game, one in which I’m definitely the winner.

    I thought I was productive before I tried it. Now I know what true productivity means. With a writing habit, a daily word count, and some overall writing goals, I’m working on my novel more than I had in the last three months put together.

    May it help you write more, write better and write true. See you there!

  • Forget Your Endless To-Do List: Try Time Blocking Instead

    Forget Your Endless To-Do List: Try Time Blocking Instead

    Are you the kind of writer who’s always worried about meeting deadlines?

    Do you begin every day with a to-do list and end it with only half of the items done? Do you get stuck working late, staying up all night with a draft or sending apology notes to editors?

    At least half of being a successful freelance writer is time management.

    When you work in a career that pays by the project instead of by the hour, it’s to your advantage to maximize those hours and complete as much work as you can. It’s also good to get in the habit of meeting your deadlines, avoiding all-nighters and maintaining a work-life balance — especially if you plan on freelancing for the long haul.

    I’ve definitely done my share of working late, worrying about deadlines and writing overly ambitious to-do lists.

    But as I became a more experienced freelancer, I started learning how to time-block my freelance work: that is, to know not only what I’m going to do, but when I’m going to do it and how long it will take me.

    Time blocking is a strategy often attributed to professor and author Cal Newport, although similar elements show up in productivity systems like Bullet Journaling or Getting Things Done. I started time blocking without really knowing what it was called, but it changed the way I scheduled and completed my freelance work — and it definitely helped me earn more money.

    How long does it take to write 1,000 words?

    I have 90 minutes in which to write this piece. I think it will take me closer to 60 minutes, but I added a 30-minute buffer just in case.

    I can’t go longer than 90 minutes, because I have an interview scheduled with a source that will take between 45 and 60 minutes, and after that I need to prep and send some invoices and do one more email pass, and then it’s the end of my workday.

    That’s how time blocking works.

    I’ve known since the beginning of April that I would write this piece on either Monday, April 24 or Tuesday, April 25, so I could make sure to have it done before its deadline of Wednesday, April 26.

    I’ve known since last week that I would write it on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 25. Today, I looked at my to-do list and decided that I would give myself between 1:30 and 3:00 p.m. to get it done.

    How do I know that it’ll take me between 60 and 90 minutes to write this 1,000-word post?

    Because I’ve been writing these kinds of posts for years now. I know that, once my research and outlines are assembled, I can write roughly 500–600 words in 30 minutes. Writing twice as many words should take about an hour, but longer pieces also require a bit more structure, which means I might need a little more than an hour to get everything done.

    If you’re new to freelancing, you might not yet know how long it takes you to write 500 words. You might not know how much prep work is required before you can sit down and write a piece like this, or interview a source, or draft a pitch, or send an invoice.

    I have the advantage of experience here — but no matter where you are in your freelance career, you can start figuring out how much time your work actually takes to complete.

    The three elements of time-blocking

    My to-do list is currently scheduled through the end of May — which means I have a spreadsheet that lists every item I need to complete in May, on the day I plan to complete it. (As a reminder: I’m writing this post on April 25.) As the work gets closer, I’ll start planning the time at which each task will get completed as well.

    Some people time block by literally setting appointments on their calendar. I used to write time and duration notes next to every item on my to-do list (“The Write Life: 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m.”) but by this point I can do a lot of my time blocking in my head because I know my typical daily routine. I check email from 9 a.m. to 9:20 a.m., I write two short pieces for The Billfold between 9:20 a.m. and 11 a.m., and so on.

    I know that I need to schedule easy-to-complete administrative tasks, like sending invoices, between labor-intensive tasks like writing, researching and interviewing. This gives my brain a much-needed break and still allows me to get things done.

    Time-blocking also helps me know how much work I can take on, which helps me maximize my income. Work expands to fill the time allowed, as the saying goes — and if you’re a freelancer it’s really easy to let that work expand to the point that it prevents you from taking on more income-producing gigs.

    Right now I’m working on a large, heavily researched project that will come due on May 15. If I didn’t time-block that project into daily segments lasting between one and two hours, I could easily tell myself that my schedule was full; that I didn’t have time to write this article for The Write Life or to pitch a new client.

    That’s a money-losing move on my part.

    But back to that big project for a minute. When I divide the project into individual time-blocked segments, I don’t label those segments “work on big project.” I write “research and draft questions to ask sources” or “write introduction and methodology section.”

    Time-blocking only works when you combine three key elements: what you need to do, when you’re going to do it, and how long you have to get it done.

    Rescheduling and time-swapping

    Time blocking is not a perfect system.

    Maybe a source asks to reschedule the interview, maybe an editor asks for some extra revisions or maybe you start coming down with a cold. Maybe you sit in front of your laptop and realize you don’t know what you want to write yet, or maybe you write an entire piece based on your carefully-planned outline and then decide to throw it out and start over.

    So yeah, life happens. Just because I plan to write a specific piece between 1:30 and 3 on Tuesday afternoon doesn’t mean that something won’t happen on Tuesday morning to throw everything else off schedule.

    But the great thing about time-blocking is that you can look at your to-do list and your calendar and say “Okay, I didn’t get this done. Where else will it fit?”

    Let’s say something came up and I wasn’t able to write this piece today. My deadline is actually tomorrow, which means I have a full day in which to solve this problem. If I need 60–90 minutes to get this done, I could either work late this evening, reschedule some of the administrative work I had planned to complete tomorrow or push back the piece I had scheduled to write tomorrow afternoon.

    I could also do a time swap: if my 90 minutes got cut down to 30 minutes, for example, I could look ahead on my to-do list, find a 30-minute task that I had planned to complete tomorrow, and get it done right now.

    Then I’d have 30 minutes free for tomorrow, and if I also planned to work 30 minutes late tomorrow, I’d get my 60 minutes back and complete my piece by the deadline.

    So that’s how time-blocking works.

    Yes, it takes time to time block, so you’ll want to schedule that work into your calendar. (I set aside 60–90 minutes at the end of each month to plan the next one.) But if you can master the art of knowing how long it takes to complete something, you can start planning your freelance day to hit your deadlines, clear your to-do lists, and maximize both your time and your income.

    Are you going to try time-blocking? If you’ve tried it before — or if you’re a veteran time-blocker — what tips and advice do you have?

  • 3 Ways to Be More Productive When You Sit Down to Write

    3 Ways to Be More Productive When You Sit Down to Write

    When I started freelancing back in 2010, all I knew was that making money online as a writer and editor was possible, and I’d be able to figure it out along the way.

    While I certainly had my share of challenges (and a few awesome resources like The Write Life to help me out), I did have one thing going for me: A journalism degree. Because of my journalism coursework, I knew how to write well and quickly.

    Knowing how to “write fast” makes a huge difference in your ability to earn more income. As a writer, you don’t get paid for your ideas; you get paid for the content you produce.

    If you can become more efficient at the actual craft of writing, you’ll be able to produce more in the same amount of time, which means you’ve got the potential to earn more.

    So how can you become the blazing-fast writer with the healthier bottom line?

    1. Learn to touch type

    The average person can type 36 words per minute (WPM) on a regular keyboard. The average person who can touch type — type without looking at the letters on the keyboard — can do an average 58 WPM. That’s nearly twice as fast!

    Here’s the thing: It’s not unthinkable that you could double the touch-type average. On a slow day, my typing speed is 112 WPM. Getting words from my head through my fingers and onto the screen is no longer a limiting factor in my productivity.

    In fact, it’s not that uncommon for me to write 1,000 words in 20 minutes or less when I’m familiar with the subject matter.

    Just think about what your effective hourly rate would be if you could charge a flat fee for each of two or three 1,000-word posts that took you an hour in total to write.

    Take the free typing test at TypingTest.com and find out how you stack up. Then, look for opportunities to increase your typing speed. Free training is available online, including at the test website.

    When you’re away from your keyboard, use any mental down-time — like when you’re sitting at a traffic light, waiting in line, or stuck in a meeting — to practice typing. Song lyrics, snippets of conversations (real or imagined), even your mental to-do list can be discretely tapped out on an imaginary keyboard, or invisibly “typed” in your mind.

    2. Use outlines

    Outlines are hands-down one of my most important productivity tools. They’re taught in English class for a reason: Developing an outline is a tremendously efficient way to write.

    Even though it might seem like it’s a waste of time, making an outline sets you up to write incredibly more quickly when the time comes.

    Even if you’re just jotting down three bullet points on a topic you know well, having an outline will save you all kinds of time when you’re doing the actual writing.

    Think about it: How long would it take you to come up with a 900-word blog post if you had to sit down and type it from the beginning, without making any notes to yourself? Maybe an hour?

    Now imagine how long it would take you to sit down and write 900 words if you already had a two-sentence overview and three bullet points with one or two sentences to explain or expand each one. Much faster, right?

    Once you’ve drafted an outline, you already know what you’re going to write about and you’re already pretty familiar with the subject matter because you’ve already researched it (or you specialize in that niche).

    You’ve effectively set yourself up to blaze through the assignment.

    The time it takes to sketch out an outline plus the time it takes to write it up is almost always less time than if you’d sat down and written the whole thing from scratch.

    3. Leave clues for yourself

    Many of us go into freelancing for the flexibility. Flexibility is great — it’s one of the biggest perks of being a freelance writer — but it also comes with the understanding that you won’t necessarily have six to eight uninterrupted hours for working each day.

    The trouble is, interruptions and irregular working hours can completely kill your productivity if you don’t handle them properly.

    The way I deal with my on-again, off-again work schedule is to leave myself clues when I leave my keyboard.

    If I’m wrapping up for the day, I jot down the first two or three things I need to do when I get back to work. If I’m leaving an outline unfinished, I’ll make notes at the bottom of the document about what I need to research next. If I’m in the middle of typing up an article, I don’t need to do anything because I’ve got my outline to tell me where to pick up.

    Whether it’s a comment in a Google Doc, a short “do this next” list, or highlights on the scratch pad where you brainstorm, plan your next steps before stepping away from any task.

    Do it while you’re already in the thick of the project, while the next steps are pretty obvious.

    Then, when you come back to work, you won’t waste time getting reacquainted and then figuring out what to do next. You already figured it out for yourself!

    What’s your favorite strategy for being more efficient as a writer?