Scott Oldford Site

Tag: productivity tips

  • 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!

  • Best Demonstrated Practices: Seasoned Writers Share Their Strategies for Success

    Best Demonstrated Practices: Seasoned Writers Share Their Strategies for Success

    Recently, I wrote an article for a corporate newsletter that focused on BDPs, or best demonstrated practices, for sales professionals.

    Several seasoned veterans in the field shared their most successful strategies for sealing the deal. Trial and error was key, as it turned out. Sometimes they’d try one tactic, only to realize that it wasn’t working very well, so they’d tinker with it or even switch to something else. When that second effort worked better, they adopted it. And they shared their proven strategies with others in their corporations — spreading the wealth, in effect.

    As writers and editors, most of us who have been doing this for a while have also developed some strategies that help us get the job done. We might use the corporate-speak phrase “best demonstrated practices,” but the concept is essentially the same.

    The strategies below — BDPs — help these writers succeed, and they might help you, too. And who doesn’t want to succeed at what you love doing?

    Get up from your desk to do your thinking

    Staring at your computer monitor, with that tyrant of a blinking cursor, can be the death of great ideas. So it’s time to step away from the screen, folks. Often, getting a change of scenery is a great way to get your ideas flowing.

    And you might not even have go that far away.

    GiGi Rose, a writer based in Nashville, Tennessee, calls herself a shower thinker. “A shower helps get my ideas moving. No pressure to write, just to think,” she says.

    Food writer and blogger Susan Williams is a shower thinker, too. “I always thought that was a bit odd, but it seems to be where ideas come best,” says Williams. “It’s like everything that’s a few layers deep rises to the surface there.”

    Make technology your friend

    Email can be a godsend. It can also pile up in your inbox and taunt you. (Just me? Nah, I didn’t think so.) Fortunately, you can make technology work for you, rather than against you.

    Liza Graves, co-founder of the website Style Blueprint, found help for dealing with mountains of email in an email management program called SaneBox. The program pulls emails that don’t seem urgent or perhaps as relevant into a separate folder dubbed the @SaneLater folder. The emails that get shunted into the @SaneLater folder get summarized in a daily email digest that arrives each afternoon, so users can check to see if they missed anything.

    “It’s not 100 percent, but it helps,” says Graves, adding that she likes not having lots of folders to check.

    Jennifer Dunn, writer and chief of content for TaxJar, is a big fan of the web-based project management program Trello. Trello enables users to create boards full of lists and tasks, then customize the due dates, make checklists and upload relevant files, among other features. The program also sends notifications to users so they don’t miss anything.

    Dunn estimates that she’s been using the program for about two years — ever since her company strongly encouraged her to give it a try. “I got thrown in feet first and fell in love,” she says. “I use it for everything.”

    Other useful apps and programs that many writers have turned for help in using technology to help them manage their work include Remember the Milk (Me! What did I ever do before I found this app?), insight.ly and Freshbooks, which many freelancers swear by for invoicing.

    Give yourself a break

    There should be no guilt in taking a break, whether it’s for an hour-long exercise class at the gym or for an entire day of the week. The truth is, all work and no rest can burn out a writer.

    You might even discover some new ideas that bubble to the surface when you’re not trying so hard.

    When she was working as a “solopreneur,” JoAnn Takasaki, a writer in Houston, Texas, realized that she was working all the time, including nights and weekends, and decided to take action. “I put aside Wednesday for my personal day,” she says. That’s the day when she could head to the grocery store at 10 a.m. if she felt like it, or tackle other personal tasks.

    Marketing professional Phyllis Nichols is a big fan of taking a walk. “Nothing helps me focus better,” she says. “I don’t listen to music. Sometimes, a podcast, but usually (just) quiet. My brain always gives me some great ideas when I introduce some quiet time and let it help.”

    Rose also believes in the value of taking a break and often seeks out her favorite spot in her house, bringing along her coffee mug. “I believe in making yourself a sanctuary,” she says. “And I either talk to myself out loud or read what I have written out loud. My little quirks keep me focused and centered. And they help me enjoy what I am doing.”

    You might also experiment with taking short breaks during your workday. A method called the Pomodoro Technique is helpful for writer and editor Rebecca Schiller. The technique calls for 25-minute writing sessions, with short breaks in between. “I make mine longer and take a 15 minute break,” she says.  

    What works for you?

    You might be able to adapt one of these best demonstrated practices to your own writing business. Or maybe you have developed a surefire winning strategy of our own, maybe a way that you strategically schedule your day or manage your income and expenses.

    Please share your best BDPs with us!