michellesaul

My New Thing I Tried In August: Writing Schedule

Since the start of the year I have committed myself to the goal of writing 500 words a day. Admittedly, this goal started falling apart around the same time our world did and I’ve been struggling to get back to it. So this month, instead of committing to 500 words a day, I decided to commit myself to simply writing everyday, with one day being devoted to typing up my novel (which is in a few less pieces as of this post).

So I broke out a blank sheet of paper, a pencil, a ruler, my mini highlighters, and a black marker and went about making my schedule. I am a visual person and I use colors as a way to see what my day will look like at a quick glance. So of course, this schedule was going to be color coded! As you can see, purple was for my novel writing days, green was for my free write days, yellow was for my blog writing days, blue was for the day my blog posts got posted, orange was my typing days, and the lone pink day was my day off from writing because it was my birthday and my fiancee and I celebrated it at Universal Studios. So with everything color coded and mapped out, I was set up for success! … Except it didn’t quite work out that well.

Honestly, I think I would have had more success with this schedule if I had hung it up somewhere to see. I kept it in my planner or in a notebook I use for novel writing, which meant it could easily be moved out of sight if I needed to access a page in either one. So with it out of sight, it was easy for it to be out of mind. I probably had the most success with my typing days, but my writing days weren’t as successful. However, on the days I did write, I got a lot done because I was focused on only working on one thing. Instead of being torn between typing my novel or writing it or working on blog posts, I knew what needed to be accomplished that day and was able to get more writing done as a result. So in that sense, the writing schedule was a success.

I do think that I will try this method again in September because I did find it helpful. The error was in not putting it somewhere that was easy to see and easy to keep in mind. So I won’t count this out as effective just yet because user error played a big role in how ineffective it was (shame on me).

So what do you guys think of the idea of a writing schedule? Would you find this effective or ineffective for you? Do you have anything similar to this that has worked for you? I would love to know! I hope everyone has a productive week!

Advertisement

26 comments

      • I understand. I think digital is great for people who can’t always write things down for some reason and is great for people who might need to listen to something because they can’t see as well as they used to. But since I’m still on the younger side, those aspects of digital organization are lost on me. I will handwrite things for as long as I can!

        Liked by 1 person

      • I’ve always been told I’m an old soul, so maybe that’s where it stems from. Plus I’ve noticed with technology comes stress and anxiety and as someone who always seems to be stressed and suffers from anxiety, I don’t want to add to it. And it’s easier to carry around a planner than a laptop! So that’s just some of my reasons for preferring handwriting things as opposed to having them digital.

        Liked by 1 person

    • Welcome! Thank you so much for following and commenting!

      I have found that creating a more focused schedule for myself helps ease some of the writing related anxiety I feel. It’s easy, at least for me, to become overwhelmed by all the different writing I do, but this helps ease that. I hope it works well for you!

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s