The Importance of Great Time Keeping

From Writerslife.org:

There are lots of skills that you need to perfect as a writer. Finding inspiration, staying motivated, and learning about the craft are just some of them. Being great at timekeeping is another.

While it may seem that being a great timekeeper is something only necessary for the office workers of the world, actually there is so much more than just arriving at work on time that a writer needs to think about. Learning how to manage your time appropriately will be seriously beneficial when it comes to your writing progress.

Here's why:

Meeting deadlines

If you are a freelance writer, you’ll know all about the importance of meeting deadlines. Without doing so, you’ll quickly lose clients and gain a reputation for being unprofessional. But meeting deadlines also applies to fiction writers too. This could be anything from competition deadlines, deadlines from your publisher or simply deadlines you have set yourself - making sure that you are organized enough to meet these is so important to your writing career.

Goal setting

Every writer knows how important it is to set goals. Whatever kind of writing project you are working on, by making sure that you have targets and set timeframes within which to achieve those goals is so important. Doing so will keep you motivated and feeling as though you are moving forward and making progress with your writing. Without this, it’s so easy to make excuses, start procrastinating and putting your writing on the back burner until it eventually drops off your to-do list altogether.

Making time to write

Excellent timekeeping will help free up more of your time to write. If you have other commitments (and who doesn’t?) being able to manage your time well will become invaluable. The more productive you can be in your day to day life the easier it will be to find slots where you can sit down and get some precious writing time in.

Feeling professional and organized

Being a writer is fantastic, but you want to feel like you have a proper job and treat yourself and your business with respect and professionalism. Make sure you set your alarm, get up and have an official time that you start work for the day. Have working hours (they can be flexible to suit you of course) and stick to them. Without doing so you could find you get distracted by other things that need doing and suddenly the day will have passed you by, and you’ll have achieved so much less than you wanted to.

Being a good writer may seem all arty and freeing on the surface, but it actually requires a great deal of organization, dedication and is pretty time-consuming too! So the sooner writers learn to pay attention to their timekeeping and treat it with the importance it deserves the more productive, creative and satisfying each writing day will be.

I still haven't quite been on a deadline, but this past weekend, I did set out to come to the conclusion of my WIP and did so by Sunday. Now the others a t work who I let read the initially unfinished draft are eager to read the rest and will be able to do so soon. I can't wait to see what they think of the ending. Of course I will need to  eventually do some polishing of the manuscript, but I d feel I reached the ending I set out to achieve. So in some ways I have been setting myself a deadline and have been making more time to write. It was a goal I had set for this particular time and work. Now my goal is to find a title. I have some written down for consideration and have just received some suggestions from one of those I let read my WIP. He's been trying to help me find the title.

And in some ways, I am starting to feel a little professional.

Now, I'm trying to decide what to do next.

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