Posts tagged time

Welcome to the third and last of the series of free videos on “Finding the Time to Write”.

If you want more information on this topic, check out http://www.learningcreators.com/buyvideoa.htm. There you’ll find a 2 DVD home study course on this topic.

Now so far, we’ve covered the three areas that you need to focus on in order to “Find the Time to Write”.  They form what I’ve called the Work Equation. Unless you balance them, you’ll never find the time to write your book. You’ll just go from one problem to another.  You fix one problem and you find another reason not to write. Just because it’s a series of excuses doesn’t mean it’s your fault. It just means you haven’t solved the whole problem.

Next, we covered the solutions to the whole issue. This is what we need to do in those three areas in order to ensure that we solve the whole problem.

We need to:

• Motivate ourselves – and keep our motivation up
• Find 4 hours of time per week as a minimum

And

• Make it as quick and easy as we can to write

Motivate, Find the Time, Use a System. Do one and the problem will reoccur. Do all three and you’ll succeed.

Cool.

Now today, I’m going to give you three tips — one in each area — to help you create your own system. By the way, these are different tips from those in the DVD workshop.

So let’s get started.

First off, you need to build your desire to write your book. To do that you need to motivate yourself just like you would for any other employee. And then, you need to sustain that motivation.

Picking the best motivation involves a number of models that I frankly don’t have time to show you in 5 minutes. In our two DVD course, we can go through the most important but in 5 minutes, there’s just not enough time. Sorry.

So my tip, instead, is going to focus on how to sustain your motivation. How to actually motivate you after you’ve chosen your motivations.

All of the windows operating systems – XP, Vista, and 7 can replace the picture you use behind your desktop. With Vista and 7, you can use a slide show. With XP, you need a tool you can download from Microsoft.  If you use a Mac, you can also do a slide show.

Find yourself pictures that illustrate why you are writing your book. Find pictures that illustrate what is motivating you. Pictures that will inspire you. Then use a picture manipulation tool — Paint will even do the job — and add a phrase or sentence to drive the point home.

Then all you need to do is add the pictures as a rotating slideshow desktop.

Whenever you aren’t taking up the whole desktop with a program, you’ll see the reasons for writing. Even if you only see a part of the picture, it’ll help to focus your mind on your motivations to write a book.

Now the second part of the solution is that you need to find the time to write.

So how much time are you going to need?

At your most efficient, you can expect to write about 5,000 words in one morning.  Now for most people, that’s also the most you can reasonably expect to write in a day. That means that for a 100-page book you’re going to need about five writing days or five four-hour blocks of time to write. Plus you’ll need a little bit for research and planning. But that you can squeeze in anywhere. We’re talking an hour here, an hour there.

Once you’ve eliminated all the time you waste, you may find that you still can’t get enough time to write a book. So try hiring a temporary worker to take on one of your tasks. Writing your book is presumably worth more than the ten or twenty bucks you’ll spend on getting your lawn cut. Or on babysitting or on cleaning the living room. Check out your local high school. They sometimes have students who are looking for spending money. Or even work-terms. Having a research assistant for free, may help you finish your book sooner.

The third part of the solution is a little more complex. It’s the system you use to write. It’s more complex because it includes the writing processes but also your environment and your work habits.

Your environment has a major effect on how fast you can write. But sometimes it’s good to slow things down ­­– slightly. This preparation time can help you to focus yourself on your writing. That’s part of the reason you should always edit your previous day’s writing before you begin today’s writing.

Creating a ritual — any ritual — will also help. It doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, simple and fast is better. But it says to your brain — “It’s time to write now.” For example, checking my backpack to be sure my computer, my notebook and my pens are in the backpack is part of my ritual. Even though it’s done about fifteen minutes (or more) before I write. It helps me to prepare.

To create a ritual you need to do something the same way, every time.  That causes your brain to link the steps. And that means that one of those steps needs to be writing. So when building the ritual you absolutely MUST produce some writing. The second sub-tip is that it takes roughly 28 repetitions to create a ritual or habit.

Okay that’s the end of the video course. I hope you found it interesting and useful.  Thank you for your time and attention.

If you want more information, you can always check out the blog. However, we also have a 2 DVD home workshop that covers the information in these three videos in much greater detail. Now this home video workshop is essentially the same information we had in our full day live workshop.  We’ve even included the same exercises that we used. We’ve just called them homework. So this is over two and half hours of pure information.  Plus guidance developing your own responses — your own customized solution. We walk you through the entire process. From identifying where you are weak to choosing where you are going to write. And everything in between.

You can find out more information  by going to http://www.learningcreators.com/buyvideoa.htm