Category: Time Management

Lowering stress is one reason I transitioned from practicing law full-time to writing full-time. But the path to a successful independent author business is less clearly defined than the one for building a law practice.

As a result of that lack of clarity, my list of things to do (or that I “should” be doing) sometimes seems endless.

Which is why I’ve been writing about a step I learned from Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours. That step is to write down next to each task on your calendar what your purpose is in doing it.

This is my fourth and the last article on the topic.

But it might be the most important one because stress has so much to do with our happiness and health.

Not Knowing What Works

The more articles I read, podcasts I listen to, and authors I talk to the more possible paths to success (or lack thereof) I find.

Unfortunately, a strategy that works for one author might not work for me.

For example, if a romance author who publishes a book a month earns a lot of royalties by running Amazon ads, that doesn’t mean my new mystery/suspense series will benefit from the same approach. Not only is it a different genre, I’ve only written 2 novels in the series so far. In addition, right now I’m still aspiring to publish a novel every six months, let alone one per month.

To add to the difficulty of deciding whether to adopt another author’s strategy, it’s not always easy to tell how well a particular book or set of books is selling.

A book that ranks in the Top 5,000 on Amazon regularly is probably selling well on that platform. A different book that rarely ranks above 40,000 on Amazon might, however, be earning its author more money.

How?

If the book is sold on multiple platforms in addition to Amazon (such as Kobo and Apple), and in multiple formats (paperback, hardback, e-book, audiobook), and the Top 5,000 book is sold only for Kindle, the lower-ranked booked may earn more money overall.

Because of these differences, comparing ourselves to another author won’t always help us figure out which tasks will help us.

Comparison Shopping For Less Stress

As I wrote about last week, noting the purpose of each task when you add it to your calendar helps eliminate unnecessary tasks. Taking the unnecessary items off the To Do list helps with stress management right there.

But it also lowers stress in another way.

By adding a purpose, we are grouping the tasks in a logical way. Now instead of choosing 2 or 3 tasks to do in an afternoon out of a list of 50 that serve multiple purposes, we’re choosing among the smaller number of tasks all intended to accomplish the same purpose.

(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made through this site, but that doesn’t add any cost to the buyer.) 

That makes it a lot easier to compare one task to another and decide which one is most worth doing.

To use a shopping analogy, I’m deciding which fruit to buy among a handful of oranges, apples, and pears rather than which food to buy from the whole grocery store.

What Works Best

Let’s say my purpose in writing this article about stress management is to encourage readers to buy my most recent nonfiction release, Happiness, Anxiety, and Writing: Using Your Creativity To Live A Calmer, Happier Life. (While I’m happy if you check it out, that’s not the purpose. My goal is to connect with other writers by providing useful content.) Once I define that purpose I can now compare to everything else on my task list that might increase sales of that book.

Based on how much time or money each task would cost, I can decide which is the most worth doing.

For instance, if it takes me three hours to write an article, it might make more sense to instead run a sale on the book and spend an extra $35 advertising it.

Which one I choose will depend in part on whether I have more time than money, what I enjoy doing, and whether the article (or the ad) might serve more than one purpose.

An added plus of comparing similar tasks is that it’s easier to decide afterward which was more effective. In the beginning, I might try both of the above approaches on different weeks. I can then compare the sales of the book and decide which task resulted in more sales.

When I didn’t group tasks by purpose, I was less likely to check my results–because often I didn’t know what I’d been aiming for.

Knowing When To Stop Working

To bring this article back to feeling less stress, comparing similar tasks helps me choose which ones to do, but that’s not the only benefit. It also helps me feel I have accomplished something when I complete each item on my list.

Before, no matter how much I did or how many items I crossed off, I always ended the day feeling uncertain whether I had moved toward my goals or not. That question often led me to do just one more thing.

Or, if I did stop working for the day, I kept thinking I should have done something more.

Now when I finish the items I’ve put into my calendar, I feel that my day is finished. I’m more able to relax and so have less stress.

That’s because even if each task doesn’t turn out to move me toward my goal, I know how to evaluate whether it was helpful or not. So at least in the future I’ll be able to choose more valuable tasks.

Eventually, everything on my calendar will help me reach my goals.

That’s all for today. Until next Friday, when I’ll talk about a podcast I recently discovered. It’s not about writing, but it nonetheless could help you figure out by example what’s working and not as you start your novel —

L.M. Lilly

Is it possible to work less and get more done?

Writing what I aim to accomplish next to each task in my calendar (learned from Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours by Robert C. Pozen) is helping me do just that.

Creating The To Do List

Most of us who create To Do lists or include tasks on a calendar every day do it because it helps us get things done. In addition to keeping me on track, crossing something off a list gives me a feeling of accomplishment.

But that feeling can fool us.

If the thing you crossed off doesn’t serve a purpose, you spent time working for nothing.

But wait, I can hear you say, at work you get paid to get things done. So we are not working for nothing.

It’s true. When you work for someone else, that person or company usually creates your To Do list. And rewards you for crossing things off.

When you work for yourself, though, or pursue a project like writing a novel because you’ve chosen to do it, no one is paying you based on finishing tasks.

A task only has value if it helps you reach a goal. If not, you’re better off doing something else (or taking a break).

Getting To The Goal

As one example, if your goal is to write a novel, you might include on your calendar participating in a writers critique group (in person or online). Let’s say the group requires all five participants, including you, to circulate 10 pages of writing 2 days before your meeting.

Everyone reads and critiques one another’s work. You meet weekly to discuss the comments.

You’re hoping the group will help you reach your goal of finishing your novel.

But will it? And are the tasks relating to it truly necessary?

Necessary Or Not?

There is no one answer to whether a critique group is necessary or not. So let’s look at how you figure that out by adding your purpose into your calendar.

First, think about your overall goal in attending the group. If the goal is to finish your novel, write that down.

Second, look at each separate task.

Writing your pages serves the purpose of getting you closer to finishing a novel. That one seems easy, and we’d probably keep it on our calendar regardless of the critique group.

The reason to read other people’s writing seems obvious: fair is fair. If you want group members to critique your work, in turn you need to critique theirs.

That reason, however, doesn’t tell us if staying in the group serves a purpose.

The question is whether the group causes you to write more pages than you would if you freed up the hours it takes to read other people’s work and to attend meetings. If without a group you won’t write, or you’ll write a whole lot less, then the group-related tasks serve their purpose. I’d keep them on my calendar.

But let’s say that you generally write whether or not you attend a critique group.

If so, the group is not serving the purpose of helping you finish the novel. In fact, it might be getting in the way of it because the hours you spend critiquing other people’s work and at meetings could be spent on your own book.

Before crossing all the critique group tasks off your calendar, though, it’s worth looking at whether you have any other purpose in attending.

For instance, you might attend because you want to improve your writing skills. If that’s so, likewise you need to look at each task related to the group and ask yourself if it accomplishes that purpose.

Writing Your Purpose Every Week

Once you decide a critique group (or anything else) is worth your time, you might be tempted to block it into your calendar for the entire year.

Including the purpose each week, though, is key to spotting tasks that no longer serve a purpose.

Going back to the critique group example, I typically write whether or not I attend a group. But for a long time I attended a writers group for a different purpose. Reading and critiquing the pages of other people helped me become a better novelist.

That was so because I could often see things in their writing that I didn’t recognize in my own, which helped me improve my novels.

As I wrote more and more, though, critiquing group members’ pages helped less. I often gave comments on basic grammar or sentence structure. While I’m not a perfect writer, I felt pretty confident about those skills. And what I needed to work on most–overall plot and character development–wasn’t covered because we read only small sections, not entire novels.

Nonetheless I kept attending for years because I thought going to writers groups was a good thing.

Had I started writing down the purpose for each task earlier, I would have realized much sooner that I was spending time on things that weren’t helping me reach my goals.

Now I am focusing particularly on things I do for marketing and promotion. I’m continuing with many of them, but already dropped three or four that didn’t truly serve a purpose. Which means I’m working less.

If you’d like to work less, too, try looking at the tasks on your own calendar.

Write your purpose next to each one. I’m betting you’ll discover a number that you can drop. Let me know!

That’s all for today. Until next Friday when we’ll talk about accomplishing more with less stress—

L.M. Lilly

P.S. Writing down a purpose for each task also helped me stop putting things off, as I wrote about last week, and increase my energy and motivation.