Author: Jeffe Kennedy

Look at that! Yes, that’s my weekly wordcount graph for this last week, where I blew my previous record out of the water. I’m just ever so pleased with myself.

I mentioned earlier this week that I wanted to re-jigger my writing schedule to maximize my productivity, now that I’m writing full time. I figured I should be able to up my output, but so far hadn’t done so by as much as I’d hoped. In the past, I worked pretty intensely for several hours, usually getting 2,000 to 3,000 words before switching over to the day job. (Which I did from home, so no commute or like considerations.) I thought I should be able to get up to 5,000 words and still have more day to do Other Things (like reading, house projects, etc.).

But I wasn’t getting there. Even with the Jeffe Training for a Marathon Method (TM) of increasing wordcount production, I was punking out well before 5K. As in, I got tired and couldn’t focus enough to keep going.

So I looked at ways to change things up.

First, I stopped the video watching, as I discussed before.

Then I did the major trick I always resort to when I’m not getting the focus and flow I need. I often fall into the pattern of turning on my computer, opening email and my browser, then checking all the social media and various messages. This often takes my brain in the wrong direction. Now that I’ve been waking up naturally and not setting my alarm, I’ve been indulging in my favorite waking up ritual, which is to lie there for a good half hour before getting up. I rarely sleep later than 7 and most of the time I’m out of bed by 6. But I start waking up before that and love to lie there in a lovely relaxed alpha-wave state, thinking about the book I’m writing, something I call the Dreamthink. If I pour a bunch of other information into my head in between that Dreamthink time and actually writing, I lose a lot.

So, first step was to write first. That would prime the pump and get things going. My first 500 words of the day are always the slowest. I speed up as I go. However, I didn’t want to go too long without checking for messages from overnight, so I decided I’d try for 500 words before anything else, then break to check the rest.

Then something entirely new occurred to me.

I’d been in a pattern of writing intensely for condensed periods of time, but why keep doing that if I didn’t need to? A lot of writers use the #1K1Hr hashtag and benchmark – writing 1,000 words or for 1 hour, whichever it came out to. Instead, I tried a schedule of 30 minutes and 500 words, with breaks in between.

And boy howdy, how it worked!

This is the schedule I set up:

I was going to post that as a jpg image, so it would be prettier and more compact, but then I heard Sassy Outwater in my head, chastising me about accessibility, so…

At any rate, the first week was a runaway success! I went from 14K on THE EDGE OF THE BLADE to 35K. I’m ever so pleased with how I felt, too. I tend to be a concentrated, focused worker, so the idea of taking regular breaks is new to me, but it worked out great for my endurance! I set up all the times as formulas, so my daily schedule hinges around when I do get up (which I wanted to keep organic) and can be adjusted if stuff comes up. If I get ahead of schedule with especially good writing runs, I finish earlier in the afternoon.

We’ll see how week two goes.