Coffee can increase productivity over short periods. It can also increase trips to the toilet.
So you want to increase your writing productivity, eh? Don’t we all! I’m not claiming to be an expert, but here are three tips and techniques that have helped me massively. Maybe they could help you too.
1) Get up at the crack of midnight.
Ok, maybe not midnight, but try to get up as early as you can manage without adversely affecting your sleep. Recently, I started going to bed around 9 or 10pm, and getting up at 5am. This gives me a few hours in the morning to do nothing but write, without worldly distractions.
For maximum effect, I recommend showering immediately to wake yourself up, and drinking copious amounts of coffee – but not a drop of caffeine from six-hours-to-bedtime onwards. You’ll need deep, perfect sleep to keep up the routine. And for those who have difficulty getting out of bed at the best of times, try putting your alarm on the other side of the room, so you have no choice but to leave the bed!
This is a harsh but rewarding regime.
2) Turn off Twitter!
So, you’ve cut out the distractions that you can’t normally control by writing in the middle of the night – what next? Well, that just leaves the distractions that you can control, mainly because they’re self-inflicted!
Twitter is the worst culprit here, but reading the news, checking up on your regular sites, anxiously clicking ‘refresh’ to view your latest blog traffic – these are all completely unnecessary activities that are not only eating into your writing time, but also putting you in entirely the wrong frame of mind.
And if you’re anything like me, then as soon as you start playing around in that browser window, you’re lost. Regardless of how much you struggle to focus on the writing, you will find some excuse to keep shifting back to the browser every few minutes. It’s a total productivity killer.
There’s only one solution – for those few hours that you’ve set aside to write, turn the clock back to 1989. No internet. Not one page. Not one tweet. You’ll thank yourself for it.
3) Do something you hate.
Well, maybe not something you hate – I wouldn’t necessarily try to force you into something horrendous! – but I genuinely believe it’s beneficial for any creative person to have something in their lives that they wish wasn’t. For you, it may be your menial job, the housework, or the weekly shop. For me, it’s my menial job, the housework, and the weekly shop.
I’m never more motivated to write than when there’s something unpleasant preventing me from doing it. That passion for not doing the hated activity can be translated into a passion for the writing.
For example, I’m paid not much more than minimum-wage – this means that my employer values a whole hour of my time at approximately the same level as the supermarket values a dead chicken.
My time is worth more than that. Your time is worth more than that. I’ll be writing as soon as I get home, in the impassioned knowledge that at least I am valuing my time appropriately.
Did you find these suggestions helpful? Have any of them worked for you? Got any better ideas?! Click ‘comments’ below, or e-mail pithytitle@live.co.uk
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