Living a quantified life is all about numbers. Regardless of our passions, hobbies or professions, we can generally find some metric by which to measure our performance. For a writer, (luckily?) the metric is crushingly obvious and never nearly as high as we’d like.
For writers, word count is king. While it’s nice to have such a clear and idyllic measuring stick to gauge our performance, watching a creeping tally of output is painful at best. Discussions about actually increasing word count often fail to generate anything more useful than wistful sighs.
There’s hope!
Today, however, we’re going to try and change that. The goal for writers (and I think this also applies to many other computer-bound endeavors) is increasing performance at the keyboard. Fair enough. We can talk about that. However, we’re also going to look at stepping away from our keyboards to maximize writing time.
A couple months ago, my friend and fellow writer Karen Smith pointed me to a blog post that has really changed the way I approach my writing work. In her post “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day,” author Rachel Aaron discusses the triangular metric she uses to maintain a high-volume word count. The three points on her pyramid are:
- Time – Track and evaluate performance and productivity
- Enthusiasm – Excitement for the task at hand
- Knowledge – Know what you’re going to be writing before you start working on it
I don’t intend to talk about enthusiasm in this post beyond acknowledging that working on things that excite you will probably result in increased output.
A quick second on Time
It’s worth noting that writers are blessed with fantastic tools that help us evaluate the “time” piece of the triad.
One of the cool things about RescueTime is that it has a different lesson to teach each of us. Sure, maybe Facebook and cat videos are the rockstars of the distraction world, but we’re all vulnerable to our own set of distractions. Similarly, we all have different highs and lows in our productivity cycles. Tools like RescueTime help us identify those patterns and take advantage of them to work at peak efficiency.
For instance, I know from my stats that I’m at my lowest productivity period from 4-8pm. It doesn’t matter if I’m chained to my laptop, I don’t get anything accomplished in the early evening. However, I start getting my wind back around 9pm, and then it’s off to the races. Thank goodness my employer doesn’t realize my most creative, high-productivity time occurs off the clock! I get to save those late-evening hours for my personal projects.
Should we choose to use them, we have good tools to help us quantify our time.
Knowing is half the battle
But… is time at the keyboard actually generating your highest word count? Aaron’s post does a fantastic job illustrating how uncertainty can stymie productivity. My own experience isn’t that dissimilar from hers. In her words:
“Here I was, desperate for time, floundering in a scene, and yet I was doing the hardest work of writing (figuring out exactly what needs to happen…) in the most time consuming way possible (i.e., in the middle of the writing itself).”
I don’t want to be doing anything in the most time consuming way possible. But Aaron’s depiction described me perfectly. Even when I have a general sense of what I want to be writing, I can spend a lot of time backtracking and rewriting my way back into a scene.
It’s so easy to get mired in a scene or a story where you don’t quite know what feeling you’re trying to illustrate or the point you’re need to make. It’s those times when you stare at your monitor, minute after minute with no real progress toward a solution. It’s those times when you wander down a rabbit hole, spewing unkeepable words while you’re trying to find a point.
Aaron’s suggested solution? Simply step away from the keyboard, pick up a pad and pen and scribble some notes.
Several months ago, I was in a position where I was vastly overcommitted to writing projects (based on my historical output). I found that even a couple quickly scribbled lines lent structure to my scenes, articles and posts. Three or four minutes of exploration on paper helped me to tie an entire piece to a theme. I wasn’t under any illusion that I’d be keeping my handwritten notes, so it was easy to commit concepts to paper without stressing about the words. Best of all, once I started typing, I had a way better idea of what I wanted to say.
I certainly feel like I write both more and faster when I first spend a few minutes with a pen and a pad, and my RescueTime stats appear to back that up. I spend more time in my word processor and less time tabbing out to “research” if I start with some notes. I am more likely to complete a project in a single setting if I’ve already jotted down my intro and possible conclusions.
Even if you’re not a serious outliner, try writing down a rough sketch of what you intend to accomplish for your next writing session. Let us know in the comments if a little time away from the keyboard has helped to maximizes your time spent typing. If you have any other tips that help you write more productively, please share those as well!
Great post for writers. These three points are the pillars of writing and suggestions provided here can reflect in large changes.