Use a Timer, It’s Your Most Powerful Tool

Want a powerful writing tool that will help all your writing? Here it is: use a timer.

Timing your writing, and your other tasks, eliminates procrastination. If you know you've only got 20 minutes to write a blog post, you'll WRITE in those 20 minutes. That blog post would take you 90 minutes to write if you didn't use a timer. Writing tends to take the time you allow for it, so time yourself.

You can use any kind of timer you like. I have a friend who uses a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Using it would drive me crazy, because her timer ticks.

I use whatever I have. On my computer, that's Online Timer at http://timer.onlineclock.net/

Chunk down your writing, and time it
My biggest enemy is procrastination. I used to be the Queen of Procrastination — I'd wait until I was "inspired" or had a wonderful idea for a project. This meant that I was constantly in danger of missing deadlines. I'd stay up all night to finish projects for clients.

Finally I realized that this wasn't working for me. I had too many clients projects, and too many projects of my own. I could no longer afford to waste time.

I discovered chunking. Basically this means working out the steps to completion for a project. Then, I schedule 15 minutes to half an hour to work on a project — this is a "chunk".

Here's what's interesting. Once I chunked down projects, I no longer found them intimidating. I might procrastinate knowing I had to write 300 pages of a book, but I didn’t procrastinate in writing 500 words (two pages.)

Exercise 5. Time a piece of writing.

Try timing a writing task you need to do.