How We Start a Productive Writing Day
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To give your writing momentum, the best thing you can do is START your day right. In this episode of the Writing Momentum podcast, Chris and Gena discuss their favorite strategies for setting up a productive day from the moment they wake.
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Episode 47 Transcription:
[00:00:13].990] - Chris Hello, and welcome to Writing Momentum. I'm Christopher Maselli, and I'm here with my wife, Gena. And today we're talking about how to start a productive writing day. What do you think about that, Gena? [00:00:25].590] - Gena I think that's a really good topic. And I think it's so important because, man, how many times has it happened to others that your day just gets away from you, that you have the best of intentions and you get interruptions, you get emails, you get caught up in social media, you get all this stuff, and before you know it, your writing day is gone. [00:00:45].580] - Chris Yeah, you really got to start your day right, I think, in order to finish it. That doesn't mean that if you don't start right, you can't get on track. But it's so much easier to get on track when you start the right way. And so what is the right way for you? [00:01:01].720] - Gena For me, it absolutely starts with a morning routine. It starts with waking up and trying to motivate myself to get out of bed, get moving, get going, get all the kinks out and just start. So for me, a morning routine is huge. [00:01:20].620] - Chris Yeah, I always start with a morning routine. Also, I like to get up early. I like to get up before the rest of the house. And so I usually get up between 530 and six is the goal. I usually wake up naturally like that because I'll leave my window shade about halfway open, so I wake up from the natural sunlight. I like that a lot better than an alarm clock. Then when I get up, I'll brush my teeth. I'll throw water on my face recently. That helps wake you up, and it certainly works great. I'll splash some cold water on my face, and then I'll go out. And a lot of people make coffee or tea. I make what's called Amino Lean. This is a product they sell on Amazon. It's kind of a health product versus, like, a powder. It's got vitamins in it, but it also has a little bit of caffeine in it. So I find it wakes me up. It's good for me. And some of the other things aren't as good for you. This is good for me. And then I'll go, I have a little bit of quiet time, I'll do a little bit of stretching, and just to get my day started that way. [00:02:11].530] - Chris It's a slow start for my day, but it puts me in the right head space for when I want to start writing. [00:02:16].440] - Gena Yeah. And I think for me, I also have a morning routine where I get up and I exercise. And for me, there's a certain amount of a sense of accomplishment with getting my exercise done. With getting some of my quiet time done, having that time, there's that feeling that, okay, if the rest of the day goes haywire, I have at least done these things for myself. I also have started using that amino lean. I think it's just nice. It tastes great. [00:02:44].740] - Chris I thought, boy, this is going away quickly. [00:02:46].360] - Gena Yeah, I have to be careful with caffeine, but I do like that it works well for exercise as well. [00:02:55].720] - Chris Yes, it is. [00:02:56].290] - Gena It's really meant to go with exercise. So that works for me. And my exercise routine, I change it up depending on what I feel. That's one thing that I learned from the atomic habits about making your habits easy for yourself, and as you make them easier, you want to accomplish them. And I have definitely found that with exercise, I can't get too rigid or I start kind of feeling like the walls are closing in on me. So I wake up and ask myself, what do I want to do? Do I want to go for a walk? Do I want to do a HIIT workout? Do I want to do a stretching routine? Do I want to do pilates? What do I want to do? And that's what I do for the day. And I switch it up based on how I feel. But it helps me still accomplish my goal, but still as fun and enjoyable. [00:03:42].560] - Chris Speaking of keeping things easy, we get a lot of things done during the day. We're very productive people, and we do a lot of things, especially with writing and all that, as we go through our day. And what a lot of people are surprised to find out when they talk to us is that we actually start by keeping things simple. We put on our to dos for the day only three things each, don't we? Yeah. [00:04:06].190] - Gena That was a productivity tip that I learned several years ago about how there should be three things that are your focus for the day. Now we all have more that we can do with that. And I'm not saying that we don't do more, but I think for me, those three items are the things that if I accomplish those things, then I sense that I have had a productive day. [00:04:29].760] - Chris That is the key to me is that and this is why I like having three things, because if I have a to do list of 15 things, which it's very easy to do, that if I have a to do list of 15 things, chances are I'm not going to accomplish them all. And then what happens is that by the end of the day, I feel like I failed for the day. I didn't do everything I wanted to do. And so this idea to me of having three things that I'm going to get done during the day has been such a key motivator for me. Every time when I sit down to create them, and I like to take it even a little bit of a step further. And I have three things that I do each day, and they're from different areas of my life. So I will have one thing that is what I call a needle mover. This is something that I do for writing momentum for our home business, for our big scope of life, right, where we want to go for you. It might be writing your novel, it might be working on your website, right? [00:05:27].490] - Chris Something for you and your business. Then I have one item that I do for a client, right, because I have a lot of freelance work, and so I try to make sure that I help get one client's work done each day. That makes me feel more accomplished. If I try to do five things for clients, it's too much. Then I can't finish all. So one thing, one thing for myself, one needle mover, one thing for a client. And then third, I like to do one errand, and this is just something I got to do, right? It might be, hey, I got to do the dishes. I've got to clean out a closet. I've got to do something else. Usually there's something that comes up, and I started adding that in because I felt like I wasn't getting all those little things that are always around us done. And so I started to say every day, okay, I'm going to have one of those little things that I just need to get done. And then by the end of the day, as long as I finish something for a client, some kind of an errand, and then something for myself or my business, is that needle mover, boy, do I feel like I got something done, because those are all significant items. [00:06:28].840] - Chris Even though they're small, they're significant. [00:06:31].120] - Gena Yeah. And I like to take and I will keep a running list of things that I have to do, things that I appointments I have to make, or jobs that I need to complete or emails that I need to return and have all of those things. But I try to focus on just those three that I do. Now, you break it up a little bit more than I do, but I'm a little more I'm not in the office all day. I've got other commitments that I'm working with and that I'm fitting in. So some of my three a day include those things include working with our kids on their homeschooling, include helping somebody with one of their projects or something that's definitely time that I include as part of those three productive things or those three priorities every day. But it is amazing to me how just having that mindset that we are productive will make all of life feel more manageable. And you're moving ahead like you are moving the needle, whatever that is. Definitely. [00:07:35].950] - Chris And different people often ask, how do you keep track of all this stuff, right? What do you do? And I used to use a paper planner and but because I'm almost always sitting in front of my computer almost all day long, I found that a paper planner was just a duplication of everything I was already keeping track of on my computer. So for me, that didn't work for me. I like to have a list on my computer of what I'm working on. And I actually start my day with a virtual assistant who logs on with me. We use Slack to communicate and she asks me, what are you working on today? And I tell her what I'm working on and then she makes sure she helps me block out time to work on those things. She'll set it as though I'm in meetings for those things. Right. And she'll help me prioritize. And that really helps. I like to have a second look at what I'm doing. And that has become a very affordable, nice way. It's just a five minute check in each morning, but that's been really good. But now you have a slightly different life because you're not in front of the computer all day, you're in front of it in different periods of time for you. [00:08:38].620] - Chris You like using a paper planner. [00:08:40].440] - Gena I brought you guys my planner to show you today. For those of you who are watching by YouTube. I use Plum paper planner because I love all the customization capabilities. [00:08:50].140] - Chris It looks like a phone book. Look how thick that is. [00:08:54].860] - Gena Partly because that's what I've chosen. And the model that I have chosen. [00:08:59].470] - Chris Does it show you a day at a time? [00:09:01].380] - Gena For me, it shows me a week at a time. I don't really need a day at a time. I prefer kind of an overall what's happening this week. And I like to be able to see the whole week at once so I can plan out my whole week. And I usually start on Sundays. I will take time and plan everything out for the week and then I break it down. Each day I remind myself of what I'm going to do and what I'm going to think about. But again, I love the Plum Paper Planner, and we will include a link in the show notes for anyone who's interested. But I love that I could for this one. This was 2022. I was able to put a picture of our family on the front of it. [00:09:39].150] - Chris Look how much weight I've lost since then. [00:09:40].960] - Gena You have a serious amount of weight if you guys are interested there. But those are our kids, and that's fun for me because they are you guys. My family is my why. People talk about their whys. My family is my why. [00:09:55].600] - Chris Do you track all your projects in there, too? [00:09:57].990] - Gena I track now we have an online system. We use Click Up to keep track of projects. And that has been very helpful because there's a lot of projects that you work on and I work on, I might start them, you might finish them, or vice versa. And that has been helpful there. So we have used Click Up and. [00:10:19].950] - Chris You've used your planner mostly for appointments and daily items, but you still go back to an electronic planner for your project management. Project management, partly because that's what I'm using. And so for us to do things together, we have to have some place that we both get together. [00:10:34].420] - Gena Because what we were finding is that I would write something and I'd send it to you for you to look at five texts later. Because we text each other throughout the day. It was like you sent me something, I don't know what you sent me. And so this was a way for us to keep track of it and keep it all in one place. [00:10:51].100] - Chris You can start your productivity by going through your emails or going through messages you get. But we discovered that the busier we got, the less that works. We can't really live and use your email as your todo list. And that's where most of us live. We do, we use our email as a todo list, but we shouldn't. We need to transfer that to something where we can say, okay, this now allows me to complete things and make sure I don't forget anything unless we see things in order. And so that's essentially what we've done through the different systems that we put together. [00:11:23].920] - Gena Yes. And the need that we have is that we do have so many clients. Also, as our business is growing, we need to keep track of the different aspects of the business that we are doing for one another or that we are doing together. And for us, thinking about social media, thinking about the podcast, thinking about our website, thinking about our newsletters, thinking about our writing moments, thinking about these different arms of our business that we have. We just needed help keeping track of them. So Click Up became the way to do that. [00:11:56].220] - Chris Everything has to be organized. We like ClickUp because ClickUp allows us to put all those items that Gena just mentioned in one place. We were keeping some in Trello, some in a spreadsheet, some elsewhere. And Click Up allows you to create all those things in one place. It is a little difficult to use. So I wouldn't necessarily start with Click Up. Maybe start with something like Trello. That's very simple. But then move yourself up to Click Up as you need. Now, I will tell you if you've enjoyed hearing about our productive days and how we start making our days productive. I love hearing this stuff from people, so I hope you do too. But if you want to learn more about productivity for authors, we have a training course that is one of our best courses in 2022 that we teach is called Productivity Secrets to Ten Times your Writing Momentum. You can get that as well as three other trainings, one on how to build awesome author websites, one on writing for the inspirational market, and one on building the entertainment values in your fiction. You can get those all in a bundle. So it's four trainings in a bundle. [00:12:58].960] - Chris They're normally $27 a piece. You can get them over the next week for $47 for all of them. If you go to Writing Momentum.com, click on courses. It's the first one you'll see there, and it's going to go away in a week. One of the Black Friday deals we're doing, but we wanted to let you know about it. If you haven't received that in our email newsletter. If you just listen to our podcast. [00:13:18].990] - Gena Yeah, we hope you do sign up for our newsletter. We do try to include tips and tricks and things that we've learned and just more information to help writers succeed. That really is our heart in everything we do. And we also for those of you who are looking for people to write with you, check Writing Moments. WritingMoments.com, we would love to have you there. It's a fairly small group right now, so we're really able to get to know people, and we have people who are more advanced. We have people who are beginning, and it's just nice to get together and we write together, but we also learn together and encourage one another. [00:13:56].380] - Chris So if you've enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, subscribe, and share this with someone that you know and that you think that will benefit from this. And until next time, we hope that together we will continue to have writing momentum.
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