Author. Lady Boss. Geektastic.
Hello lovelies. Welcome back to the blog. Today I want to go over goal setting for the new year. I know I've gone over this for short term planning before, but I want to give you a way to plan your entire year realistically so that in December of 2021 you can look back and know you accomplished something.
Do you plot your novels out before writing them? Do you start writing with just the ideas in your head and see where the stories and characters lead? Are you maybe somewhere in-between plotting only a few scenes ahead, or just the major points and then building the plot by writing between them?
Well hello, Lovelies! Here we are in Q4 of 2020. It's gone by too fast, hasn't it? It's time to set some new goals so that I can accomplish ALL THE THINGS! As with other quarters I use a Kanban-style Trello Board for all my goal setting. If all of that is gibberish to you, let me explain. Kanban is a Japanese word and it means "signboard" in English. This type of board aims to provide a visual representation of the workload and a capacity measurement for how much work in each category can get done at one time. You put tasks on your Kanban board as space permits, rather than as line items come up. Most commonly in productivity circles you see the board divided horizontally into three parts.
Storyist Storyist is a creative writing application for Mac OS X and iPad. Tailored for novelists and screenwriters, it provides a word processor, a cork board with support for index cards and photos, an outliner, and a project manager. It is very similar to Scrivener, so if you're already using that, you definitely don't need …
Continue reading "5 Notes Apps for Writers"
Trello No one who has been on this blog a while is going to be surprised when I say that that Trello is my #1 favorite goal setting and productivity app. I love using it for quarterly goals, for making checklists, and for generally keeping life in order. I maybe haven't talked too much about …
Continue reading "5 Productivity Apps for Writers"
Is there a system out there that is better than the Pomodoro Method?
I've talked about my love/hate relationship with the Pomodoro technique multiple times on the blog now. I love learning new methods for productivity, and am always looking for another way to hack or otherwise motivate myself into getting work done, yet I find that there are always drawbacks to each system.
One weekend, I was thinking about this, and came up with a new system that I hadn't ever heard of before.
Okay, so we've talked about time blocking your day and your week for success, but how far can you really time block out and still make it effective? Well, turns out, you can time block a lot of things pretty far out. I set up my calendar for the entire year, but I'm a crazy …
Continue reading "Time Blocking Your Month for Success"
Have you ever noticed that you do a lot of the same tasks every day? If you have 10 emails come in at different times, is it more efficient to answer them right away and get them dealt with and out of your inbox the moment they come through, or to gather them and complete …
Continue reading "Time Blocking Your Week for Success"
Let's continue our discussion on using our time wisely, and talk a little bit about the Pomodoro Technique because it is an important tool for task management big and small. I've talked about this in a few previous posts, which I will link to below. I have to tell you that the moment I heard …
Continue reading "Time Blocking Your Day for Success"
What if I told you that 80% of your successes in life came from 20% of your actions? Crazy right? But that's exactly what we're talking about today. What is the Pareto Principle? The Pareto principle is a concept developed by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto back in 1895 after he noticed that 80% of the …
Continue reading "How to Do LESS but Get MORE Done"
