Writing: getting it done one baby step after another

Are you completing your writing projects in a timely manner?

If you’re not, chances are that you haven’t discovered the fine art of chunking. You “chunk” by breaking each project into small tasks — baby steps. Each task should take you no longer than half an hour. I like to chunk projects right down so that each task takes around 20 minutes, tops.

This means that any project, from writing an article to writing a book is broken down into tiny sequential tasks. As you complete each toddling baby step, you zoom through the task.

As The art of the doable to-do list – Email – Lifehacker suggests:

“Work through projects using next actions.

If you’ve got a multi-action task – that is, a project – only keep its next sequential action on your to-do list. When the task is complete, refer back to your project list (again, separate from to-do’s) and add its next action to your to-do list. At any given moment, your to-do list should only contain the next logical action for all your working projects. That’s it – just one bite-sized step in each undertaking.”

The big benefit of the baby steps is that you don’t have time to get bored, nor do you procrastinate. You can handle even the largest, and most intimidating of projects if you break it down into baby steps.

You can keep track of the baby steps of a project in various ways. I used to do it via index cards — I kept a stack of cards for each project.

Nowadays, I use Things on my Mac and iPhone, but I still carry index cards. Old habits are hard to break.

Try chunking all your projects right down into baby steps. You’ll feel a lot less pressure, and you’ll get all your projects done faster.

Big tip: at the start of your writing day (even if you’re a part-time writer, and your “day” is just a couple of hours), go over your projects and see if you can break tasks down into smaller chunks. At first, it will seem as if you’re wasting time with this project-review, but you’re not — you’re working more efficiently.

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Tagged as: freelance writing, writing, writing process