ONC 2023 TIPS & TRICKS: SETTING A DAILY WRITING ROUTINE | THE WRIMO BLOG

Welcome to The WriMo Blog where I share my monthly writing goals, project progress, and more! Today's post is all about setting a writing routine. If this interests you, keep reading!

In today’s, I have some suggestions for how you can set aside time on the daily for writing, so you can reach your goal of 20,000 words within the 12-week timeline. Please keep in mind, everyone writes differently, not every method will work for you. That’s perfectly okay; find what works for you and go with it!

Writing daily is definitely essential to reaching any goal, but because 20k in 12-weeks is really not all that hard, you can definitely get away with missing a few days now and then.

As I’ve said, every writer is different; some writers can write over 5k at a time, while others only have time for a couple hundred (sometimes less), and that works for them and their lifestyle. I fall in the middle as I tend to have a mix of word counts throughout the week. Sometimes I can write 2500, other times I barely scrape 500. Set yourself a goal that works for you, it will all add up in the end.

Remember, your daily schedule is different from someone else. Create your writing schedule according to YOUR lifestyle. If you know you have time to yourself after your household is asleep, use that slot of time before you start your night routine to get in some words. Or, if you know you have an hour in the early morning before everyone is awake, grab your coffee or tea, or what have you, and do some writing. If you live by yourself, look at your schedule and dedicate a time to write during a specified time of day where you know you are not going to be busy.

I am very much a morning person and I like getting as much done as I can in the morning before the rest of my family is awake. I also like getting all of my work-related tasks done so I have the rest of my free time for writing.

Here’s a helpful tip I picked up over the last couple of years during writing challenges. Set a timer and try to write as many words as you’re able until the time runs out. To do this, I recommend turning off any distractions such as your phone and/or iPad notifications/ringer. If you’re writing on a laptop/PC, put your other devices in a different room so you’re not tempted to check them between writing. If you are doing your writing on these devices, putting them in airplane mode will minimize distractions. Which brings me to my next point.

If you’re hoping to get the most out of your timed writing sessions/sprints, my experience has shown me that using GoogleDocs with the offline access feature turned on, and my laptop on airplane mode, I am less likely to veer away from my writing. I love Scrivener and I use it for a large portion of my projects, but there are so many bells and whistles that I sometimes forget why I opened the file. Scrivener is actually helpful to idea-dump and create vision boards, etc. So I do recommend it, but for time sprints, I find myself constantly checking the word-count meter to see if the number is rising. Sure, its an essential tool, and you can totally use it if you want to; this is just what happens to me.

A great timer app, which is an exception to putting your phones/devices in another room, is the Forest app. Not sponsored, this is an app every writer I follow is using. You grow trees the more you use the timer, and when you leave the app, the tree dies and you are “forced” to start the timer over. It also has ambient sounds like rain fall or rushing rivers. I live with a lot of people in my family, so I’m actually used to a lot of noise around me, but I do like listening to something while I write.

I believe I’ve mentioned the Pomodoro Technique, which is timed sessions with breaks between each session. This method is used for all things task-related. I am not the best at explaining what this is, so here’s what the internet says about it: This excerpt is borrowed from Wikipedia.

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a pomodoro, from the Italian word for tomato, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used as a university student.

The technique has been widely popularized by apps and websites providing timers and instructions. Closely related to concepts such as timeboxing and iterative and incremental development used in software design, the method has been adopted in pair programming contexts. - Wikipedia Page

Everyone I’ve seen talk about this technique has their own version of it, tweaking the times to fit the task they wish to accomplish. Don’t be afraid to tweak and make changes to fit your progress.

February has already begun by the time this post is live. So I hope this is helpful to you! Stay safe, and stay aweomse. See you in the funny papers!