The Writer's Life: Tools of the Trade & Setting Aside Time

Tools of the Trade: 

Dropbox or Google Drive? Or some other organizational system? 

What matters most is you have a cloud-based system to contain and organize your writing. Otherwise you risk wasting hours of precious time hunting down drafts and bits and pieces of writing. Set up a folder and subfolder system with categories that make sense to you.

Factors to consider: 

• Cost & Storage Capacity: Google Drive and Dropbox both have free and paid options. How much storage do you need? How big is your project?
• Ease of use: Which system feels most intuitive to you? Which system feels frustrating?
• Sharing Your Work: Are you sharing your pages with an editor or a book coach? What system does she prefer?
• Cloud-based: I can’t emphasize this enough. It will only take one hard-drive crash for you to never make this mistake again. Save yourself the heartache. Choose an organizational system that is cloud-based—TODAY.  

What’s your favorite organizational system—and why?

Setting Time Aside:

In her marvelous book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard writes: “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.”

I wish there was a magic silver bullet, but the truth is that if you want to get that book written, there’s only one way: setting aside non-negotiable time to write. Whether that’s thirty minutes a day, three hours on the weekend, renting a hotel room for a week, or binge-writing for a month at a cabin in the woods, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is making the time to write.

What matters is what you do with this hour and the next one. 

How you spend them is how you spend your life.

How do you make time for your writing? I’d love to know.