Magic bullets don’t exist in the realm of writing. No matter what else might change with each passing day, the goal is still the same: put words on the page. You can prioritize tasks, monitor your work performance, and try every single productivity tip on the market. There are no hacks for how to plan to get your work done, but there are some tips that can make the process bearable.
I’ve been where you are right now: married to a weekly work plan, crossing my fingers, and hoping to leverage the time that I have for my most important tasks. There are days when I wake up and wonder how I’m going to get it all done, but those days are reminders to return to the system that works for me.
Task management can be as simple as you want to make it. Let’s take a deep dive into how you can start with your time management to cross that important task off your to-do list.
7 Steps for Project Planning and Writing More in the Time You Have
Consider this your own personal help center for how to plan to get your work done. These seven steps have been so instrumental in helping me put books out into the world on a regular basis in addition to book coaching, freelance writing, and editing work.
Don’t wait another minute to improve your productivity and get that important task done now.
1. Work Planning: How Much Time Do You Really Have?
Part of the issue with project management is that you need to know how long an activity takes you – and then check to make sure you have a corresponding block of time in your weekly schedule. For me, I often have lofty ideas when it comes to what I want to do – but they aren’t always realistic. This is why it helps to start with an ideal schedule.
Pull up Google Sheets and create a table with the time listed by the hours you are awake vertically on the left and the days of the week horizontally across the top. This is the basis of your new weekly schedule. From here, fill in all of the activities that are recurring and non-negotiable: grocery shopping, baseball practice, drinks with your friends on a Friday night, you name it.
This leaves you with a certain number of blocks empty. Chances are it’s far fewer blocks than you would like it to be.
All of these blocks are dedicated to your latest project plan. You can only work during the time you have free, so be realistic and ruthless when making your weekly plan so that you allocate space to work on projects that have great meaning to you (whether that’s writing a book or something else altogether).
2. Create an Effective Work Plan
Once you know how much time you have for weekly tasks, it’s important to think about what you can accomplish in this given time slot. If you can write 500 words per hour and you have two hours to dedicate to writing, then you can write 1,000 words that week. This is how granular you need to be when dividing your work into smaller tasks and half-hour increments.
The problem for many people is that they don’t know how long a specific task takes them.
Time tracking might be necessary before you move on to weekly planning. For a week, pause every half-hour to jot down what you accomplished in that time block. This could be just shorthand for repetitive tasks or as detailed as how many words you were writing if you want to know in a given timeframe.
Data is your best friend when it comes to making an effective work plan.
This prevents disappointment and unrealistic expectations from taking over your task list. You can only get so much done during your work hours, especially if you have a difficult task that will take more time. Add up all the slots where you can work and estimate what you can reasonably accomplish. All you have to do is write down individual tasks and goals at this stage.
3. Prioritizing Urgent vs. Important
Once you know what you could accomplish with the time available, it’s time to prioritize your work into multiple buckets or categories. If you’re like me, you have more projects on your mind than what you can reasonably do during work hours. I always have my hands on multiple tasks. I spend all week thinking about them – until Friday afternoon when I have the weekend to make progress.
That means that my task list gets longer as the week goes on, and my anxiety soars at the idea that I might not be able to get them all done. Of course, there’s no way I could get each individual task done over the weekend, but it feels like an all-or-nothing situation.
You can minimize some of this struggle by thinking about urgent tasks and important tasks. Don’t let the urgent crowd out the important. Different tasks have varying levels of importance for your productivity. Some to-do list items are going to feel like they need to be done right now, but hold off until you can evaluate them.
Ask yourself questions like this one: Is this activity going to move the needle forward on my goals or business? If the answer is no, then it is likely an urgent task rather than an important one. Make sure that you don’t spend all of your spare time putting out fires (the urgent task) and never start rebuilding the forest (the important task).
You may want to reassign the urgent tasks to someone else (employees, partners, kids, etc.) so that you can focus on the important task that only you can do.
4. Set a SMART Goal
Does your list of weekly tasks seem to morph and change as you go through the week? It seems like those mile markers that let you know how much progress you’re making are repeatedly moving, ensuring that you never reach the end of your to-do list. You might even have lots of lookalikes crowding in – similar tasks that seem related but may not have much impact on your real goal.
So how do you create a goal that remains the same until it’s achieved?
Set a SMART goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This means that you know exactly what needs to happen for your productivity to be a success. Instead of “finish my book,” it might be “finish a 70,000-word draft of my first novel by June 2025.”
This tells you exactly how to move the needle forward and when you’ll know that things are going well for you. If you know you want to write 70,000 words and only have 30,000 right now, you can divide that remaining 40,000 words up into smaller tasks that fit inside of your work planning.
Not realistic? It might be time to reevaluate your SMART goal. It could mean that you need to scale back the project scope, extend the deadline, delegate tasks, or simply cut out unimportant tasks.
5. Keep Track of Goals During Your Work Day
I’m the first to admit that I LOVE project management software. There is something so satisfying about seeing your action plan moving from concept to completion. Project planning allows you to see manageable tasks and how or when you intend to get the deep work done to finish them. In other words, what are your objectives?
My favorite project manager is Notion which is free for individual use. It has so many functions that you can use from a chart function to a digital Kanban board to a calendar. You color code things, move them around with a few clicks, and cross off each thing that you get done. It’s flexible, adaptable, and easy to take with you anywhere (even if you prefer to go to the coffee shop to work).
You can view a tutorial on how to set up your Notion dashboard in Sarra Cannon’s Heart Breathings video here.
Other software that works similarly includes Trello and Asana, but I didn’t find it as robust as Notion.
Of course, some people prefer to have an action plan that they can actually lay their hands on. Ditch your fancy project management tool and use a Kanban board on the wall of your office. List all of your to-do list items on the left, move them to a doing column when they’re in progress, and then put them in the done column (or throw them away if it feels less overwhelming).
6. Adjust your Plan Accordingly
It happens to the best of us: we sit down to do a task at our scheduled times and then we realize that we didn’t make as much progress as we hoped. Revise your work plan at regular intervals to keep you from having to get to the day of the deadline only to realize that you’re weeks away from making it.
This causes unnecessary stress and could be avoided with regular check-ins.
At the end of the week, look at your Notion or Kanban board to see what you were able to achieve. Measure progress against your SMART goal and where you should be at this point in the process. If unimportant tasks are getting in the way, then you need to start to delegate, reassign, or delete them from your to-do list for the week.
It may take you some time to catch up if this has been going on for a while, but you can take control of your week again and proceed with project planning and your objectives. Recalibrate your SMART goal if you really need to, but only do this as a last resort.
7. Experiment with the Best Times for Deep Work
You want to know how to plan to get your work done. While these 7 steps can help you make significant progress, there are a few things you can do to make your workday more efficient. Namely, you need to evaluate when your best times of day are. Some authors write best at the start of a morning before unimportant tasks start to crowd in. Others are night owls, only able to get into the groove when the kitchen is clean and the kids are in bed.
There are no wrong ways to think about an action plan for your objectives.
Productivity is a unique experience for everyone. What works for me (early mornings) might not work for you if you need to write on your lunch break or while your kids attend swim lessons.
Track how you get the most work done, when it is, and the atmosphere that is most conducive to hitting your goal, and then create an effective work plan that hits the mark.
What’s Your Most Important Task This Quarter?
We are coming up on the start of the second quarter of the year and for many of us, that means it’s time to set new goals and objectives. It’s a time to prioritize tasks and put a fine point on our overall productivity. Planning every 90 days is an easy way to identify how much progress you can realistically make on a goal, assess how it’s going, and what you could be doing differently.
What task is on your to-do list for the upcoming quarter?
For me, it’s finishing my 90-Day Novel, which I’m excited to share more about in the coming weeks! Let me know what you’ll be working on and we can hold each other accountable.