A Writer’s Battle With Time: First in a Series

Posted by Tom Colvin

January 8, 2008

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve got a problem. Several major writing projects are contending for attention, and I’m not pleased with my allocation of time.

One project is, of course, this blog. I spent three months gathering information and organizing the blog before making it public almost exactly one year ago. I decided to make the blog my top priority for 2007 in order to get it firmly established. I’m pleased with the results and gratified by the response from other writers. However, I found myself spending much more time on the blog than I had anticipated.

The other big project is a major non-fiction book requiring substantial historical research. I’ve been working on it since May 2003, delving into archives in Spain, Canary Islands, Mexico, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau and England. I managed to get a lot of research done in 2007. With research perhaps 95 percent complete, I’m now beginning to write.

In addition, I occasionally find myself writing articles for magazines. And, of course, there is always the routine monitoring of email and other office tasks.

Sound familiar?

I first wrote about my conflicting projects six months ago in an article titled, “Sprints & Marathons: The Writer’s Dilemma.” You can read it in the current issue of the British magazine Writer’s Forum, which hit US newsstands yesterday. Basically, I’m finding sprints easier to run than marathons. The blog almost always trumps the book.

Now that we are at that crucial turn-of-the-year moment, I’m determined to get more control of my activities and my time.

You can see quite dramatically my dilemma in the screenshot below, charting my time allocations just last week. [This chart comes from a very recently harnessed time-tracking facility I'll soon review in detail.] The blog, including maintenance and research, dominates, while my book project receives much less attention.

Charting my time allocations

I intend to agressively use time-tracking software to help me recalibrate my time allocations. I’ll be seeking parity between the blog and the book.

Over the next few weeks, expect reviews of the various time-tracking software that I’m trying out. Maybe you’ll discover one that suits your requirements as well.

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