My muse versus time management

At the request of The Wife, I'm writing today about a piece I read on-line and how it's affected my productivity.

Corey Doctorow, a very good SF writer, posted a column on the Locus Magazine site called "Writing in the Age of Distraction" that I found very helpful. In the four or five months prior to reading it, I hadn't done much writing. As my son's primary care-giver, I never felt like I could devote the chunks of time I felt I needed to get some writing done. Before Oscar came along, writing for four or five hours at a stretch wasn't uncommon. After he was born and before The Wife returned to work, I was still getting regular two-hour writing sessions. Now-a-days, that's a rare luxury.

Doctorow's column is mostly about how to write when all around you are the distractions of the Internet, but it applies to someone with a very limited schedule, too.

The main piece of advice is to set a very regular, short schedule. He says that when he's working he only aims for a page or two a day, often only devoting twenty minutes to it. In that way he can write a novel a year, half-a-dozen columns a month and other various things.

I've taken that advice and I now use the 30-to 45 minutes I get to myself everyday while Melissa is nursing Oscar in the afternoon as writing time. Because I felt like it wasn't enough time to accomplish any writing, I used to just read or even try and catch a nap during that time. Now that I'm using it to write, even if I'm only getting a page a day, I feel amazingly productive. I'm going to be pitching some comics to a publisher soon. I used to wonder where I'd find the time to write any comics if any of those pitches got accepted, now I know where that time will come from.

Doctorow has other advice as well in that article which I am experiencing varying degrees of success following, and I recommend you read it to see for yourself everything he says.