If you are like me, you have tons of ideas for pieces you want to write and not enough time or energy to actually write them.
The result is often paralysis – you have unfinished blog posts, book outlines, and book chunks lying around in piles or on your hard disk, thousands of words that might never see the light of day. I feel your pain… perhaps 5% of what I write I publish. In fact, as I am writing these lines, I really hope that they will “find their way” into my blog.
But no more. I decided to increase the productivity of my writing. Move from 5% publishing rate to 20% at the first stage, and one day cross the 50% barrier. So I came up with a system to help me determine which writing projects I should focus on. Here it is:
How to prioritize your precious time and become more productive with your writing?
I created a table to compare my different writing projects. It contains important parameters such as time to completion, potential rewards, risk, etc. Below are a few examples of projects I am currently working on.
| Project | Time to completion | Long term reward | Short term Leverage | Risk |
| Rewriting my “failing” book | 3 months | A new book out really fast! | No leverage | Perhaps no re-write can make this book good. |
| Just blogging whatever comes to mind | NA | Possibly high volume of content | NA | No long term goal..? |
| Blog about specific topic, e.g travelling | NA | Can be turned into non-fiction book later | NA | Not exciting enough |
| A novel about depression – I have about 30% written | 5 months to first draft | Niche book which could be successful on long tail | Release chunks of the book on my blog, weekly | Writing a book about depression is like coming out of the closet in many ways |
This is the system I came up with; which of the projects above would you choose? how do you manage your content? Would love some more ideas…
