Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

How do you make time to get things done?

Get up earlier.

Really, I’m afraid that’s the answer.

On mornings when I get up by 5:30 or 6 a.m., work out, shower, dress, eat breakfast, scan the news, straighten up the house, give the diabetic cat her shot and hit work hard at 8:30 or 9 a.m., I am a productivity monster for the rest of the day.

There’s even time to clear clutter and work on my book.

On mornings when I drag ass out of bed a little after 7, barely get dressed enough to be presentable as I kiss my husband and school-age son goodbye on the driveway, then wander into the house in a fog and piddle around until the first cup of coffee hits, the day is often shot before it even starts.

Here’s the deal with getting up earlier – you have to go to bed earlier. Duh.

You have to stop drinking coffee after about 2 pm in the afternoon, unplug from electronics, maybe go for a short evening walk after dinner, take a minute to review your schedule and To Do list for the next day and get lights out by around 9:30 p.m.

Yes, 9:30. I wouldn’t even know what Letterman or Conan look like if I hadn’t seen pictures – no late night staring at the boob tube for me.

The Navy tried to make me a morning person for almost 23 years, but reveille never came easily to me. Now, as a freelancer and entrepreneur, I am “getting religion” about early to bed, early to rise….

How about you?

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It’s a simple formula, really.

To create and publish great content (blog posts, Facebook Page Wall notes, videos, tweets) you need….

1)  Lots of good ideas about something that interests you, a way to record those ideas and time to do so

2)  An editorial calendar to coherently organize and schedule the ideas – expanded into content – for publication, and time to think about and work on the calendar

3)  Structured blocks of time to create all of the great content that you’ve thought of, then organized and scheduled

Three simple things, and time ties them all together.

Number One is doing fine for me;  I have a whole notebook of blog post ideas that I carry around, and I keep notecards by the bed in case of late-night rockets of brilliance to the brain. Read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life for more insights into organizing your ideas.

I used to be pretty good with Number Two, then fell off of the planning wagon, got tired of pulling content out of my left ear at the last minute, and stumbled wearily back to the calendar.  The key is to schedule time to think through and craft the calendar, organize the content ideas and fit it all into your workflow. Go read Becky McCray’s post on the six most important things; it will help.

I am not doing so well at Number Three.

My basic schedule for keeping up with 3 blogs means a post for one of them each day, Monday through Friday (this blog is scheduled for every Tuesday and Friday. Ain’t happening, is it?)

This means I need a more functional schedule. It also means I am considering dropping one of the blogs for which I’ve run out of creative energy. In my Navy shipboard engineering days, the electricians called that “load-shedding”….dropping noncritical items off of the power grid to ensure power to vital systems and equipment.

It does not mean I need to “make time.”

You can’t “make time.”  That goose is already cooked. No one gets extra helpings of time or special favors from the Wizard of Time.

24 hours. That’s it.

As usual, strategist and thinker Chris Brogan has a thoughtful take on time. Here is the direct link to his video on YouTube if you can’t see the box below.

I found it helpful, and hope you will, too.

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