How to Keep Writing and Get Stuff Done in Pandemic Year 2
Adjusting expectations is the key to productivity
If you’ve spent any time researching productivity, you’ve come across this maxim: “We all have the same 24 hours.”
Love it or hate it, if you’re like me, you often feel you don’t have enough time to get everything done. Ironically, since the pandemic hit, time is the one thing many of us gained. But between caring for a toddler, Zoom schooling with a kindergartner, and tagging in and out with my wife on work projects, my writing time shrank. I did my best to keep up, but my output waned.
At first, I beat myself up. I whinged everyone seemed to have more than the 24 hours I had. Every colleague was zooming forward in their career and I was stuck in neutral. That mindset was toxic and doing me no favors. I realized that while I can’t control the time my responsibilities take, I can control my expectations about what I can produce. That perspective shift changed everything.
Setting Expectations
To be productive, writers have to set expectations. Some of us can write consistently every day, churning out the same ten pages or two articles or 2,000 words. But for many of us, expectations are a flexible thing. And that’s okay.
