Scheduling Success

Breaking down accomplishments to a measurable science.

Scheduling Success

Breaking down accomplishments to a measurable science.

One of my favorite quotes will help set a realistic tone to this read:

“The road to success is paved with failure.”

It’s so easy to know what you want and soon get discouraged because you have been working so hard for a couple of weeks and you don’t feel any closer to your goal.

If you want to write a great book, it doesn’t take a lot of time. It takes planning and action on the plan you create. As another classic quote goes:

“Plan your work, work your plan, and your plan will work for you.”

You can take thirty days to write a good book or two years to write a good book. The process is all the same. It must get broken down into daily targets. You can write a sixty thousand word book in 30 days by dedicating blocks of time to write 2000 words a day. Then you can spend more time editing, analyzing, and rewriting the book with the same process; dedicate blocks of time daily for the next thirty days to go over a chapter or so.

This simple process of breaking down the big goals into manageable daily tasks eliminates the stress of trying to figure out how to accomplish the large goal, takes the focus off of that goal, creates strong daily habits, and enables you to focus on the small successes that eventually add up to the large accomplishment.

TRY THIS: Think about one large goal you’d like to accomplish but have never set aside the time for. Whether it was too big of a task, didn’t have enough resources, or you’ve simply been putting it off until the dreaded ‘tomorrow’.

Think about what you need to do to accomplish the task. If you were planning on writing a book, FOR EXAMPLE, you may need to take the time out to plan the outline of the book. Write the book. Edit the book. Design the cover. It all seems like so much, right?

But if you want to write an 80,000 word book in a year, while working a full-time job and raising a kid, the process couldn’t be simpler. It doesn’t change.

Brainstorm the first month. Get all of your ideas out. Schedule time the first week to think about the plot. One day you may be sketching the plot, the next you may be focusing on the conflicts, then the climax, etc. Next week, you completely create all of the main characters. You create the lives of the protagonist, the environment, the family, the antagonist, etc. The point is, you schedule the time in daily, and it’ll all get done.

Months two through ten, you set aside time to write your book. 80,000 words? Schedule it slow. 10,000 words per month which equals 300–500 words per day, every day. If you’re writing a book that may even be too small to get an entire idea out so you can bank on having extra time by the end of month ten.

The last two months you break it down by the chapter. Schedule the time to edit a single chapter or X amount of words per day. You can loop in finding a designer for your book cover.

Do you see what I’m getting at here? It’s not so easy once you get rolling and really break it down. Before you know it, the big task will be done because of how you allocated your time, daily!

Try it. Do it. Live it. It makes life a hell of a lot simpler!