The Importance of Time Management by miika Spray

To my eternal embarrassment, I should really add a disclaimer to this post:

Take my advice, I'm not using it.

Don't let Twitter & Facebook get more keystrokes than your manuscript.

Time management is a topic most of you have heard time and again, here and elsewhere, and many of you have just nodded and taken it on board but not really put it into practice.

It's OK, you can admit it, even if just to yourself.  There's no-one here but us chickens!

My day tends to be crazy, I wear so many hats a hydra would be hard pressed to keep up!  Between cover art and illustration commissions, systems administration, or writing, my days are long, and coffee flows like arterial gushes of darkened blood splashing across the walls in an orgy of caffeinated carna ...

*ahem* sorry, I get carried away sometimes.

I'm sure all of you have days with just as many demands on your time as I do - and I think it's safe to say many of you have fallen into a sneaky little trap lurking just out of your conscious ability to see it ...

Social media.

"Why did she call it a trap?", you may ask.  It's a trap because it's interactive, continuous.  You've all seen people at restaurants or clubs or in class or on the bus repetitively refreshing their twitter and facebook feeds, frantically thumbing away replies to who-knows-what - the electronic teat that seduces you into needing to participate all the time, lest you miss something earth shattering!

Which is where social media becomes you, the author's, worst enemy.

Take a look at the non-manuscript wordcount you've amassed today - in total, especially twitter and facebook.

Then compare it to your actual writing wordcount.

If your social media wordcount exceeds your writing wordcount, you've fallen into the trap and are sinking fast.

This is where time management is critical, but when it comes to social media it may also be the hardest discipline to force onto yourself.

Social media is great, for talking to friends, to keep up with news, to get pointers on writing, and to promote yourself.  But when your social media output exceeds your writing wordcount, you've changed professions from writer to social media maven.  Admittedly, that actually does pay off for some people, but you're a writer, not a twit :)

So you have to be just as assiduous and dedicated to managing your time on social media platforms as you are making sure you write one, two, six, however many hours per day - and stick to it.  The earth won't end if you let some tweet go unanswered for a few hours, your followers won't (in theory) abandon you in droves because you're not up and retweeting stuff at 3am.

Budget a part of your day, either a block or a series of them, for when you'll go check on your social media lists and posts, but don't let it get dragged beyond the time you've budgeted.

It'll be difficult for people, social media is a very tempting channel, but ...

Just think how much further along your story might have been if all those words you clattered off into the social media universe had been dropped into your manuscript instead?

So, since I'm not exactly in a position to proudly offer ways to avoid the trap, share your ways of not getting sucked into the social media time-suck?