Many of you know that I’m interested not only in blogging and writing for the web, but also writing in general, most especially fiction writing. Some of the RSS feeds I follow are those of writers in various genres of fiction, science fiction being one of them. From time to time an article strikes me as containing useful advice that applies to all writing or maybe even more broadly to becoming more productive and efficient in any venture.

Jay Lake is one of the most prolific writers I know and also increasingly successful in the science fiction genre. I’ve posted links to his articles before because I’ve learned a lot from them. Why track productivity? is another article with some great points that can be much more widely applied than to just writing. In this quote you could substitute almost any other productive activity:

Writing is all about excuses. It’s almost always easier to do something else. Laundry, dishes, shopping, childcare, lots of things which are quite legitimate and don’t even qualify as cat waxing. Not to mention writing-related program activities, such as reading, research, send-outs, outlines, reading LJ and other sites, writing and reading email, making long-winded blog posts, etc. At some point the professional sloughs away the excuses and writes.

This is so true. It’s incredible how much time the average person wastes in a day or week. Think of all the time spent watching television or surfing news sites or some other less than optimally productive activity. He mentions ‘blog posts’ in the above, but in some cases (in mine, at least) this is a productive activity. However, the main point of the above passage stands true: It’s easy to put off those activities that propel us toward our goals.

The most important quote is right here:

If you’re wondering why you never get anything done, or why some writers (me, possibly, from your viewpoint) seem to have superhuman productivity, it’s that simple. Because once you start measuring, then you understand costs.

Measuring what we accomplish is vitally important to achieving goals. Jay is absolutely on the money when he says it’s about understanding the costs of whatever you’re doing. If you have a basic familiarity with economics, you’ve probably heard the term opportunity cost. This refers to the cost of choosing one activity over another. We all have limited time and however we choose to spend that time depends on what we deem to be most valuable at the moment. If we aren’t focused on achieving our goals at that moment, we may choose to do something of less value that ends up costing us in the long run.

He goes on to say this:

So if you’re not tracking yourself, find a way to do so. If you want to try an experiment, add this to the mix: track the number of hours you spend with the television on, the number of hours you spend surfing the Web, the number of hours you spend gaming, and/or the number of hours you spend out of your house going to parties, clubs, concerts and bars. Do that for a week or two, then look at how those things balance out. That will tell you how much of a priority writing really is for you. It doesn’t matter what the answer is, I’ve got no judgments here, but you might be quite surprised.

Again, replace ‘writing’ with whatever other productive activity that’s important to you. How much time are you spending on your writing, blogging, internet marketing, or business development versus other activities? This isn’t to say that you should spend every waking moment working toward your goals; we all need a fair amount of downtime to stay healthy and sane. Leisure time is very precious and valuable, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. There are many other moments of slack time in the day that we fill up with habitual, useless activities. These times could be put to better use. It’s definitely worth spending some time thinking about as we end up this year and begin the next.