Creating a Writing Schedule

Before I delve into creating a writing schedule, I think I should elaborate on what a writing schedule is and why you should have one.

For many writers, procrastination is a real problem. If you're not a procrastinator, you might be an over-worker and burning out is something that happens often to you. The writing schedule helps to regulate the amount of work you do in a day for maximum mental wellness and productivity so that the book you want to write will get written and you can enjoy a better writing life balance.

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A writing schedule is useful for writers writing multiple books or projects at once as well as for writers who need to follow up on different writing phases of your book.

I've talked about it previously the MGS scheme for Webnovelists and the NaNoWriMo challenge. These are writing events that require specific word counts by a deadline and the writing schedule can help you pace your writing speed.

Consistency is the key to productivity.

Here are some tools that I would recommend for tracking your writing progress and making that scheduler:

1. Excel / Google Sheets

This can be done on your computer, in a thumb drive or on Google Drive. I like this writing schedule tracker the best because it allows me to use simple formulas for calculation and tracking my word count.

For those writing multiple books at once, this is the ideal tracker and writing scheduler that you would like to consider. It goes hand in hand with google calendars because it can push notifications to your gmail inbox when you create an event or reminder.

You can view my personal writing scheduler here for reference.

2. Trello

A good artist friend of mine introduced this dashboard function to me and I've been hooked on it ever since. Trello is free to use, you don't need to upgrade it to premium if you don't want to but you need to create an account. The beauty of Trello board is how it allows you to create your projects by category like organised sticky notes. Once you're done, you can remove it. It's simple to use and allows for image links or file uploads.

Imagine you have a project about creating your book cover. There are font files for the typography as well as image references that you wish to include. Saving it all on a drive or document file will take up a lot of space and it can be hard finding what you need in one glance. Trello's unique sticky note dashboard allows everything to be found at one glance from your images, to the points that need to be done. You can create checklists and tag people you've added to your board as a team who can mark them as completed when it is done.

It's a simple board that works well if you have proofreaders and beta readers working on your chapters for your existing projects.

3. Sticky Notes

This is a default program on just about every laptop or computer. If it isn't, you can find some free software online to download it.

I like this program because it's something that opens on default upon startup. This is kind of the red alert emergency reminder that gets the whip cracking. If you don't remember to deal with this, it is going to continue getting in your face each time you start your computer. Perfect for those who need to look at something in their face first thing in the morning after hitting the power button.

Read also 3 Tips to Manage Writing Multiple Books At Once.

The mentioned tools above are things I use. However, you don't have to use everything if there isn't a need for it. Simply choose one that works best for you and stick to it.

The key to a successful writing schedule is discipline.

Alternatively, you can do it the old fashioned way and buy a table or wall calendar to write your targets on. I find this method effective when it comes to scheduling certain important posts that need manual updating. Scheduler functions don't work for every site, as much as I wish they were true. It's also very easy to miss certain updates for projects that I don't frequently work on.

An example of my old-fashioned calendar schedule would look like this:

That was during my NaNoWriMo when I had to manually upload posts to my Instagram for the Daily Writing Prompt activities. I also had to update the Patreon account for my weekly blogs while keeping up with the 50,000 words I needed to do for E-Ghost.

With that, I hope it gave some of you an idea of how to create your own writing schedule and plan or pace your word counts and chapters, especially if you're writing more than one work at a time.

If you require any assistance, feel free to drop me a message on any of my social media and don't forget to leave me a tip on my Patreon <3

That's all, thank you for reading and see you next week!