The 12 Week Year for Writers

CHAPTER 5CREATING YOUR MODEL WEEK

Your ability to execute your 12 Week Plan depends directly on your ability to schedule enough time to get your writing done. This point is so simple it hardly seems worth noting, but I know from experience that it also strikes fear in many hearts, because making enough time to write is one of the biggest challenges for many writers.

Every life and every schedule present a unique set of challenges for making time to write. A few lucky folks out there may have all sorts of free time, but most of us need to get very creative to find time to write. Some of you are raising children, taking care of an older relative, working crazy hours, or starting a business. On top of that, many of us have schedules that change from week to week or month to month.

But here's the hard truth: If you don't plan time to write, you won't write. If you don't plan regular times to write, you won't write regularly. If you want to write more, you need to schedule more time to write. In short, what we don't plan, we don't do. By creating a 12 Week Plan you have taken a critical first step toward embracing that truth. You have identified your goals, identified the necessary tactics to accomplish them, and committed to executing those tactics over the next twelve weeks.

The next step is to align your time with the execution of your 12 Week Plan. To do that you need to do two things. First, you need to create a weekly schedule that provides the structure within which you will ...