The 12 Week Year for Writers

CHAPTER 10HOW TO USE THE 12 WEEK YEAR TO WRITE MORE

Now that you've made it this far, you have a solid grasp on how the 12 Week Year works for planning and managing your writing process. If you've already created your first 12 Week Plan by this point, congratulations. You're ready to achieve great things. It will take a while before you really understand how it works, but you're on your way. Your first 12 Week Year will be a thrilling but somewhat bumpy ride as you adjust to new habits and confront your execution performance on a weekly basis.

In this chapter, I want to dive deeper on how to use the 12 Week Year to make you a more productive writer. Unsurprisingly, a question I get a lot is: What's the one best thing I can do to improve my writing productivity? My answer is always the same: There are no magic hacks, short cuts, or weird tricks to writing more or faster. If you want to be a more productive writer, you need to embrace a system like the 12 Week Year.

That said, if I know a bit more about what exactly you mean by “productive,” I can be more specific about how the 12 Week Year can help. It turns out that being more productive can mean several different things. Which of these is most important to you will probably vary over your writing journey, but writers commonly worry about at least three meanings of the word productivity:

• - Writing more words at any given writing session
• - Writing more words over a period of time (a week, a month, a year, etc.)
• - Finishing ...