Are You A Productive Writer?

How much time do you spend on writing each week? When you sit at your desk to write, is that all you do, or do you get distracted by other things. I’ll come clean and say that I am prone to distraction. In addition to writing/blogging, I also spend my time reading blogs, maintaining my sites, checking out new advertisers, researching and promoting my sites or blog posts. All of these are essential tasks for a writing business. But …

Rescuing My Writing Time

If you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago – or if you’d asked anyone in my family – you’d hear that I spend all day at my computer. I start at 8am, work till 2pm or 3pm depending on school pickup, and do some more in the evening. But I decided to find out for sure, with the aid of an application called RescueTime.

RescueTime is a time tracker. There’s a lightweight desktop application which sends info to a website to produce charts about how you spend your time. Of course, you have to do some work too.

Tagging And Tracking

The desktop app tracks the applications that you open and how long you spend using them (measuring the application that’s in focus at the time). It also tracks which sites you visit. Your job is to tag those sites with handy labels. If you are a serial surfer, then this might prove too much for you. I discovered that I visit a lot more sites than I thought.

I’ve been using it for the last week and I’ve made a few more discoveries. This was an unusual week for me. I was off site for a couple of days, and busy in the evenings, so I did much less writing than usual – just 11 hours. That included both writing articles and writing blogs. I spent 4 hours on email, 2 hours on site maintenance, and nearly an hour each on advertising and promotion.

What I Learned About Writing Time

Clicking on my most productive day revealed that I spent almost 45% of my time writing, with the rest spent on other tasks, including looking at other blogs. That means that 55% of my time was spent doing other stuff. A lot of this was research for my writing, searching for new gigs, and emailing writers and clients, so this was all related stuff.

And I learned something else. Although I did less writing than I thought, my writing time was extremely productive. In the hours that I worked, I wrote quickly and maintained a high hourly rate. The lesson is that I don’t have to be glued to my computer all day to make writing pay. I just have to use my writing time effectively.

Have you ever tried tracking how you spend your time? What tools did you use and what did you find out?

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Tagged as: freelance writing, writing, writing business, writing career