Backing Up, Organizing, Managing Time

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Although there are so many things that we can try to help us manage parts of our writing careers, I’ve found that some of the best are the smaller, quieter things.  It’s easy for me to get distracted by trying Facebook ads or working over my metadata…and these are both really good things to do.  But sometimes I need to return to the basics, especially when I’m very busy and don’t follow some of my own best practices.

Here are a few:

Backing up:  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard nightmares about losing content. Too many! It’s like a horror story for writers.  We hear all the time about backing up our work in progress, and that’s certainly important. But it’s also important to have previous projects backed up, covers backed up, contracts backed up. I just went through and backed up a ton of stuff and shuddered when I realized how much time had passed since my last backup.  I usually do it daily.

I use a variety of different methods.  We really don’t have to overthink it. I’ve used USB drives and servers and external hard drives in the past.  At some point, it occurred to me that if my house were destroyed by fire or a tornado or something, those types of backups wouldn’t be enough.   That’s when I started emailing files to myself so that I would have data on a cloud. Now I use various clouds to backup to, including Google and Microsoft.

Tagging and titling documents. Not only should documents, covers, and business papers be backed up, but it helps if they’re listed in a way that we can easily find them.  I’ve stupidly spent the last few weeks pulling up a document by searching for it because I couldn’t find it in my documents folder and I’m uploading it on Wednesdays to Wattpad.  I finally took the extra minute or two to tag the thing and then save a copy to a location on my computer that makes sense. I was just wasting that time every Wednesday (it was 5 a.m. every Wednesday and maybe I wasn’t at my sharpest, but still).

Now I’ve been on a tagging spree.  Sometimes I’ll save documents…all kinds of documents…and not have the slightest idea later what I was thinking when I saved it. I went through and put tags on a slew of documents and pictures this week so that I might save myself a bit of time later on by being able to quickly locate important files.

Another time saving thing that I do is to outsource my memory as much as humanly possible.  And this is one thing I haven’t neglected to do. I’d be sunk if I did, because my memory is abominable and always has been.  I use Google calendar so that I have it with me on both my laptop and phone. I add everything to the calendar…events I need to attend, events that other family members need to attend, chores, the grocery list, and any action items from emails.

When I receive anything in an email that requires an action from me, I put it on my calendar along with a copy/pasted bit from the email in the calendar notes area with the details and the name/phone number of the sender.  Having all the information in one spot helps me complete the tasks.

Timers and clocks and evaluating what’s not working.  I mention this frequently, I know, but it’s the way I keep track of my time and keep on task.  I set a timer (usually on Google…you just put ‘set a timer for ___minutes’ into the search box) and when the timer goes off, I know I need to stop being on social media, or whatever the current task was.

And, sometimes, we just need to assess when things aren’t working.  If something we’re doing is consistently not working (with our writing, our promoting, our accounting, etc.), we need to stop and ask ourselves why and brainstorm new approaches.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about and working on lately.  How about you?

And, if you’re interested in hearing more about Wattpad and best practices there, Orna Ross’s interview with me is on the ALLi site.

Image: MorgueFile: Dianne Hope