Tag: tasks

APODS – Priorities: The Opportunity Cost by Amanda Cabot

This month we’re going to conclude our discussion of priorities by talking about opportunity cost. Are you familiar with the term? The basic concept is that resources, whether time, money, energy, or something else are finite and that the cost of something is not absolute. Rather than measuring dollars or minutes, opportunity cost measures what we give up when we make a choice.

Video Game or T-shirt

Consider a child whose allowance is enough to allow him to buy either the video game he wants or the T-shirt with his favorite sports star’s picture on it. If he chooses the game, he cannot buy the T-shirt. Therefore, the opportunity cost is the T-shirt. When he buys the video game, he’s making the decision that it’s more important to him than the T-shirt.

As writers, we make the same decisions each time we set (or ignore) our priorities. In our case, the precious and finite resource is time.

If you remember one thing from this post, I hope it will be the following:

Time to write is not free.

You might want to print that out and post it everywhere you posted the picture of your goal, because it’s equally important.

The End

In your quest to reach “The End,” you should ask yourself two questions.

(1) How important is writing to me?

(2) What sacrifices am I willing to make?

You can say that writing is important, but as the adage reminds us, actions speak more loudly than words. If you procrastinate, if going to a movie or (shudder) cleaning your house is what you choose to do rather than finish your chapter, you’re demonstrating that writing isn’t as important as you claim it is.

opportunity costs, priorities
Actions Speak Louder than Words

The second question is where opportunity cost becomes critical. I used the word “sacrifices” deliberately, because there will be not simply tradeoffs but true sacrifices if you make writing and reaching “The End” your highest priority. There will be times when you’ll have to turn down an invitation you’d like to accept, simply because you need that time to write. The cost of that invitation is finishing the chapter. Don’t mislead yourself by saying, “just this once won’t matter.” Each choice you make is significant.

As you accept the fact that time is finite and that you will have to make choices about how to spend your time, it’s important to decide what will not get done. I recommend the following three steps.

Review your current time use analysis. Remember how you tracked your time for at least a week and categorized how you were spending it? That analysis is an invaluable resource and a key to establishing priorities.

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Warning — There May Be Side Effects

Differentiate between urgent and important tasks. If your child has broken her arm, taking her to the doctor is urgent. Doing laundry may be important, but – unlike an urgent task – it can be delayed.

Substitute writing for the least value-added tasks. Did you discover that you spent a lot of time watching television or reading tweets and Facebook posts? While you might consider those important, are they more valuable than writing another chapter? The opportunity cost of the time you spend on them is time you didn’t spend writing.

Establishing and following priorities isn’t easy, but it’s essential if you want to reach “The End.” Each time you make a decision about how to spend your time, consider the opportunity cost. And, one final bit of advice: “No” is an acceptable response when someone asks you to do something that will interfere with your writing time.

(C) 2019 Amanda Cabot

Amanda Cabot

Amanda Cabot is no stranger to getting to “The End.” She juggled a sixty-hour a week job with nonnegotiable deadlines and building a house long-distance at the same time that she wrote two books a year. Whether or not she kept her sanity during that time is debatable. Amanda is the best-selling author of over thirty novels, eight novellas, four non-fiction books, and what she describes as enough technical articles to cure insomnia in a medium-sized city.

Her most recent release is A Tender Hope, the third in the Cimarron Creek trilogy.

Amanda Cabot, Cimarron Creek Trilogy
A Tender Hope, by Amanda Cabot

You can find Amanda at:

www.amandacabot.com
https://www.facebook.com/amanda.j.cabot
https://twitter.com/AmandaJoyCabot/
http://amandajoycabot.blogspot.com/

APODS – Priorities: The Four Ps (Part Three – Plan and Part) by Amanda Cabot

This month we’re going to conclude our discussion of William Bridges’s Four Ps (Purpose, Picture, Plan, and Part) by outlining the way to develop a successful Plan. The final step will be to identify the Parts everyone will play.

In prior months, you developed a Picture of what it is you want to accomplish. Now it’s time to create the Plan. I might have called it the schedule, but that would destroy the symmetry of the Four Ps, so Plan it is. This is where you determine everything that you need to do to reach “The End” and organize it into a logical sequence. That may sound daunting, but it becomes doable if you break everything into small tasks.

Step 1: List everything that needs to be done

Depending on where you already are in the process, creating the task list may be as simple as listing the chapters you need to write. But, if you’re at the very beginning of a story, you may also need to develop your characters’ background stories and research the location or other key elements of the story. And if you’re like me and write multiple drafts, your list of steps will include those multiple drafts as well as a final review.

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Thyme to Write – Make a List
Step 2: Arrange those tasks in logical sequence

After all, you can’t write the second draft until the first one is finished.

Step 3: Estimate how long each of those tasks will require

In this step, we’re talking the amount of effort involved, not the elapsed time. Does it take you sixty hours to write a chapter and thirty hours to complete the second draft? Of course, it varies, but do your best to estimate how much effort is involved in each of the tasks.

Step 4: Divide each task that exceeds 40 hours into sub-tasks of no more than 40 hours

Please note that the forty-hour limit assumes that you devote forty hours each week to writing. If your writing time is longer or shorter, adjust your sub-task effort limit accordingly. Having tasks that require no more than a week to complete is important because it allows you to measure your progress and take corrective actions, if needed, before too much time has elapsed.

schedule, priorities, realistic
Establish a realistic schedule
Step 5: Establish a realistic schedule for completing those tasks

What do I mean by realistic? One that has a high probability of success. That means factoring in life. Even if your normal work week is forty hours, there will be times when you can’t actually work a full forty hours. Recognize that up front and give yourself slack time, ideally on a weekly basis. Remember that your goal is to succeed, not to discourage yourself by falling behind because you developed a schedule that’s impossible to meet.

Once the plan is complete, it’s time to assign Parts. While writing is primarily a solitary occupation, and the majority of the responsibility for getting to “The End” falls on you, others play roles as well. It’s important to recognize those other contributors at the very beginning of the project and to get their buy-in to the schedule so that they’ll be ready to play their parts when needed.

And there you have it: William Bridges’s Four Ps as applied to writers. I hope you’ll come back next month for a discussion of opportunity cost.

(C) 2019 Amanda Cabot

Amanda Cabot

Amanda Cabot is no stranger to getting to “The End.” She juggled a sixty-hour a week job with nonnegotiable deadlines and building a house long-distance at the same time that she wrote two books a year. Whether or not she kept her sanity during that time is debatable. Amanda is the best-selling author of over thirty novels, eight novellas, four non-fiction books, and what she describes as enough technical articles to cure insomnia in a medium-sized city.

Her most recent release is A Tender Hope, the third in the Cimarron Creek trilogy.

Amanda Cabot, Cimarron Creek Trilogy
A Tender Hope, by Amanda Cabot

You can find Amanda at:

www.amandacabot.com
https://www.facebook.com/amanda.j.cabot
https://twitter.com/AmandaJoyCabot/
http://amandajoycabot.blogspot.com/