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Description:
Writer's Block Category #3 - Difficulty Prioritizing When your to-do list is miles long and keeps growing every second, it can feel irresponsible and indulgent to write. But the truth is that your writing is important, and creativity is a form of self care. This episode covers the paradox of choice and different methods for prioritizing your life so that writing remains toward the top of the list.
Listen
You are listening to The Novel Writing Podcast, episode 150.
I'm your host, Colleen Mitchell. Grab a cup, cozy up, and let's get to writing!
Episode Topic
Today's episode is about the third of four categories of Writer's Block, called "Difficulty Prioritizing". If you got this result from our Writer's Block quiz, then your first stop should be the video Halie made for you, so if you haven't watched that yet, go ahead and pause this first.
You back? Awesome.
Overwhelm and Inaction
Raise your hand if you've ever done NOTHING because you couldn't decide which thing to do first?
This is a classic problem of the overwhelmed. When you have too many things to do, the brain will short circuit and choose to do nothing, because there are too many competing choices.
There's actually a study out there about how too many choices makes us less satisfied with the final choice than if we only had a few choices. Think about clothes shopping for a moment. I promise we'll get back to writing in a minute. When you go shopping for a shirt, and there's 30 choices of shirt (think style, colors, patterns, material, long sleeve, short sleeve, thickness, stitching, etc.), you will have a harder time choosing a shirt than if you had 3 or 4 options. Not only that, when you get home and actually wear the shirt, you'll be less satisfied with your choice. You'll think about all the other shirts you could have picked that were really just as good as the one you bought, and yet you didn't choose them. You chose THIS one.
Connecting Back to Writing
So let's bring this back to writing and prioritizing. Writing is one of many things on your never-ending to-do list. Let's just face the fact that we will NEVER EVER cross the "last" thing off the to-do list, because it grows every day. We never lack things to do.
Your brain will look at each thing on your to-do list and categorize it as "easy" or "hard", and more often than not, writing gets labeled as "hard" by the brain even if you really enjoy writing. This is what happens next: writing shoots to the bottom of the to-do list, and then your brain looks at everything else, labeling the rest of them as hard or easy.
The vast majority of the things on your to-do list will end up in the "hard" category, even if they truly aren't.
The Challenge of "Easy" Tasks
What's even worse is that the things your brain labeled as "easy" actually are "hard" in disguise, because you have to overcome the inertia of NOT DOING SOMETHING in order to START, even if it's something easy.
So for example, handwashing some of the dishes is a recurring task on my to-do list that my brain would label as "easy". But then I'd have to start doing it. And that requires effort and energy.
It's not that I can't do it, it's that my brain (and yours, too) is automatically pushing EVERYTHING to the bottom of the priority list, even though there are technically things that have to be done sooner than others.
The History of Priorities
Fun fact about the word priority is that it wasn't even a plural word until the 1940s. The word priority means the number one most important thing. And when you have more than one most important thing, none of them are most important, and you're more likely to not do any of them when you want to do them.
So when you have a billion things on your to-do list, and your brain labels them all as hard, and writing is in that category, no wonder you have trouble prioritizing writing!
Good News: Solutions Exist!
Are you ready for the good news? There are multiple ways to force your brain to properly prioritize things, and it's just a matter of A) finding what works for your brain, and B) coming up with a surefire way to overcome the inertia of starting.
Methods for Prioritizing
I'm going to list a few different ways of prioritizing, with the understanding that your writing is important, but it's up to you to decide how urgent it is. Never forget that your writing is important.
The Eisenhower Matrix
This forces you to categorize things into a matrix of urgency and importance. High Urgency and High Importance are the things to do immediately, Low Urgency and High Importance are the long-term tasks and projects to do once your immediate things are out of the way, High Urgency and Low Importance are things to delegate, and Low Urgency Low Importance are things to delete (if possible). And if not possible to delete (or delegate), do them last. Writing would fall into your Low Urgency High Importance box.
Prioritization Matrix Spread
I saw this on Instagram and will link the video in the description. It has you compare every task against all the others to determine which one is more important, and then at the end, you add up the scores to determine the order in which you should do things based on overall importance. I've done this exactly once, but the one time I did it was eye-opening and really helpful. The downside is how long it takes to both set up and go through.
ABC Prioritizing
Your most important things are marked as A-tasks, second most important are B-tasks, and everything else is a C-task. Ideally, you'd work through your lists A to C. Writing should be an A- or B-task.
Eat the Frog
Do one really hard thing every morning on your to-do list so that you get the "worst" out of the way and have a sense of accomplishment the rest of the day. Maybe your frog is a difficult scene to write.
The Big 3 (Full Focus Planner)
Choose 3 main things to do each day, and then do them. Hopefully, writing is one of those big 3.
Final Thoughts
There are innumerable more prioritization methods out there, but you'll have to try them out to decide which one works best for you, always remembering that no matter which method you pick, putting writing toward the top of your list does not mean that you're ignoring or putting off your other obligations.
Outro
That's it for today's episode! If this has been helpful for you, I'd appreciate it if you left a rating or review on your platform of choice. While it does nothing for me, it does help other writers find this podcast.
Thanks for joining me, and remember, the first draft is supposed to be garbage.
Show Notes
Dive into the first episode of the Novel Writing Podcast with your host Colleen and her sometimes-guest Halie Fewkes Damewood! Here, we give you the gist of who we are, what we do, and what you can expect from this podcast.
What to do next…
Halie & Colleen are both authors! Find their books below:
Secrets of the Tally, by Halie Fewkes Damewood
The Chronicles of Talahm, by Colleen Mitchell
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