We’re just over a week into the year, and so far it’s a bit of a mixed bag. In terms of word count, I’m several thousand words below target for the tenth of the month. From a production perspective, I’ve completed two short stories, and have a third in flight.

If I’m going to hit the rest of my targets for January, I need to increase my word count, and two things happened this past week that were like a bat over the head. I mentioned Dean Wes’y Smith’s writing challenge last time. What I didn’t mention is the planning he did to set himself up for success.

Dean spent time in December tracking how he spent his time, and where he could find the hours for writing. The blog is here – My 2022 Challenge. In parallel, I listened to one of Joanna Penn’s podcasts, and she talked about the same thing – tracking your hours and finding time for writing.

And then it hit me.

I’ve listened to both these writers, and others, say much the same thing. I’ve never set myself up to track my time, and wondered why I couldn’t “find” extra minutes to write. I’ll let you know how the tracking goes this week, along with, potentially, two new short stories.