“Banking” Writing Hours Pays Off With Interest

The anchored lifestyle ticks along more smoothly when you do a little bit of each of your priorities every day, day in, day out. Sometimes, though, you might find that cramming is a useful tool in your time management toolbox.

Although cramming is usually associated with all-out marathon sessions of work designed to meet a crushing deadline, the sort of cramming I have in mind is a much more positive, pro-active kind. I tend to call it “banking” rather than cramming. Although the effect is the same, the motive is 180 degrees different.

If you’re under deadline pressure and working all the spare hours you have, ignoring the family, and passing on basic functions like sleeping and eating, that’s cramming. It’s an intense, heart-attack inducing period of high pressure, and high expectations, and there’s penalties involved if you don’t complete the massive amount of work you’re facing. It’s a negatively-motivated experience, and all you feel at the end of the cramming session is a sense of relief and disgust at your own body odour.

Banking, on the other hand, is a voluntary decision (for a number of reasons that I’ll cover in a minute) to push aside a number of priorities for a defined period of time, and just write, instead. There’s no penalty for not completing a requisite high number of words, no contractual obligations to be met. It’s simply a short period of time where you chose to focus very intensely on writing, and ignore the greater portion of your life.

You can’t ignore all of your life, because you do have to turn up for the day job each day, and showering is always a good idea.

But there are other daily priorities that you can temporarily put aside, that will suffer only minimal damage from being ignored: Marketing and PR activities, reading of anything and everything, including email – put an out-of-office notice on your email program that says you’re out of town for a week, or something that let people know you won’t be responding for a week.

Go through your daily schedule and decide what can be safely dumped for the period you’re trying to clear. Get the other members of your household involved, too. If they understand and are cooperative, you may find that even basic functions like eating switch to auto-pilot, as meals magically arrive on your desk.

A week is a pretty safe period to put your life on hold. Two weeks will start to stretch tolerance levels of most priorities, but can be handled if you plan it properly. Much more than two weeks is probably not a good idea for a number of reasons, including simple human endurance. You can’t keep up such a concentrated effort for longer than two weeks without something suffering in your life, including your mental or physical health…and the quality of your writing, too.

Reasons for Banking Hours.

As an example, if you have a long weekend coming up when you would like to go away on a short vacation with the family, you might chose to spend a week or two before the long weekend “banking” your writing hours: getting as much done as you can, so that the weekend off is guilt-free and relaxing.

Actually, if you go on your weekend knowing that you’ve banked 75,000 words over the last two weeks, then the weekend is going to be relaxing twice over, because you’ll be basking in a strong sense of accomplishment, plus getting to let your hair down and have fun at the same time.

By the way, for such a pay off, you may find your family more than happy to help you ignore them for the week leading up to it.

Other reasons and ideas for banking include:

1. Getting a “tough” book started.

If you’re girding yourself to tackle a book that is more ambitious, complex, or otherwise challenging for you, a week or two of banking hours will help you get the manuscript underway, and give you a sense of control over the project. This is also a great way of easing into a book that is outside your normal subgenre.

2. Getting a difficult book out of trouble

Same idea as #1: if you’ve hit a snag or the book just doesn’t seem to be working, and you’re not sure why, spending a week or two focusing on it will help you sort out the problems and get it back underway again.

3. Playing catch-up to assuage your guilt centre

Maybe you’re feeling vaguely stressed and frustrated these days because life has thrown you a curve and you haven’t been able to write as much as you planned or would like. Perhaps you’ve just been going through the doldrums and procrastinating your way out of writing when you should, or when you promised yourself you would.

For either of these reasons, a week or two banking writing hours will do marvels for your confidence, ignite your passion for the current book once more, and get you progressing through the pages to the point where the idea of sitting down to write is no longer the scourge of your day.

4. Because you’ve been banking some other activity lately, and need to catch up.

Banking hours can work for more than just your writing productivity. If you’ve just launched a new book, the first couple of weeks of concentrated book marketing can impact your writing output. A week or two of banking writing hours will put your account back in the black.

5. Because you have the deadline from hell coming up.

This may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but there’s a sharp difference between cramming to hit a deadline, and banking hours in order to meet one.

Cramming is something that happens when you look up at the calendar and feel your heart flip and thud when you realize you only have two weeks to turn in the book and 95,000 words to go.

Banking to meet a deadline is when you first get the book’s production schedule, realize how tight it is, and actually schedule in one or two weeks of concentrated writing right at the very beginning, and maybe the option for another week or two half-way through the schedule, in order to build up pages and loosen up the schedule at the far end.

Banking to meet a deadline means you’ll turn in properly written stories on time, without the heart attack and horrendous pressure, and look incredibly professional and reliable when you do.

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Banking hours is a positively-charged experience that can help you overcome any number of life’s little niggles. It’ll help you settle back into the anchored author’s standard day with a peaceful mind and a sense of accomplishment.

Give it try and let me know how it works for you.

First appeared on Anchored Authors, August 26, 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.