PREPTOBER 2022 | Planning Your Day

Starting your day without a proper plan is like flying blind without a navigation system. It doesn’t bode well.

We walked through your top ten NaNoWriMo goals in an earlier post. As a refresher, there are five categories to keep in mind when picking your top ten goals: health, support system, writing, accountability, and fun. Then, you pick one or two goals for each category, adding up to a total of ten goals for your NaNoWriMo experience.

Now, you may have been thinking to yourself, Liz, ten goals is a lot. I don’t know if I have enough time in my day to get something done for each of those ten goals––let alone my actual NaNoWriMo daily word count.

But you may have more time than you realize. You just need to take a realistic look at what your time is actually going to.

Where Are You Now?

In order to achieve our goals, it’s important to have a gut check of where we are right now. Write down your current schedule on a piece of paper. Actually take your time doing this and be perfectly honest with yourself.

What does your morning look like? Are you sleeping in until nine in the morning every day? Are you waiting until the last minute to wake up for work in the morning and then scrambling to get ready?

What do your working hours look like? Are you using your break time at work to scroll through social media?

What does your afternoon look like? Do you find yourself nodding off at around three in the afternoon every day? Are you constantly reaching for coffee just to fight off exhaustion?

What does your evening look like? Do you get off of work and immediately go out for drinks with friends? Do you sit at home and watch television? How late do you stay up? Do you go to bed early or do you go to bed late?

When I asked myself these questions a few years ago, it was a hard reality check for me. The majority of my day was spent in a slump, and I honestly cannot tell you what I did during those waking hours. I can tell you that I wasn’t writing.

Where Do You Want to Be?

Now it’s time for you to figure out where you want to be. This is especially important as we go into NaNoWriMo. I want you to visualize what your ideal NaNoWriMo day will look like. Get detailed with it.

What does your morning look like? Are you waking up earlier to get your writing done? Do you workout in the morning as a part of your health goals? What do you eat in the morning to fuel your mind?

What does your work day look like? Those breaks you used to spend scrolling––are you writing instead? Are you walking for your lunch break instead of mindlessly scrolling? Do you call up one of your support system people for a quick chat?

What does your afternoon look like? Are you hydrating yourself properly so you don’t feel as tired? Are you taking a step away from work for a bit to do some meditation?

What does your evening look like? Do you call it quits for the workday at five and then go for a walk or a run before you start your evening? What time to you go to bed at night? Do you go to bed early or do you stay up a little bit later to get your writing done for the day?

Ask yourself these questions and really envision what you want your typical NaNoWriMo day to look like. Please note that every day is not going to be perfect. That’s life. Things happen. But the better we plan out our day and visualize it in full, the better we’ll handle whatever distractions life throws at us.

Routines

Over the next couple of days, I will be talking about routines in more detail, but I wanted to touch on the idea of routines in this post. We’ve all seen the epic morning and evening routines on YouTube. If you haven’t, I strongly recommend you check them out.

Writing should become a part of your daily routine. Morning, afternoon and evening routines need to involve your creativity in some way. This is particularly helpful during NaNoWriMo when we’ll all be aiming for 50,000 words in a month and we need to cram as much writing into our day as possible.

For example: I do a lot of my fantasy romance writing in the early mornings before my day gets started. In the afternoon (during my lunch break), I like to shoot videos and look at my blog. In my evenings, I write for my blog. I have it set up this way because my mornings are when my mind is freshest and I can be my most creative self. I break up my afternoon with a burst of creativity that doesn’t take too much brain power, but just enough to keep me on my toes. In the evenings, I’m ready to free write, and I view my blog almost like my diary where I can just vomit words onto a page and edit later.

Your routines may look very different from mine. Maybe you’re a night owl and find yourself way more creative at night. The bulk of your NaNoWriMo writing may need to be done at night, then. Maybe your day starts at an odd hour like ten at night because you work the night shift. Whatever your day looks like, your NaNoWriMo schedule needs to be tailored to that.

Be Realistic

Be realistic when you’re planning your ideal NaNoWriMo day. Would we all love to write for eight hours a day and achieve well over our word count on a daily basis? Yes. Is that realistic? No.

Figure out how much time you need during the day to accomplish your daily word count. You could be a writer that needs two hours just to get the typical 1667 words per day. You may not be able to carve that time out for yourself every single day and you may need to overcompensate on the weekends. Make sure you plan that out.

I recommend grabbing a planner like Angie Bellemare’s Daily Grind Planner to help you plan out your day. Her planner makes you list out your top ten goals every day and then write down your schedule so you know how you’re going to fit a task for each of your top ten goals into your day.

I’ll drop my ideal schedule down below so you can get an idea of what my typical day will look like in NaNoWriMo:

Notice that I incorporate my goals of fun into my schedule––I usually like to watch a movie and read in the evening. Remember to decompress after your long day and include your own fun goals into your schedule. Drop a comment below to let me know what you’re thinking in terms of your schedule and how you plan on incorporating your top ten NaNoWriMo goals into your day.