It’s now 4:10 PM my time and I have to head off to run some errands and meet an old friend.

But on my calendar I had noted that it was time to write my next installment in the 10 Keys to Faster Copy… so here’s #5 and it relates directly:

“Writing Time Must Be Managed”

There’s an old truism in business that “work expands to fill the time available.”

This absolutely applies to writing. When you give yourself, say, 4 hours to write 1 page of copy then by gum, it’ll take 4 hours to write that page.

On the other hand, if you set your alarm and only give yourself 10 minutes to write that page, I’ll betcha you can crank out that page mucho pronto.

I don’t have any fancy, scientific reason for this. My best guess is that we’re prone – especially these days – to lose focus at a whim, which makes it a whole lot harder to buckle down and stay productive.

Hence, you need to trick your mind (note I didn’t say use will power) to abandon all happy alternatives in the effort to get that copy written as quickly as possible.

And the method I mentioned earlier is one of the best – use your calendar and literally block out the amount of time you intend to spend on the project.

It’s best is you can define both:

  1. the amount of time you intend to spend… and…
  2. the exact output you intend to wind up with.

You can do one without the other but BOTH is really the key to maximizing your use of time.

This may be a new concept to you. And the push back that I myself used initially went something like “but I don’t know how long it will take me to produce 10 pages.”

Trust me, the more you do this, the better you’ll get at understanding your optimal level of productivity.

Try it for your next writing task.

Write faster. Write better. Right now.

– Jack

PS – I gave myself 10 minutes to accomplish this email and it wrapped right on the dot. 🙂

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