Bonus: Write More Words! Marissa and Joanne's Top Productivity Tips

In this week’s bonus episode, Marissa and Joanne (the Happy Writer Social Media Captain and writer of several middle grade books) chat about the topic they most frequently get asked about from authors and aspiring authors: how to be more productive. In this conversation Marissa and Joanne share their best tips on how to be a productive writer, maximize time management, maintain joy in the process, tackle big goals, find the perfect work/life balance, and more. 

Some of the methods/suggestions discussed:

Alphasmart: https://hackaday.com/2020/11/05/alphasmart-neo-teardown-this-is-the-way-to-write-without-distractions/

The Pomodoro Method: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/the-pomodoro-technique-is-it-right-for-you.html 

NaNoWriMo: https://nanowrimo.org/ 

Write or Die: https://v2.writeordie.com/ 

The Ivy Lee Method: https://medium.com/the-ascent/the-ivy-lee-method-a-profoundly-simple-yet-effective-way-to-get-more-out-of-your-to-do-list-71dea851e3c

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Transcript

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[00:12] Marissa : Hello, and welcome to the Happy Writer. This is a podcast that aims to bring readers more books to enjoy and to help authors find more joy in their writing. I am your host, Marissa Meyer. Thank you for joining me. As I mentioned last week, we had a bit of a mix x up with one of our guests so we've had to reshuffle the schedule a bit. And so Joanne and I thought that we would do a special bonus episode this week. And we are going to talk about one thing that I know I get asked about all the time and something that I believe Joanne is a bit of an expert at since we've been working together for so many years, and I know how productive and focused she can be. So that is right, we are going to be talking about productivity, how can we get more done, write more words, be more prolific, tackle our to do list. But also, and this is a very important detail, how can we strike a healthy life balance that brings us a lot of joy and a lot of satisfaction without always feeling completely stressed out. So that is what we're going to be talking about today. I really hope this topic is going to be helpful for a lot of you and especially because here we are, one month into 2023 and I'm sure the luster of some of your new year's goals might be starting to wear off. So hopefully this topic will help to reinvigorate you before we get started. The thing that is making me happy this week is that my family and I, we are about to embark on our very first family cruise. Actually, for me, it is my very first cruise period. I have never been on one before but we're going to be taking a Disney cruise down to Mexico. We're going to be gone for close to a week. I am so looking forward to it. Mostly I just have daydreams about sitting in a lounge chair by the pool, drinking margaritas and reading so many books, which is pretty much all I want to do on every vacation ever. I am also so happy to be talking again with today's guest co host. She is our social media captain here at the podcast and so much more. She does tons of work behind the scenes to help keep this podcast rolling. She is also the award winning author of the middle grade novels, sorry for Your Loss, the book of Elsie. The sun will come out fish out of water and more. Please welcome back Joanne Levy. Hooray.

[03:06] Joanne: I was going to say I love that you called me Captain. You must have the cruise on the brain maybe.

[03:11] Marissa : So that could be I think I was going to say extraordinaire. Social media extraordinaire. But I'm like I've called you that before. We need a new one this time. Always great to have you. Always get to chat face to face. We do most of our communication through email, so it's nice to catch up from time to time.

[03:29] Joanne: Even on zoom.

[03:31] Marissa : Even on zoom. I know. One of these days I know you have mini writing retreats at your lovely home up in Canada, and one of these days, I'm going to make it up there.

[03:43] Joanne: That would be cool since we've never met in person.

[03:46] Marissa : I know, I know. That would be cool. We could record a podcast in person, live.

[03:52] Joanne: How fun would that be?

[03:54] Marissa : It would be fun. I don't even know logistically how that would work, but we should definitely do it someday. Put it on the bucket list. So today we are talking all things productivity. Joanne and I have each made a list of some of our top tips. We have not compared our list prior to starting the recording. I assume there's going to be a fair amount of crossover, though, so we're each going to just kind of go down our list and discuss some of the best practices and techniques that we have discovered over the years. And I will start by saying I am a little obsessive on this topic. I love reading books and articles and listening to podcasts that talk about productivity and work life balance and how I can be more efficient with my time and all of it. Joanne, is this also a topic that you love?

[04:48] Joanne: It is. I absolutely love productivity, but I'm not much of a self help productivity book reader. I'm just a very organized person who loves spreadsheets. It's funny, because when you suggested this episode, I thought, this is going to be a lot of fun because we have different processes and different ways of coming at productivity, and we also have really different family lives, so how we come to things is going to be really different. So I don't read a lot of those books, but if you have any you want to mention, go ahead and we can put them in the show notes, too. Bookshop list. Curated list of productivity and writing craft books.

[05:33] Marissa : I do. In fact, I wrote down my top three, so I'm going to do a little recommended reading at the end of this episode. But also, some of my tips are taken directly from these three books, so they're just going to come up naturally, too.

[05:47] Joanne: So I just ruined everything. I just ruined everything.

[05:51] Marissa : No, not at all. Not at all. It's good for people to know what's coming up. We've got so much good things coming up. All right, Joanne, you get started. What is your first tip?

[06:03] Joanne: Sure. So the biggest one and the most important one that I need to adhere to as well and remind myself of is get off the Internet, get off of screens, turn your phone to airplane mode, whatever you need to do to get rid of the screen distractions. Be it write longhand, be it use an alpha smart keyboard thing. Whatever you need to do to get away from the shiny distractions of the Internet is my absolute number one tip.

[06:36] Marissa : Yeah, no, that's a good one. I will frequently go out into the world, like to a cafe or to a restaurant, to get writing done. And there have been times when the server would ask, oh, do you want the password to get on the Internet? No, I do not. That's why I'm here, because I have no access to the Internet right now.

[06:54] Joanne: Yeah. And it's hard because I am a kind of a chronic multitasker. So sometimes I'll have 20 windows open and I'll write a couple of sentences, and then I'll go to a tab and look at something, write a few more sentences, open up Facebook. And that's sort of how my brain wants to work, but it doesn't give me really deep focus. So while I can do it for certain things, if I'm doing deep editing or like a third pass of something and I'm really, really having to focus, I absolutely can't have Internet. And I know even if I just turn it off, even if I'm drafting, I actually get more done and better words done. So I'm not the best at doing it, but I know that that's my number one thing.

[07:44] Marissa : Yeah, it's really helpful when we can remember to do it. I hear one hang up that I hear people have when it comes to this idea of turn off the internet, turn off your phone, is that some writers will say, well, I need the Internet for research, or I might need to look something up, I might need to go on TheSource.com and find the perfect word, et cetera, et cetera. What's your answer to that?

[08:10] Joanne: So put a placeholder in and go back later so you can leave yourself a sticky note and go back later. This comes to my second tip, which is allow yourself crappy first drafts. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time around. So, yeah, you can always go back and need a better word here, or need whatever song title here, whatever research you're doing. I find that some people, when they say they need to do research while they're in the middle of writing, it's kind of a trick to procrastinate.

[08:43] Marissa : Yeah.

[08:44] Joanne: So be really honest if you really need to look it up in that moment, or can you look it up and layer it in later?

[08:51] Marissa : Yeah, no, I do the same thing. I love the placeholders. If I'm writing and I come to something that I need to research or maybe a character that I haven't named yet, I'll just put in all caps, insert flower type or insert name or whatever. And then when I'm done with that draft, I will usually have a day or two where all I'm doing is going in and filling in those placeholders. And it is one of the most joyful days of the whole process. I love when I can just sit down and just scroll, look for those all capital letters and just plug in all of those. It feels like I'm getting so much done in such a short period of time.

[09:34] Joanne: That's so funny because I've done that before. And then if I get to the end of a draft, I hate past Joanne because I hate those things. I would go back at the end of the writing session and fill them in. Maybe that's my commitment to not perfect first drafts, but pretty clean first drafts. But that's really funny. You can go find and replace for all caps. You can do a find by format of your text. So there's a little tip for people that don't know. You can actually do a fine replace for all caps.

[10:12] Marissa : Yeah, no two tips, ones that I also use. My first, most important tip that I really have to do, otherwise writing would never happen, is that I schedule my most important work like it's an appointment. And this is something that I really started doing after becoming a mom and really buckled down the last few years after we no longer had a full time nanny. COVID hit started taking on the homeschooling thing and the podcast also. And suddenly life was way busier than it used to be. It occurred to me that if you don't prioritize the most important thing, the day just so quickly fills up with other things. The busy work, the laundry, the dishes, the emails. There's always something else to do that seems more pressing, more timely. And it's easy to feel like, oh, I'll write my words tomorrow. Oh, I'll work on this chapter tomorrow. And so for me, when I fill out my weekly schedule, I always figure out exactly, okay, what afternoons do I have free? Do I have an hour between home school and this doctor's appointment? Do I have a little bit of time on the weekend? And I look for those openings in my schedule and write down, okay, that's my writing time. That's when I'm going to work on this book, this project, et cetera.

[11:53] Joanne: Yeah. And it is your full time job, so it makes sense that you schedule times for that. And people that it isn't their full time job or even their part time job, treat it like one, maybe not a full time job, but take it seriously like a job and schedule that time in. And if you just give yourself a different perspective on your writing time, you may find you have more of it than you thought.

[12:19] Marissa : Yeah. No, it is so funny. And people talk about this when you go from writing pre publication or writing when you have a second job. And then there is this fantasy, and I think we've all had it, that if I was writing full time, then I would get so much done. I would just have long luxurious afternoons where I could write and nothing would bother me and there would be no interruptions and et cetera, et cetera. And it's such a lovely fantasy. I do not know a single writer for whom this is the truth. Like, as soon as you where you're writing full time, it can be really easy to think, well, I have all this time, which means I can kind of squander it doing these other things. And it's really a trick that you have to figure out how to stay focused and how to prioritize it every day, even when it's your actual job.

[13:23] Joanne: Yeah. I do think that a lot of people discovered that reality of the sort of time fantasy when COVID hit and everybody was in their home and all of a sudden everybody had time to write. And how many did it's like, oh, I have all this time to write. Why am I not writing? And I mean, there were other factors at the time, too. I think a lot of creatives were so stressed out that you don't feel all that creative. But yeah, I found when I had a full time job outside the home and I only had evenings and weekends, I could get a lot done on evenings and weekends. It's how you look at that time and how you schedule it and your perspective on what you need to get done.

[14:04] Marissa : For sure. Yeah. One of my favorite I don't know if it's a quote or a terrible I don't know what you would call it, but something that I repeat often to myself, the idea that if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. And I love that because I definitely find that when I am busier and have more and more on my plate and on my to do list, that's when I'm my most focused and my most efficient, and suddenly I can get so much done. And then if I have a week where I'm on vacation or I'm between books or for whatever reason, I just have a slower week, then it's like, well, maybe I'll sit around and binge TV for a while. And that does not happen on those weeks when I feel like I have lots to do.

[14:53] Joanne: Yeah, and I think we share that, too. I think we're both busy people, and we like to be busy people. For sure.

[14:59] Marissa : All right, what's your next tip?

[15:01] Joanne: My next one? Well, I mentioned it about allowing yourself to write crappy first drafts, but just to sort of expand on that and bird by bird, Anna Mott's book, she talks about crappy first drafts, although she uses the S word for that instead. It's not spinning your wheels trying to be perfect the first time around. And I think it's easy to get on a hamster wheel of perfection if you go over and over and over and over the same things. So I think if you allow yourself that first draft of whatever it is you're writing to be not perfect. You can keep moving forward. And I think that's an important one for a lot of people. You hear stories of somebody who's been tinkering with the same book for 15 years, and they still don't feel done, and I get that feeling. But if you want to move forward, then you need to allow yourself to sort of let go of certain things and just move forward.

[16:02] Marissa : Yeah, sometimes done is better than perfect.

[16:06] Joanne: Yes. And you can always edit a page. You can't edit a blank page.

[16:10] Marissa : Yeah, I'm going to kind of piggyback on that one, because one of my favorite tricks for getting lots of words written is doing the writing sprints. And we do them as a part of NaNoWriMo just for fun, as kind of part of a community or National Novel Writing Month for people who don't know that acronym. But even for me, just in my day to day writing life, if I am having trouble getting started or I feel like I'm kind of blocked because I'm stressed out, is this going to be good enough? Am I ready to write this chapter? If I start to feel that those perfectionist tendencies creeping in, then I will set a timer for ten or 15 minutes. And I don't know how the psychology of it works, but there is something about knowing that you only have to do this thing for ten or 15 minutes that just shuts off that editor. It makes you think, okay, it doesn't have to be good or perfect or quality. I just need to get some words down on the page and know that I can fix them and make them better later. And so for me, that's one of my favorite ways of turning off that editor, making myself put words on the page as quickly as I can without stressing out about how good or how bad they are.

[17:40] Joanne: Which is funny, because we tried to sprint together once, and I think I told you after that it was terrible for me and it totally didn't work. And I spent my time literally typing, why am I doing this? Marissa? I can't believe I signed up for this and why am I doing this? And this will never work for me. So that sort of illustrates how different things work for different people. I will never do sprints. It's just not my thing. And somebody has suggested to me the Pomodoro method. That's similar, isn't it? It's a timed yeah, let me think.

[18:15] Marissa : Is it? It's been a while since I used Pomodoro. I think it's 43 minutes of work and then seven minutes of rest. Something like that.

[18:26] Joanne: Yeah. Anyway, I think I looked at it once and thought, maybe 25 minutes of.

[18:30] Marissa : Work, five minutes of rest. I don't know. Details are sketchy.

[18:33] Joanne: Yeah, not for me. But I knew you were going to mention sprint, so I actually looked up this morning. Have you used Write or Die? I've heard you.

[18:42] Marissa : I have. It stresses me out. Anxiety? No, thank you.

[18:46] Joanne: I tried it this morning, and for anybody that doesn't know, it's a website called Write or Die. And I think you can buy the software. You can use it free online, and you literally type into the window, but you set a time and how many words you want, and if you stop typing for too long, the screen goes red and then there's a big alarm and a siren. If you're a stress writer, like, if you do well under that kind of stress, then you can give it a try. But for me, I was like, no.

[19:17] Marissa : Doesn'T it at some point start deleting what you've written?

[19:22] Joanne: I think if you set a certain mode, it will do that. If you don't write fast enough, it will start deleting. So if you want that super high stress way of just getting words down, then maybe that works for you. I know people that use it, so it works for some people.

[19:38] Marissa : I do. I definitely know people who love this website and love that feeling of having to stay focused. And it is, of course, very similar to using the timer. I just can't stomach the thought of it starting to take my words away.

[19:54] Joanne: You'd have to set it up to do that. You would have to give it permission. But still, I wouldn't write well under stress like that, so not for me.

[20:04] Marissa : But it is for some people. Yeah, I think part of it for me, too, part of the reason that writing Sprints works is because when you think about trying to write a complete novel, whether it's 50,000 words, 150,000 words, it is a lot of words. I mean, writing a novel is like a really big thing, and we don't put on our daily to do list. Write a novel. Like, you have to break it up into smaller chunks. I guess that kind of comes down to another tip. Whatever your goal is, don't think of it in terms of the big end goal, the big end project. Break it up into very small, manageable tasks that aren't as scary. And for me, like the ten to 15 minutes writing Sprints, I know I can write 500 words. Maybe I can even write 1000 words. If it's going really well. And you do that enough times and it becomes the first draft of a novel.

[21:05] Joanne: Yeah. If you write a page a day, in a year you'll have 365 pages. So it's those little bites of writing. When I'm actively drafting, I try to do at least 1000 words a day, and that's my chunk. So, yeah, little small goals, for sure.

[21:26] Marissa : Yeah. All right. My next tip, and one that I have struggled with for almost my entire life, but I have definitely gotten a lot better, is saying, no, this is so hard for me. I have always been a yes person. I'm a people pleaser. If someone wants me to do something for them, I want to say yes. I've got fear of missing out. I want to do all the things at one point, and I don't remember if it was an article that I read or a book or something, but someone was talking about this idea that when you say yes to something, you are also saying no to something else.

[22:09] Joanne: Or to yourself.

[22:10] Marissa : Or to yourself. Exactly. And so these days, I try to be really aware of this and really conscious about it. And if I'm asked to whether it's be a guest on another podcast or I'm asked to do a book signing or I'm asked to do some promotion work for my publisher, and there's that instant, that inclination to say yes. Yes. I try to make myself pause and think, okay, this is going to be an hour of my time. What am I saying no to if I say yes to this? Am I saying no to an hour of reading to my kids? Am I saying no to an hour of writing? Am I saying no to an hour of cleaning my house? What is the actual trade off here? And then I can decide, is this something that's worth that trade off, or is it not worth that trade off?

[23:05] Joanne: Yeah, completely. One thing that the Pandemic really taught me is to really look at emotional labor and not even just time, but what it takes to if it's an hour presentation, how much emotional labor do you have to invest in that? How long is it going to take you to do the PowerPoint? How long is it going to take you to research? How long is it going to take you to read the book that you talk about in the workshop? Which is something I was faced with recently. So it's being really honest with yourself about what you can and can't do and really putting the writing first, if that's what you want to be first.

[23:46] Marissa : All right, what's your next tip?

[23:48] Joanne: So my next one is if you're truly spinning your wheels on something and feel like you're blocked, get away from your keyboard for a walk, shower, date with a friend, whatever. Get completely away from your story, because there are times when you're spinning your wheels, spinning your wheels and your subconscious needs to work it out in the background, which means you need to pivot to something else. I find that a lot. If I'm stuck, it means my brain doesn't know where the story is going next, and it needs to work it out. So even though it seems counterintuitive to get away from the keyboard, even if I've written two words or erased 100 words, I walk away and just let the gears spin in the background. And even sometimes I'll get into bed when I know I'm stuck into bed at night. And tell myself, try to work this out while you're sleeping. And it happens. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, it's 03:00 a.m. But I have an epiphany and my brain has said, well, you're going to get up at three in the morning but we've solved the problem. And then the next morning it's solved. It's just letting the gears chug away in the background and having a pen and paper by the shower is always good. You always find shower thoughts are a real thing too. But getting away from the keyboard is key, I think.

[25:12] Marissa : Yeah, no, I do the same thing. If I'm really stuck on something then I will. A lot of times I'll write a little note that I'll leave on my bedside table that's like, here's the problem I'm trying to figure out in this story, whatever it is, and I leave it there on my bedside table with a pen and say, okay, subconscious, do your thing, year out. And you're right, it frequently works. It's really quite magical.

[25:40] Joanne: Do you actually write anything in the middle of the night or you just set the intention?

[25:44] Marissa : I usually just set the intention. There have been times when I've woken up in the middle of the night and have an idea that I need to to go write down. But generally it's just setting the intention.

[25:55] Joanne: And do you find running is a meditative way to get the gears turning in the background?

[26:00] Marissa : No, I listen to audio books when I run. So for me it is not a time that I get a whole lot of ideas. I have gotten ideas when I'm running. If I'm listening to music then I'm more likely to get ideas for my current book. But nine times out of ten I'm listening to an audiobook. And so for me it's more of my like my time to to focus on something else and to kind of feel the well that way.

[26:25] Joanne: And I found that too. There was times when if I take the dog for a walk and don't listen to something, I find that I'm making space for ideas and things. But I like to listen to audio books when I walk the dog and that leaves no space. So it's like if I'm working on something and need to work it out, I need silence or sit out in the backyard with nothing going on or whatever. Just letting the space be that you can let ideas in.

[26:52] Marissa : Yeah. One of my tips that is real similar to that, that I wrote down here is that sometimes the most productive thing that you can do is rest. I tell myself this a lot when I'm feeling really frazzled or overwhelmed with something and for two reasons. One, exactly what we've been talking about is that sometimes you just need that space in your brain to allow those thoughts, to allow the subconscious to feed you all of the things that it's been working on, and you just need some time away from your work for that to happen. But then twofold, there was one of the productivity books that I really liked that I was going to recommend that I will recommend. It's called The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey. And he talks about how productivity we often think of in terms of time management, but in reality it's often more a case of energy management. And it doesn't matter how much time you have if you are too tired to do anything. And we've all experienced this where we have an hour or two in our day and we think, oh, I should get some writing done, but, oh, I'm so tired, I just want to lay down and take a nap. And so I really try to be very conscientious about protecting my energy reserves. And sometimes that means going and taking a nap, and sometimes it means taking a walk, and sometimes it means stopping my riding time short so that I can relax with my family a bit more. But sometimes rest is the most important thing that you can be doing.

[28:33] Joanne: Yeah. And don't you find whenever you do take time away, even if it's forced, the ideas are better when they kind of parachute in on their own.

[28:42] Marissa : Yeah. And also it makes me miss writing. If I go a period of time where I'm not doing any writing, then I start to feel that burning inside again, where my fingers start to twitch and I'm like, oh, I've got all these ideas. I can't wait to get to my keyboard and get started on them. And I think that it is so important for us writers to feel that occasionally, because if you're just constantly pounding away in one project after another and you never give yourself the chance to miss it, then we can start to forget why we're doing this and why we love it.

[29:19] Joanne: Exactly. And if you can get your subconscious involved, I think the writing is always a little better because things are going on that you're not consciously thinking and it just deepens things.

[29:30] Marissa : Absolutely.

[29:31] Joanne: Is it my turn or is it.

[29:32] Marissa : Your turn for it?

[29:34] Joanne: So here's a kind of a practical one. Get an accountability partner to trade work with. Not necessarily a critique partner, although that could be part of it too. But maybe you set up we're going to trade a chapter or five pages or whatever every week, and then that sort of keeps you accountable because you don't want to be the one to show up with nothing. But you have to keep each other on task. I think if you're both are like, oh, I came with nothing. Oh, I came with nothing to haha, then it defeats the purpose. But really keep each other to task. And I think that would work really well. I've done that in the past. I haven't done it recently, but when I. Had a critique group, and we met, I think, once a month, and we had to come with a chapter. It kept everybody on task, for sure. And I think you could probably I don't know if I would do it daily, but maybe a weekly thing.

[30:30] Marissa : Yeah, no, I think that could be really helpful, especially for someone who maybe struggles with self motivation, who just isn't able to keep themselves accountable or keep themselves going, having someone that's keeping an eye on you, who has expectations from you. And of course, for us, for published authors, at some point, you probably have an agent or an editor, and you're maybe not sharing stuff with them constantly, but you do have someone who has expectations from you. So if you're not at that point in your career and your journey yet, then I think that's a wonderful advice to find someone that can kind of be cheering for you and also maybe lay down the law if you start to slack off a little bit.

[31:16] Joanne: Yeah. And I think the only thing I would caution is just to make sure that you set your rules up front, how much critique you're planning on doing with each other, or whether it's just absolute rough draft accountability, just so you know what you're getting into. Because if all you wanted to do was write five pages and you got your pages back and they're fully edited, then maybe that's not what you were looking for. So just have sort of your rules and boundaries up front.

[31:40] Marissa : All right, I've got two more. One of them is productivity specific, and one is more kind of general work life balance. So my next tip for productivity and time management specifically is to use something called the Ivy Lee Method. Joanne, do you know about the Ivy Lee method?

[32:06] Joanne: I do not. I've never heard of it.

[32:08] Marissa : I don't know where I first heard about this method, but it is my favorite tool for just like, a really practical, hands on tool that I use, especially when I'm starting to feel super overwhelmed and I have so much on my plate, and I'll never be able to get through all of this in time. This is the tactic that I always go back to. So Ivy Lee was a business consultant a long time ago. I want to say, like, back in the 30s or 40s, maybe, businesses would hire him to come in and help make their workers more productive. And his method is so simple. In the evening, you write down your to do list for the next day, and from that list, you pick the six most important things, your highest priority items, and most importantly, you put them in order of most important to least important. And you have to do it the day before, because the day of you might feel like, I don't want to do this most important thing. So it's really you want to kind of have that clear head space where you can really think practically, what is my actual most important task? So then you wake up the next day and you have your list, starting with number one most important, and you start working on that thing, and you work on that thing until it is done, and then you move on to number two on the list, and you work on number two until it is done. And if you get interrupted by a phone call or you have to go have a doctor's appointment or whatever, you pause. And when you come back, you just pick up and keep working from where you left off. If you don't get through all six things, six is a relatively arbitrary number. You could do it with four items. You could do it with eight items. It doesn't really matter. At the end of the day, you take the things that you didn't accomplish, and they become number one and two and three, et cetera, for your next day. And what I love about this is that it forces me to really think about what is the most important thing and really focus on what I'm trying to accomplish every day. And then it gives me the roadmap so I don't have to make decisions, because, as we know, when we get really busy and we have a lot going on, you can fall into decision fatigue really quickly. So by doing it this way, the decision is already made. I don't have to think, okay, what should I be doing next? What's my next priority? What's my next task? It's already there laid out for me, and I can just start working. And it's a really great way for me to stay focused and on top of things. And whenever I employ it, I don't know, for me, it really works really well.

[34:57] Joanne: Yeah, that's cool. And that goes back to sort of that emotional labor thing of trying to decide what to do next. And sometimes, like you said, decision fatigue. You start spinning your wheels and become paralyzed because I don't know what to do next. What should I do next? So it takes that barrier away. No, that sounds really good. I've never heard of that. I will look it up.

[35:17] Marissa : All right.

[35:19] Joanne: Thank you. So my next one, and this is one I'm very reluctantly subscribing to and kicking and screaming, starting to outline. I know. And I have always been a panther. Always been a panther. And I like being a panther because for me, the joy in writing is writing the story. And I've had to outline. I sold a couple of my short books on outline, so I had to write outlines for those. And I find that after I write the outline, I feel like I've written the book. And the fun part is gone, but I'm getting better at outlining, and I have found that outlining makes the writing a lot easier for me. And when I'm getting to a point where I'm sort of on deadline, then it just makes the writing easier. And I'm finding different ways to find joy in writing than just discovering the whole story. So I'm finding a little more joy in the blank parts in between the outlines. But it is a more satisfying and more productive way to write because I don't find that there's those big parts in the middle where I don't know what happens. Because I used to write, I would start out with maybe three plot points and not even necessarily the ending. So that's a lot of space. That's a lot of space to fill. So yeah, I do think I'm definitely more productive in writing faster when I'm outlining or whatever that's worth.

[36:53] Marissa : Sure. And you know that I've always been an outline writer, so I am a fan of the outline. For me, I have found that whatever part of our brain that we use to figure out what happens in a story is a completely different part than we use to actually write the words and put the words on the page. And so for a lot of writers, you know, we come, we sit down for our writing day and we've got a blank page in front of us. And if you don't know what has to happen, you're trying to do two things at once. You're trying to use your brain to figure out the next part of the story, and you're also trying to actually put words down on the paper. And from my experience, that can cause a lot of conflict in ourselves and we kind of get stressed out and lost. And maybe it doesn't function that way for everybody, but that certainly works that way for me. So I figured out really early on that if I plan out what needs to happen and can stay focused on the plot and the major points of the story that I'm trying to hit and have that figured out, then when it comes to time to actually sit and write, I can then focus on sitting and writing and not have all of these questions and these doubts and these, like but I don't know, where is this heading? What am I building up to?

[38:20] Joanne: And you know, I have absolutely never thought of it that way, that it's two completely different skills or ways your brain is looking at a story. Not until just now. So thank you for that gem. Yeah, it is two different things. So I'm going to cut myself some slack. I'm going to write an outline and then fill it in and have fun with it.

[38:42] Marissa : Yeah, and also it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I think it's important for people to realize that you can make your 50 page outline if that's what you want to do, or you can make a one page outline that just encompasses the major beats. Or maybe you just want to outline the next three or four chapters and go from there. There's a lot of flexibility in the outlining process.

[39:08] Joanne: Have you written a 50 page outline?

[39:10] Marissa : Yes, I have. It is not my favorite. Let me think. So Winter had a very, very intensive outline because that book was so complicated and there were so many characters and viewpoints and subplots and different things that had to be wrapped up by the end of it. So that one had a very big outline. And then I did I can't actually talk about details because I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But last summer, I was working on a special project for a company, and they required a a very, very in depth outline. So that outline, I actually was, like, 100 pages long.

[39:52] Joanne: Wow.

[39:53] Marissa : And yeah, I know at that point, like, you've written the book, it feels like yeah.

[39:57] Joanne: I think if somebody tasked me to write a 50 or 100 page outline, I would write the book and then go back. I've been known to do that with synopsis.

[40:09] Marissa : It is not my preference. There does reach a point for me when non outliners talk about where it's like, well, I feel like I've written it, and now it sucked all the fun and the exploration out of it. So I don't like to write outlines that are that in depth, but my typical starting outline is maybe like, four or five pages. It's like a couple of sentences for each chapter. Yeah.

[40:34] Joanne: And that's fair, because then you know where you're going, at least without too much detail. So there's lots of room for some improv through there.

[40:44] Marissa : Yes.

[40:45] Joanne: I think I will always be a plan, sir, if at all. But it works for me better. And I've known it for a few books that I'm better off if I outline, but I've been very reluctant about doing.

[41:00] Marissa : Yeah, you got to find what works for you. And it's important to try different things, too. And you tried it, and you've found some things work. And who knows? A book or two from now, you might find a different method that works.

[41:16] Joanne: Maybe every book is different.

[41:18] Marissa : Every book is different. Yeah. And I've had books where I write the outline and then stick almost exactly to that outline. And then I've had books where I write the outline and then write 20,000 words and realize the outline is completely wrong and I have to scrap it all and start all over again. So every book is different.

[41:36] Joanne: And I did think of one more pearl of wisdom, but in chair.

[41:42] Marissa : Yes.

[41:44] Joanne: I think there's just no way around it. I think if you spend too much time thinking about writing or reading about writing or thinking about writing or talking about writing and not writing, then you're not getting anywhere.

[41:56] Marissa : Yeah. No. And that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about scheduling your writing time and actually determining, like, this is when I am going to write and whether it's just sitting down in your chair and doing it, whether it's going to a room in your house or going to a cafe. Or maybe it's helpful for you to have some sort of ritual. Like, I'm going to light this candle and turn on this music, or whatever it is. But finding a way to cue to your brain, this is my time when I am going to sit here and I am going to get some writing done.

[42:32] Joanne: And I do think that thinking about writing and researching writing and even just daydreaming and giving that space counts as writing, but it's not going to get your draft done. So there has to be some discipline there, for sure.

[42:45] Marissa : Absolutely. There's a balance. There's a balance, and it can take practice and time to figure out what that balance is for you.

[42:53] Joanne: Yeah. And how many books in did you start really trusting the process?

[42:58] Marissa : Oh, gosh. Well, I have no idea, because I feel like my process has continued to change and evolve. You know, I'm 1516 books in now, but my schedule and my life is so vastly different from when I wrote Cinder and Scarlet that I feel like every few years I have to totally recalibrate and figure out, okay, how am I going to get this book written? Now, how am I going to get this book written? But I do trust that I will get it written. I trust that the first draft is going to be awful, and that's going to be okay. I know that there's going to be a rough patch in the middle of every book when I find myself hating it and thinking that I'm a hack and I'll never this is a terrible idea, and there's going to become a period when I come out of that book and I start to love it again. So there are similarities across the process that I've just kind of learned to expect.

[44:02] Joanne: Yeah. And I think that part of that is experience. But I think it's helpful for beginning writers to know that it's still hard down the road, but you get to where you start to trust yourself and trust your process and know that you will get there. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's helpful. I hope it's helpful.

[44:23] Marissa : Yeah, no, I think so, for sure. All right, I've got one final tip. It's less of a tip and more of a way just of thinking about work life balance, I guess. Because it's important to realize that we do not try to be productive and we do not try to be prolific just so that we can get through our to do list and then add more things to the to do list. I think it's important to remember, like, part of the reason that we want to be productive is so that we can have more space in our life for things that really matter to us. And for a lot of us that's writing, for a lot of us that's more time spent with our family. I hope for a lot of us it's self care and doing what we need for ourselves. So making sure that you're not just rushing through your to do list just for the sake of adding more things to the to do list, like make sure that you are thinking about why you want to get things done so that what are you making space for. And for me, one thing that I found helpful is to think of my to do list. Not in terms of a daily to do list, but think of it more in terms of a week because there are lots of things that I want to do. I want to make good progress on my book project, I want to have game night with my girls and maybe we go on a field trip or two this week. And I want to get all of my runs in this week. And every week when I sit down to figure out what my plan is going to be, I'm not just thinking about what are the things that have to get done. I'm thinking about the things, what do I want to get done, what do I want my life to look like and feel like this week and making sure that I'm planning those things in as well. And we know that within the course of a single day you're probably not going to have time to write 1000 words and go for a six mile run and go on a field trip with your kids and clean your house and et cetera, et cetera. A lot of times you just simply cannot fit it all into a single day. And that can kind of stress us out when we think of it that way. But when you have a broader perspective of looking at it from week to week, then you can start to feel like, okay, maybe there is more breathing room here and there is time for me to do the things that are really important for me.

[47:01] Joanne: Yeah, for sure. And I'm just going to say for the record, I will never find the time to do a six mile run.

[47:07] Marissa : Didn't yesterday.

[47:10] Joanne: Just one thing I actually thought you were going to have as one of your tips is how you manage your email. Because I think you have a system, don't you, about managing your email and how you look at your email only certain parts of the day. Is that still correct? I think you talked about well, I.

[47:30] Marissa : Don'T think it's so much of the system but generally speaking so I have a walking treadmill or a treadmill desk and it varies day to day. But my typical day for me is that we get up in the morning, we have our coffee, we snuggle by the fireplace and at some point I get up and I get on my treadmill desk, and that's usually for an hour. And that's when I do my busy work. So that's when I'm answering emails, that's when I'm reading newsletters, posting to social media, that sort of thing. After that, I do school with the girls. That takes me into the early afternoon. I go for my run if I have a run that day, and then the late afternoon, early evening is when I get my writing done. That is a typical day, but it varies. There's so much variation and flexibility within that. Yeah. To your question of having a system with emails, I try not to just check my emails constantly, and I feel like if I don't respond to someone's email for a day or two, it's going to be fine. There's very few emails that need to be responded to immediately. And generally speaking, I don't want people to think that they can reach me and that I'll respond immediately. It's rarely the case. And so, yeah, I have no problem making people wait a little bit.

[48:58] Joanne: Yeah. And I mean, that just makes sense because you're scheduling your time and what you want to attend to when you want to attend to it. And I love that you schedule in cuddle by the fire time.

[49:08] Marissa : It's the most important part of our day.

[49:12] Joanne: One thing I was going to mention, too, is that any tips and tricks and anything that you may read in a book about how you should write and what you should do, I mean, please find what works for you. Not everybody writes every day. Not everybody writes 1000 words every time they sit down to write. I dislike writing advice that says, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to do this to be successful. It's find what works for you, be disciplined about it and do it.

[49:44] Marissa : Yeah, I love that. I agree 100%. I have never been the writer that writes every single day. I tried once, I made it my New Year's resolution that I was going to write every day, and I made it pretty far into the year. I think I made it to like, July or August and I was miserable. I hated writing every single day. And I think it comes back to again, I never had time to miss it, and it just became this thing on my to do list and I just started to dread it. Yeah. Don't listen to advice that doesn't work for you.

[50:21] Joanne: Yeah. I'm not saying only write when the muse hits because writing is work, and if you want to get a book written, you need to write it. But again, don't listen to somebody else's advice that doesn't work for you. Even if that's our advice.

[50:35] Marissa : Even if that's our advice. No, 100%. I mean, Joanne and I, we are pretty good with our time management and productivity, but a lot of that is because, at least for me, I have tried many different things over the years and read many different books on time management and tried their different techniques. And over time, I figured out what does work for me, but not everything has worked for me. There's a lot of advice that I have tried and then discarded. And so, yeah, I think it's really important to take everything with a grain of salt to experiment and then, yeah, figure out what works for you.

[51:21] Joanne: Yeah, it's like reading recipes. You try them if you like them, or you take a bit of this and a bit of that and whatever works for you.

[51:28] Marissa : All right, I'm going to close this up with my recommended reading for people who do want to read a book that might help them be more productive. I know I mentioned The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey, the one that really focuses on managing your energy as much as managing your time. Another one that really has inspired me was 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam. That book is the one that gave me or helped me kind of look at my to do list on more of a weekly basis as opposed to a daily basis. And then my number one book that I truly wish everyone would read. Joanne, I'm curious if you read it. You mentioned you don't do the self help book, so maybe not, but it is a classic. It is called Getting Things Done by David Allen. Have you read this book?

[52:18] Joanne: I have not.

[52:20] Marissa : Okay, I'll just throw it out there. It is dry reading. It is not an exciting book, but I think his process is genius, and it really kind of changed my life when I read it and started implementing his strategy just for getting things out of your head and staying organized and breaking your to do list into manageable chunks. And it's really effective, and I think it's a brilliant book.

[52:50] Joanne: Well, I have written all of these down because I don't think I've read any I haven't read any of them.

[52:55] Marissa : Do you have any suggestions on any more recommended reading for people?

[52:59] Joanne: Well, I always like to recommend Stephen King's on writing and in lamont's bird by bird. I mean, those are my favorite writing craft books. I can't remember specifically if there's time management stuff in there, but I think there's always stuff to find in those two books, even if it's commiseration or if you need to read Stephen King's backstory and know how much rejection he went through to make you feel better about your own rejection. I always recommend those two books to everybody. Classic and Bird by Bird is I can't say it enough. It's one of the funniest books I've ever read. And that's not just funniest craft books, but funniest books, full stop. It's just really funny.

[53:43] Marissa : It has been a long time since I read Bird by Bird. I should revisit it yeah, it's just really good.

[53:51] Joanne: You don't feel alone as a writer because she's so honest about writing. It's definitely that honesty that I think we can relate to. There's a whole chapter on professional jealousy. One writer has not felt jealous of somebody else, so it's that honesty that makes you realize you're just not alone in this. No matter where you are in your career, there's always somebody doing better than you, for sure. I don't have any productivity books because, like I said, I don't really read them much. I was blessed with a natural talent for being really organized. I don't write weekly to do lists, and I don't write daily to do lists, and I have, like a thousand things in my head at once, but I just oh, my goodness.

[54:42] Marissa : If you read the David Allen book, it will change your life.

[54:45] Joanne: Oh, really? Will I have to start writing things down?

[54:48] Marissa : You're going to have to write everything down, and you will love it. You will be so much, so happy.

[54:54] Joanne: I will report back because I don't anticipate loving it, but anyway, we shall see.

[55:03] Marissa : I will do it for a later.

[55:04] Joanne: Episode when Joanne writes everything down.

[55:08] Marissa : Yeah, that blows my mind that you don't keep to do list. I am shocked. No, because nothing ever slips through your you never miss anything. It doesn't seem possible.

[55:22] Joanne: Not usually. If it's something really important that I know I might forget, I'll put it in. I have a Google calendar that I use, so for doctors appointments and things like that, and they'll pop up, and like, today I had in the calendar and things like that. But generally, no.

[55:35] Marissa : Well, I can't even imagine. I live by my one note. If something happened to my one note, I would not know what to do. I would wander around aimlessly. What am I supposed to be doing today? All right, Joanne, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a wonderfully, fun conversation.

[55:55] Joanne: Always my pleasure.

[55:58] Marissa : Readers, writers, I hope this has also been very super, very motivating and useful for you, and I hope that it helps you on all of your writing projects this year. A reminder you can find both my and Joanne's books and the books that we talked about today on our affiliate store@bookshop.org shop, marissamire. And don't forget you can buy Happy Writer podcast merchandise on redbubble and tea public. Next week, I will be talking with debut author Jenna Miller about her contemporary romance out of character. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe and follow us on Instagram at marissamyerauthor and at Happy Writer podcast. Until next time, stay healthy, stay cozy, and whatever life throws at you today, I hope that now you're feeling a little bit happier.