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Writer Productivity in the Summer. Or not:)

August already arrived and yet it is still typically very hot. Oh, I’m not complaining. I always take my summer wardrobe & weather over looking like an Eskimo and a bleak winter.

However extreme heat reduces productivity and the will to work. It might also cause you to stock on iced-drinks and face the wind/air-conditioner, and ultimately making you catch a cold, like the one I’m trying to fight off right now.

Fortunately, applying a few simple tips to your daily life can help you make the best of the summer, while managing to get all your work done.

1)      Air- conditioners. Not every house has one, but it is unthinkable for any respectable coffee shop not to use them. If you don’t have air-conditioning in your living quarters, you can always go to the next Starbucks or a similar concept coffee shop where you can work.

You just need to make sure that directly under the conditioners as this will most probably cause you to get sick. Also make sure you bring a sweater with you just in case. After all, outdoors might be hot enough to walk around in your swimsuit, indoors might feel like the North Pole.

2)      Fans.  Fans are more affordable and a lot less complicated than air-conditioners. However, most of the time, they tend to be less effective. But then again, a fan is the next best thing when there is no wind outside and you feel like the heat is suffocating you. Just make sure you get the cool indirectly as fans can also easily make you sick. I should know, I’m a few hours from taking my prescribed antibiotics.

3)      Beaches and pools. If you live near a sea or an ocean, take advantage. Not only swimming will help you get fit, it will also keep you cool and fresh.

And even if you don’t live near a sea, there are usually affordable pools around. Although some people don’t enjoy the pool experience, it is a nice way to energize yourself. For instance my university gym offers a reasonably-priced membership so I go swimming almost everyday. I can work for much longer and much more productively after I swim.

You just need to make sure you don’t get in the sun without protection.

4)      Showers. It is all very well to save water and protect the environment, but you can’t restrain yourself from taking regular showers as this will help you cope with the heat, especially if you live in a city where the daily average temperature easily hits 40 degrees Celsius.

You can be careful about not wasting much water, but you can’t survive without getting under the water at all.

5)       Cold drinks and lots of water. Drinking lots of liquids is always crucial, especially during hot weather when you lose a lot of water through sweating. Try to make sure you consume healthy drinks, though- such as water and freshly squeezed juices. As simple as this may sound, many people often neglect this or just try to fulfill their liquid needs through fuzzy drinks, which is not the healthiest option.

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Try to apply these daily and you will find it easier to work in the summer.

Related Posts

Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers by John Soares

How to Use Our Email Accounts Productively to Avoid Procrastination

 How to Turn Procrastination into Productivity: 7 Fun Tips for Writers

9 Productive Things Writers Can Do When They Have a Cold

Yep, that is exactly how I react when I have a cold…:)

Catching a cold can come at any season. You know the symptoms: dizziness, lack of energy and low fever. I typically get sick during unstable weather, through a combination of the temperature differences between outdoors and indoors, and the differences between indoors with air-conditioning and indoors with no air–conditioning. Combine it with all the open windows and all the others getting sick and voila: you have a writer with a cold, trying not to vaporize and writing despite a headache.

And while I unfortunately discovered that there is no way I can be as productive as my usual healthy self, there are still a lot of productive and not-so-exhausting things I can do. Here is how you can work through a cold if you want to or need to:

1) Facebook: Facebook is a great way to catch up with your friends. And since you are sick, it is OK to start replying to your received messages, as opposed to replying when you are totally healthy and supposed to be doing something else.

But it is not all. You can also promote your old & recent articles. If you are well enough to log on to Facebook, you are well enough for some mindless article promotion. And since you are already active there, browse through groups and fan pages, join the ones you like, join some communities. If you already have a bunch of communities you joined before, converse and leave your own relevant links that will bring value to the conversations. Also leave links in your messages to your good friends. And don’t neglect to copy paste your article links to your profile.

Worry not. There is no need to overdo anything. 3-4 article links to your Facebook profile/news update within some hours between them is great for exposure and give your friends time to digest and all.

2) Twitter:Yep, you can tweet about your sickness, but while you are at it, why not post some good links? It can be your old or new article links, friends’ articles, or links to stuff you are promoting. If you can turn on your computer and log on to twitter, you definitely owe this little activity to yourself.

3) Stumble and Digg: I suggest you get these sites’ toolbars so you can vote things up and down easily. Since they appreciate you being active and not just marketing your own stuff, this is a great time to promote both what’s yours and other things you like. And when you get better, you will realize you’ll have gotten rid of one your promotional chores for a while.

4) Registering and signing up for useful sites: You may have come across links to register for social media sites, sites that pay for your content, e-mail newsletters you find useful, etc… Registering to multiple sites take time. Since you have time now, use it to sign up for useful stuff.

5) Read blogs and articles: If you are well enough to read, take this time to read friends’ and other’s articles and blog posts. If you can comment, please do. If you don’t have the energy, just help spread the word about the article and let the author know you did this.

6) Check and clean-up your e-mail inbox: You may not feel good enough to study newsletters or apply tips that you are getting from them, but you can always clean out spam and other unwanted stuff. The cleaner your email inbox is, the more productive it will be for you to use it when you feel healthy.

7) Organize bookmarks: How many bookmarks do you have? The idea for this article came to me while I was trying to organize an enormous list of bookmarks. Most of the time, we run into a useful resource, we bookmark it so that we can come back to it later. But since this happens with a lot of sites, we barely ever have the time to go back. Sometimes it is even hard to remember we had a list of websites to visit in the first place.

Do yourself a favor by organizing them. Get rid of the ones you don’t need. If you run into some beneficial stuff, remember to stumble them up, and/or write them down on a Word document, so that you will remember them easily.

8) Take advantage of your entertainment. And if you do watch excess amount of movies and TV shows, remember to write about them later. I once devoured 7 episodes of Supernatural on one sick day. I later wrote a lot of articles on them.

If you have done general reviews for that movie/tv show/whatever already, you can come up with comparison articles, collection of best episodes, list posts and many more.

9) Jot down ideas. When you are physically inactive, your mind can go into overdrive. Make use of these ideas: write them down so you can use them later.

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So above are things I do when I am not feeling well. What are your tips for “sickness productivity”?

Recommended Articles on Productivity & Time Management

Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers by John Soares

How to Use Our Email Accounts Productively to Avoid Procrastination

How to Turn Procrastination into Productivity: 7 Fun Tips for Writers

This e-mail procrastination cartoon tells it all, doesn't it? Image via ytorf.com.

Many books have been written and chapters have been monopolized for time management. One of the most popular,m aybe even the most popular, procrastination activity of all times is reading and sending e-mails.

Sure, you can do your best to avoid scam. You can warn your friends against sending you weird chain emails that mean well but end up being nothing but time-wasters. You know those emails. It can be a collection of funny cartoons or jokes, or much worse, an e-mail in the form of a story or a greeting card that urges you to forward to as many people as you can.

I don’t get those emails often anymore, and I immediately delete the ones I get. But managing your inbox doesn’t end there. You have work e-mails, e-mails from friends, newsletters, notifications, offers and more.

Ideally, your work e-mail and personal e-mail are two separate accounts.  In this day and age, one email isn’t sufficient, especially if you are a freelancer.

But what about those newsletters? If you are working online, there is a big chance you want to keep up with the industry. You need to follow blogs. You updated need information. So you sign up for newsletters. You sign up for free e-books. But of course after signing up for 40 newsletters (it can and should happen if you are educating yourself in specific areas). But keeping up with the information you are receiving is a challenging activity. What you should do is to create many relevant folders so that you can store different things separately and you can return to them whenever you need.

Of course it doesn’t end here. You might also have chosen to be notified when someone comments on a blog post or article you commented upon. Someone might have commented on your article or blog. You need to keep up with these as well.

Timothy Ferriss is an established entrepreneur and blogger who tells you how to deal with all the distractions in your life in his book The 4-Hour WorkWeek. As the title suggests, the book is all about reducing your work week to a mere 4 hours. That’s right, not even your work day but your work week! It sounds implausible but he talks about everything in step-by-step detail. It is possible.

However, I am pretty sure I spend at least 4 hours a week, just checking and reading my emails. He suggests that you should only check your email only twice a day- once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And obviously he is talking about being done with the task quickly and efficiently. It is good advice but one we struggle at keeping. Surely, it can be done. But it  does takes patience, effort, and an e-mail checking diet. After all, which writer doesn’t want to see if she has published her recent article or heard from that publisher?

We writers do in fact have many work-related and significant reasons to have a love affair with our email accounts. But we can and should work on cutting the habit and maximizing our productivity. Organizing our e–mails, and not spending more than enough time on them, are good starting points to stop the e-mails from turning us into procrastinators.

Procrastination Cartoon via inspirationline.com.

Procrastination means delaying your actions. Everyone does it. It’s not all about laziness. Some things just always get in the way of a productive day. Sometimes it is your kids, spouses or other relationships. Sometimes there is a chore or an illness. And sometimes you just feel stuck, blocked or tired. So you feel like doing anything but working.

Yes, the Internet is full of articles on how to beat procrastination. But the truth is, we all always procrastinate, one way or the other, whether we can help it or not. It is human nature. I am pretty sure sometimes the motivation is wonderfully great that delaying doesn’t even cross your mind.Take Jake Gyllenhaal for instance. Does it look like he procrastinated when it came to muscling up for his leading role in Prince of Persia? But then again he received an extra 2 million dollars just to build the muscles. Give me that money and see if I ever procrastinate when it comes to dieting…

Below, Jake Gyllenhall as Prince of Persia.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Image via screenrant.com

But hey, for us the regular folk, the motivations and the payouts aren’t always great. So instead of getting depressed and feeling guilty about all the hours and minutes taken from your work, take all those moments and turn them into something useful.

Taking Advantage of Procrastionation: 7 Tips for Writers

1) Movies. Movies are a great method of relaxation. And everyone loves a good movie, right? So lay back and watch it. Enjoy the film and write about what you think about it afterwards. Put it on your blog. Turn it into a research idea. Make that movie count for both fun and some bucks.

2) Music. Almost anyone has a favorite genre. And music is something that is integrated into in our lives and we can create many topics revolving around music. Write about it.

3) Diet breaching and procrastination. Yes, you had sworn you’d never eat that much. But you were upset or happy. Maybe you were just hungry and lazy. Fine. Go ahead. Write about it.

Diets never lose popularity. If you can manage a nice a little angle with some edge, you can query fitness magazines. You can post it on your blog if it is a related topic.

You can even review a diet book you were supposed to follow. Post it to wherever you feel appropriate. In fact, why not make some money with it? Register to Amazon’s associates program and get the link for that book. Place the link in your review.

Now, you have a second income possibility and another reason to promote that article. If it is an e-book, go and look around Clickbank. See how it is doing. And while you are at it, you might decide to write about those books, see which ones you are tempted to try. And then…That’s right. Then you write about it.

4) Out with friends: One of the most popular procrastination method of all times. While you are already out and away from your computers and notepads, just let go, recharge and come back.

5) Hour-long phone conversations with your friends. I suspect this happens more to women than men. Your friends might call to rant about their relationships or just spill their guts about their newest crush. And right there, you just got some nice material for posts on relationships and dating. We all have experience and go through some annoying yet hilarious phases in our lives. I am not saying you write the conversation down as it is and expose your friends. But you might very well use it as an inspiration point. You might not go overbroad as Sex and The City’s Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and base a whole column about it, but you can count those hours as brainstorming sessions and get something out for you.

6) Magazines. Whether you like fun lifestyle magazines or stuff about your hobbies or industries, blindly going from one page to another, why don’t you pay more attention to the headlines? The editor’s note? The masthead? The topics? What got your attention the most?

You never know, you might (and should) try to pitch that magazine someday. Even if you don’t, it is an excellent resource to keep in mind when it comes to take notes on how to grab attention and make more sales.

7) Books. There is quite nothing like a page-turner. Books that make it impossible for you to put it down don’t come out that often. So, don’t put it down.

But keep a (mental) note on what parts you like the most. You can choose to review this book, or you might want to study what made it into a seller. Also look at the publisher. After all, you might have a book manuscript belonging to a similar genre. And now you know at least one other publisher who might see that genre as relevant.

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You see, any procrastination method is not to be feared but to be enjoyed and taken advantage of. This way you will have to worry less about your productivity levels. This attitude might even seriously prevent your writer’s block.

But of course if you procrastinate all the time, there is no way you can benefit from it.