What’s On Your Desk-Work Playlist?
Could you write while SisQó sings the Thong Song? What about pure silence? This Week In Writing I ask what do you listen to when writing?
Do You Write With Your Head Down?
Life is a balance of working in a state of flow (sometimes in silence) and a distracting mess of connectivity. How do you write?
The Life-Changing Power of GTD For Freelance Writers
Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a staple of productivity. The concept, coined by David Allen in a book by the same name, focuses on breaking projects into individual tasks. All your attention is focused on the task at hand rather than the whole project. This increases productivity by accomplishing smaller parts of the whole….
Level Up Your Productivity Through Budgeting
Confession time: I like to be in control. It’s not an overbearing thing, but my anxiety moves in when I lack options. To maintain control, I crave spreadsheets, numbers, and data. Information leads to choices, and options bring control. Seven years ago, my wife and I began using the budgeting software, You Need A Budget…
How I Write From Home
In February, an estimated 3.4 million Americans were working from home. While currently impossible to determine, the number of people working remotely is likely much higher today. Management of The Writing Cooperative and everything I publish is written from home. Being a professional freelance writer requires investing in yourself. Small investments, like a quality website…
Unlock Your Creativity In Three Hours Or Less
In 2013 Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel¹ gifted humanity with the Disney animated film, Frozen. The film was a major success, earning over $1.2 billion worldwide. Frozen was not only one of Disney’s biggest hits, it also gave us the best advice as we begin a new decade:² Let. It. Go. Is it cheesy? Yes….
The Art of Procrastination: What We Can Learn About Writing From How I Met Your Mother
In season four of How I Met Your Mother, Ted Mosby quits his architecture job to start his own firm. Robin continually chastises Ted for doing everything but calling clients and working on projects. Throughout the episode, Ted finds many ways to avoid work. He chooses the official pens for use by his solo firm…
What I Learned About Writing From My Film School Friends
Despite graduating college with a business degree, several of my friends were in film school, which led to me being part of multiple student films. Along the way, I discovered that writers can glean a lot of advice from the filmmaking process. Pre-Production: Loglines When creating a film, writing the script is not the first…
Work Like a Dog
Sometimes we get busy, like really busy. So busy that it’s difficult to think, let alone be productive. But fear not because there is a lot we can learn from our four-legged friends. While working from home recently, I’ve exhaustively studied my pooch, Mac. He taught me to be more productive and I want to…
How to Write When You Don’t Wanna Write (As Told By Other Writers)
I’ve been in a slump lately. Ideas are flowing, that’s not the problem. I have zero desire to sit down and actually write the things. I call this strange feeling The Funk™️. Feeling stuck, I reached out to a number of writers’ whose work I greatly admire and asked them a simple question: How do…