One of the most critical skillsets an authorpreneur needs to develop to achieve success and maintain sanity is the ability to prioritize.

A great story and good marketing can bring you far, but they are not enough. You can’t measure your progress against yesterday’s tasks if you do not have a system in place that lets you do just that.

In this episode, we’re going to chat about what to do when your to-do list gets bigger than the hours available to you and how to choose what’s going to get your time, money, and attention—and what isn’t.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 051: How to Prioritize your Writing and Publishing Tasks

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 49 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.

If you find this show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking to the buy us a coffee button on the website and the show notes.

Crystal Hunt: So today’s topic, especially when you’re going wide, there are about a million things that creep onto your to-do list. Today we’re going to chat about what to do when your to-do list gets bigger than the hours available to do the things, and you have to choose what’s going to get your time, money, and attention, and what isn’t. But first as always a quick update of what we’ve been up to. Michele, what’s new in your world?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: Crystal, I’ve been wrestling with story number six of my mythological fantasy collection, and as always is proving to be difficult. Like any story that I write is difficult, but this one, for some reason it’s proving extremely difficult. Hence why I use the word ‘wrestling’ and it might be because it’s the last story of … that I’m planning, at least for the moment, to write in this genre. If I successfully write this story, I will have enough material to publish all the way to the end of 2021.

Both Italian titles and English titles. So I don’t know, maybe there’s some psychological pressure. I don’t know how to call it, but it’s proving to be more challenging than usual. And I also have a deadline because we both know that I work very well with deadline, pressure and with gun pointed at my head.

So I basically asked one of my beta readers to be my accountability partner and my deadline to send at least the first draft of this story is March the 30th. So not very far away from the moment when we record this episode. So wish me luck. And I do know that this means that I will have to ride like crazy for the next few days.

Other than that, I have also been battling with translation. I’ve actually another deadline. I have three days to complete the translation of Muse of Avalon, because this is the project that I am focusing now. And again, I foreseen a number of nights with not a lot of sleep to get this done by the deadline, but I will really try my best. As of now I have 72 hours left. Last thing this is something that gave me great joy and it’s marketing related. You might know, at this point that Muse of Avalon, the English version, is already out and it was nice it to see it on top of the new releases for ancient Greek history on amazon.com.

That’s something that never happened before with Bringer of Fire or Soul of Stone. So I just wanted to take a few seconds to thank all the subscribers and all the people that follow me, and also that purchased the novella. So that was the news for me. What happened to you my dear Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: Well, I’ve been working away on the Create with Co-authors book and doing sort of an editing pass on the chunks that came from the other two co-authors and then making sure that my own sections are all complete and that’s been my writing focus for the last week or so, and designing the new website for the Rivers End reboot has been my candy projects. I love working on stuff like that and my author assistant and I have been reviewing a ton of other author sites, making notes about what we love, what works, what doesn’t necessarily work from a reader perspective and just compiling our wishlist of what we’re going to have on the Rivers End book club sites.

So making sure that is getting all pulled together. And my biggest excitement this week is actually my shiny new office chair that I’m sitting in. It’s exciting because the fabric makes it look like it’s a dragon. So it’s kind of shimmery green and black, which is exciting, but also it’s an ergonomic chair that is, they call it a core chair.

And so it, wiggles around a bunch. You can control the level of wiggle, but it’s like sitting on an exercise ball. So it actually engages your core muscles and it’s much better for your back. So I’m, as I’m going into a really focused, extra long hours of writing phase, I want to make sure that I am taking care of my body enough that it will keep taking care of me as we go through these next few months, and that was my grownup author investment for this year. My big purchase was to get a proper actual chair after two decades of not really using proper set up office chairs and starting to notice now that I am past 40 there’s different expectations that your body has of view.

So yes, that is very exciting. I am sitting in it right now. It arrived like half an hour before we started recording the podcast. So we’re giving a li inaugural test run and that is all good. Now today’s topic is it’s not all about specific resources or websites to send you to, it is not a here take this checklist and do these 42 things kind of an episode. We are going to dig into something a little bit less tangible, we’ll say, but I think really important for authors, as we say, don’t bleed out on the money side, but I think don’t bleed out on the energy side or the focus side as well is really important. So we’re going to talk about overwhelm and how you manage when there’s too many things and not enough time. How do you choose what things to concentrate on or where to put your energy? And we are going to share a couple of different strategies that we’ve discovered dealing with this stuff in our own author lives and share that with you so that you do have something you can test and try if you find yourself in a similar situation.

And for anybody who doesn’t know, my background is as a health psychologist, actually. So my professional training is coaching people through this stuff. And so I think it’s fun too. Let those two sides play together for a bit, the author and the coach or counselor. And hopefully you can benefit from that mix of stuff as we chat a bit about this.

So Michele, I’m curious for you, what does overwhelm feel like or mean to you when I say to you, Oh, are you feeling overwhelmed? What does that translate to in your world?

What does overwhelm feel like to you?

Michele Amitrani: I have to say Crystal, the concept changes over time. So what I felt like to be overwhelmed three years ago is not now. Now it’s definitely, I feel it more time more times, which I don’t necessarily know if it’s something good. But my number one rule is always trying to get as much things done by keeping quality up though, which is not always the case.

I can’t always do that, but it’s my basically number one priority. But I think it’s a great question the one that you asked, like what overwhelm me now at this point is something that we actually spoke about many times before in this podcast. And you use a figure of speech if you want, or an image that it’s, I think describe very well what overwhelming can be for anyone.

It doesn’t have to be an author or just writer. It can be everyone. And you use a—and I don’t know if it’s yours or if you took it from somewhere else, but the example of kicking a number of balls down the field. If you have 12 of them and your strength level is maybe you have certain number of kick that you can give in a day.

So I feel that is the definition of overwhelming for me when I have in this field 10 or 25 different balls and I try to keep them all, they move like maybe one centimetre or one inch, since we are in Canada. But when we have two or three of them, then we can focus more and we can really kick that ball and that ball can go very far.

So I think at the end of the day, what really is important priority-wise is it comes from you. You have to understand which one is your number one priority, which one is number two, number three. And I think this is something I can’t tell you because it depends on every single person, or every single author in this case.

Something that I want to ask you then is how do you think, if there is a way or a procedure or a system that a person can use to understand if they are overwhelmed and in that case, what can they do to not be overwhelmed anymore? 

Crystal Hunt: There definitely are some cues you can watch for, and these will be a little bit different for each person because our stress reactions are different.

They are personal to us. I know sometimes if I’m feeling really stressed or overwhelmed, I will just be short with people. I don’t have as much patience and that can be challenging. If there’s too much, you get frozen, right? So sometimes you just find yourself staring at a screen and you don’t know what tasks to start or what thing to do or what to pick up.

So basically when your stress response is activated you have the fight, flight, freeze or flee tend to be our typical responses as humans to stress in our environment. But the stress also is triggered internally. So that feeling of overwhelm often will trigger one of those four responses. So you might get angry or frustrated or short with people you might feel the need to go move around and do other things and not even be at your work.

You may flee from your writing work, which, often takes the form of Netflix binges or, really you suddenly have to clean the kitchen or whatever it is that you’re doing that kind of is avoiding or fleeing from your tasks and your focus projects. And freezing is when you just sit there and you aren’t actually going anywhere or accomplishing anything. Maybe you’re scrolling through Facebook, which is a combination of a freeze and flea, I think. Or maybe you are just sitting there thinking: Oh, I should be doing this better. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? And I think we see all of those things happening, but you may notice that your sleep is more disruptive than usual.

You may notice that you are feeling an upset stomach. You may—some people get like exzema or rashes that will break out due to the stress. I find for me, I have trouble concentrating on any one thing when there are too many things going on. And so if I find myself bouncing from task to task, that’s usually a pretty good indication I’m in kind of an unhealthy spot where there’s A: there’s too many tasks to bounce to, so there’s that, and B there are just too many things going on. The other thing you might notice is retreating to some things that make you comfortable. We have kind of default habits in play of how we deal with stress.

And for some of those things, they are not so healthy. So things like eating junk food or drinking is a common one that is, or other sort of chemical outlets are all options. So if you find that you are maybe a little too focused on chocolate as a solution to all the problems that can be an indication that things are getting a little bit out of hand.

And the other thing I think is that you just have to sense within yourself: Are you feeling a little bit panicky? Are you feeling that sort of heightened? Your heartbeat your skin changes, all of those things, just if you are physically stressed or there’s something happening in your environment, same kind of physical cues, and we often will justify these away as being caused by something external, but it’s not always the case. Sometimes it is due to things that we have set up for ourselves and that we are in control of things like our to-do lists and the amount of things we’ve committed ourselves to and often in publishing there aren’t strict timelines. And we set the timelines as authors for the most part, if we are indie publishing. So other than a pre-release date, which even then is negotiable for the most part, even though we think that can’t be changed, if you’re wide, you can change them and even if you’re in a Kindle pre-order you can change that once you can’t change it a lot of times, but you can change it once.

So I think it is important to remember we are ultimately in charge of those deadlines. We’ve imposed them on ourselves, but that also means we are fully capable and powerful enough to adjust them. Yes, reader’s expectations may be they may not be thrilled with you when you do that. People may be disappointed that they have to wait a bit longer for the book.

But ultimately you have to keep yourself healthy, functioning, happy, and able to keep writing. And it’s that don’t bleed out the emotions thing that we talked about. You’ve got to make sure that you are, identifying when you’re in over your head or there’s too much going on, and then, knowing your own cues is really important. For me I can always tell because I start making I started making lists outside of my usual systems for project management. And when I get completely overwhelmed, I have to go back to paper. I can’t function on the screen anymore. Because that’s back to my training when I was a kid and I would be feeling overwhelmed and getting upset, my mom would sit me down and be like, okay, just make a list. What are all the things that you have to take care of, get them on the paper and then sort them out. And I still default to that when I get overwhelmed and there’s too much going on, I will sit down with a print list, even though I use Asana and I have all of these, virtual, digital product management project management tools.

I still default to my paper list when I get in the weeds and that’s my biggest clue that something is going on and there’s too much to handle at the moment is when I grabbed the notebook or I grab I like a graph paper thing to start sketching things out. That’s usually an indication that I need to take a step back and remove some things from my list.

So what about you? Do you have any specific signals that I didn’t mention there, Michele that people might recognize?

Michele Amitrani: Yeah. There is one thing that happens to me a lot. When I feel this, I understand there’s something wrong, which is a very personal version of the ‘fear of missing out’ thing.

So I start thinking: don’t think I’m doing enough. I think there is something wrong with the line of work that I’m using because there is that thing over there that I’m not doing and that’s obviously very important, so why this not on my list? So I’m going to put that in. And I’m going to do the same and again, until my list to grows to a gigantic size.

So it’s a very weird version of fear of missing out I will say. And the only way I know how to battle this is to just ask my myself a question that I actually learned from Tim Ferris, the famous podcaster and blogger. I think the first time I read this was on his book Tools of Titans where he said: when you are overwhelmed or there’s something that is not working in your business, try to answer this question: is there anything that will make one of these items on the list irrelevant or no longer necessary? So if there’s one of these things that is going to eliminate the needs for me to do two or three different things, then do that first. And surprisingly it is working because there are many things that are only projection of the very important one.

Usually, if I follow this advice, I’m able to cut my to-do list of quite an impressive number percentage-wise, like 30, 40%, because at the end of the day, as writer, as authorpreneurs and as writers, the most important thing is to get books out. Most of the other thing is like noise.

I get it. It’s important, social media and of course the publishing, we need to publish those books, but beside that I would say 70 to 75% is you have to get the damn book out there and it needs to be qualitatively very high. Then of course you have to do marketing and all these other things, but there are so many things like that don’t fit the picture.

For example, one of the things that I wanted to do for one of my latest releases was writing a blog post on Goodreads, which it’s great, but not, they mean people are gonna read it and it takes to do that. That is one of the examples of the fear of missing out it’s an indicator of, I’m actually losing time by doing those things.

And again, I have nothing against Goodreads. It’s just something that doesn’t work as many other things, at least for me. So that I think would be the answer to my question. And when you are Crystal in front of this list, is there a way that you use to prioritize things? Say this one is more important than the other similar to like mine, similar to Timothy’s rule? Or you have a Crystal Hunt rule for prioritizing?

Tools and strategies to help prioritize

Crystal Hunt: My prioritizing rules are based on a mashup of hundreds of different self-help books that I’ve read over the years about leadership and management and all of those things. And so I’ve developed a custom system, but it really boils down to, I think, two main ways of approaching things. And I have three tools that I use together to make this happen. So the first thing that I will do, if I’m feeling super overwhelmed and there’s too many things on the list is take a quick look and see how many, I’ll make a 5 to 10 minute list. So how many things can go off of the big list onto a 5 to 10 minute list?

And then I’ll spend even as much as an entire day doing only five or 10 minutes tasks so that I will clear out as much as possible because sometimes it’s just the size of the list that’s too overwhelming. If you sit down and that there’s 50 things, my mum called those easy wins. So when we would sit down with this huge list of things, it was like it would only take you, five minutes to do that, and you could do that in 10 minutes and then you build up a feeling of success. Like you get unstuck so if you’re in that frozen state, then I find the 10 minute lists should be super valuable because you can unstick yourself and get a bunch of quick wins, and then you feel really good. Like you are getting somewhere.

And for those of us who love to check things off of the lists, then you get that little hit of serotonin when you are like, boom! Okay, I got this. I’m feeling good about it. And then you can move on to the slightly more challenging things. Once you’ve had a bunch of those quick wins and then you’re dealing with a smaller list and then you can go ahead and actually prioritize.

So for sure we do this a longer version of some of the stuff I’m going to talk about. We do each quarter in our 12 Week Year Retreat at the Creative Academy. So one of those is actually coming up on… I believe it’s April 12th. So by the time you’re listening to this episode, you’ll still have time to come and join us, if you’re listening to this, when it first comes out. 

And if you’re not listening to the episode, when it first comes out, we do a 12 week year retreat. Every 13 weeks. And if you come to the retreat, you’ll know why there’s that bonus week in there. But we do an exercise where we help you download your brain onto the pages and figure out, okay, what all is here, which of these things are going to get prioritized? Which ones are going to get done? Which are going to get eliminated? All of those things. So for me, step one is all of the quick little fiddly things that I can clear off my plate to make the list smaller and to let me actually see what’s on it. And then I can make some choices about some of the bigger things. And Michele said removing stuff is often the most effective way to make that happen.

So I will sit down and say, okay, is there anything that I can delete completely. Is there anything that I have on here because I felt like I should do it, but it doesn’t actually have to happen. So then I will delete it, I will delegate it or I can actually move it to one other list. So I will have a ‘must do’, ‘would be nice to’, and a sort of ‘dreamland’ version where it’s like, Oh yeah, that would be amazing if I could get to those things.

But breaking that up into basically four pieces. So you have your 10 minute lists, your ‘absolutely have to do’ list and then ‘your nice to do list’, and then you’re ‘in a perfect world I would get to these things list’. And just separating it out. Again, you’re just paring things down into smaller, more manageable, digestible chunks.

So by breaking it into those, you can then decide, okay, on my must do list, I have these four things. And once I’m facing a specific list of four things, I can ask myself, okay, which of these things is going to get me the quickest return on investment? Or the biggest return on investment? Which is going to be the longest tail of benefits? Or is it something that I have to do to unlock the next set of things or the next stage of things? For our project, sometimes we have tasks that are dependent on other tasks. For example, everything that comes after the writing in the publishing process, can’t be done if the writing isn’t done right, you can’t edit something that doesn’t exist yet.

You can’t market something that doesn’t exist yet, so all of those things, they have to happen in a certain order. So if the one thing holding back everything else that I need to do with it is that then I know that task has to stay a priority. And just looking at it like that, where am I going to get the quickest win? The biggest win? If you think about the 80-20 rule, it’s a mental heuristic that lets you analyze things. About 80% of the benefit that we get in our author careers comes from about 20% of what we’re doing. And so your goal is to really identify what are the 20% of things that will get you 80% of the results, because then everything else can go onto the would be nice to do, or eventually dream list.

Doesn’t have to be on the current to-do list must do right now. So that’s one kind of, that’s like the advanced strategy. There’s a lot of moving parts there. I’ve been working on that for a lot of years to figure out that and it’s set up to get around my own little quirks of personality and how I operate as well.

I know Eileen Cook has a ta-da list. She calls it. So she doesn’t necessarily start with a list of all the things she has to do, because that can be overwhelming. And you can feel like you failed before you even get out the gate. If you have this big long list and you just can’t get to it. So she just makes a list of the things that she has done.

And then that is your ta-da!. It’s finished is the idea there. So that’s a way to also be reinforcing to yourself, your wins and your progress, and be focused on what you are doing and not on what you’re not doing. If that makes sense, you just shift the lens you’re looking through and that is really great.

How about you, Michele? What is your approach method for pushing through those tough bits? 

Michele Amitrani: I would say sometimes I have to change the approach, but most of the time is a price. So you mentioned chocolate before and my eyes was, they were glinting. Chocolate is one of the things, with moderation, so not too much of it.

And nowadays it might be also something like a series that I want to really watch. What I will do is first punish myself by not watching it and getting it only if I get to my number of hours that I need to be writing on that day, or if I finish a specific task. So maybe you can call it the carrot and the stick kind of approach.

It works for me. It keeps me going. The other thing that I use is as I was mentioning, I have two deadlines and in both of these deadlines, there is one factor that is the same, which is a person making me accountable. You’ve been doing this to me, Crystal, several times. You actually been doing that for 12 times in 2020.

So you know what I’m talking about. So there needs to be something that I lose. Can be money. It can be the respect of a person, maybe. Well, you can’t really lose the respect of a person just because you don’t meet the deadline, but my brain believes that.

So it works. And I’m not doing this by, tricking my brain. It’s just the way I’m wired. So I don’t want to disappoint the people that I respect. So it usually doesn’t happen. If somebody wants to push me on doing something and then that’s not going to happen. And I think me and Crystal are similar in that regard, but if there is a challenge and I want to accept it, and then the challenge is on. So that’s one of the other things that I use to encourage myself to get the work done. And there’s actually another thing that I use to power through difficult times. And it’s actually something that I’m doing nowadays with the story number six of my mythological fantasy collection, which is setting timers.

I don’t know why, and I’ve been using these techniques since I would say a couple of years ago, but I really started using it extensively when I started my 12 by 20 challenge. So it works like this: I set the timer for 15 minutes, 30 minutes or 1 hour, and once the time has been set, I can’t do anything else, if not the task I’m supposed to do in that timeframe. Now, why do I say 15 minutes, 30 minutes or 1 hour? It’s just because I found that these are the three time slot that work for me in the morning when I’m fresh and super strong, I set a lot of timers for one hour. So one hour time slot. In the afternoon, I found a lot of time that this timeframe, shrinks to 30 minutes. And if I push myself to a third writing session, as I’m doing these days, which is after dinner, usually It’s very difficult for me to keep anything above 30 minutes.

I sometimes do that, but it’s very difficult. So that is something that I found works for me, because I know once those 15 minutes or 30 minutes are done, I’m done. I can take a walk, I can do stuff. It has been weird for how effectful it is for my brain.

So I’m using a lot of this and that is the number one reason why I am a writer that never counts words. I have no idea how many words I wrote today or one day ago or one year ago. I know how many words I’ve published, but I don’t know how many words I wrote in a specific day. But I do know to the last second, how long did I write one day.

So that’s basically my timeframe. That’s what I’m chasing. When I write 15 or 20 hours in a week, I’m happy. When I write 5 or 10, I know I’m doing something wrong. And my personal my best time was 39 hours and 30 minutes per week. That was something I’ve never been able to achieve after that. But that’s just to explain you basically, how do I use this timers technique, if you want? I think there is something similar that I use something like the Pomodoro technique, but that’s set for 15 minutes, I think. Probably Crystal can tell you a bit more about that. Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: Yeah. So the Pomodoro technique is one that a lot of people are familiar with a lot of sort of productivity books and, get more done kind of stuff talks about that. You do whatever for 25 minutes and then you have a five minute break. So you’re using five minute and 25 minute timers to keep yourself in a cycle.

And you focus for twenty-five minutes, you reward yourself with five. I’ve found, I actually don’t do as well with the super short timelines. When I’m writing, I have a really hard time. Once I’ve dropped into it, if I’m getting interrupted every 25 minutes, I actually get really frustrated and it pulls me back out of the story.

So I do set longer timers. I try usually for an hour at a chunk. I know you’re supposed to get up and stretch every half hour and move around a little bit, but there’s always that battle between what gets you the focus and the flow. So that state of creative flow that we’re looking for can be hard to drop into in those shorter times.

But you can get in there faster if you practice and if you’re doing it frequently, then you never fully come out of it. And I think that’s really the key. The other approach is what we call eat the frog. So Brian Tracy is a business guy who wrote a bunch of books about productivity. And I love this one, I talk about eating the frog all the time, and the idea is the frogs are like the big ugly tasks that you have to do that you avoid or put off. You don’t really want to eat the frog, right? Because, mhm, frog. So that one is my everyday strategy is that there’s bound to be a frog in each day.

If you’re pushing yourself outside your comfort zone a little bit, and you’re doing all this business management and marketing stuff and you’re writing and you’re doing all these things, at least something on the list every day is going to be a frog. So the idea is you do that first, that the very first thing in the day is the hardest thing for you.

If there’s anything you’re avoiding you do it first. Now I’m going to caveat this because for writers, a lot of us are really focused on getting our words in first. And so this does not mean that you should put the frog ahead of your words, right? You should get up, and if getting the—if it is your frog, great, you’re getting a two for one deal.

If your frog is something else, then do your words, but then when you switch to the rest of your kind of business day, then do the frog first. So the frogs do not get to take priority over the stories. I think that’s an important thing for writers because we are in a very different position than a lot of business people and that we are trying to be both creative and productive.

And those don’t always go hand in the same kind of expected way. So doing the hard thing first, we will refer to as eating the frog.

All right. I think our final piece of advice really needs to be: don’t panic, right? Just like Douglas Adams said the key to surviving whatever’s going on is don’t panic. And if you are feeling yourself in that stressed out, not sure what to do next, not sure where to go next. I don’t know what you can get rid of, and if you really are having trouble seeing that for yourself, because we can get too far into it and have no real context or vision anymore, then it’s absolutely excellent to get some help. If you don’t have a critique partner or an accountability buddy, or somebody that you can talk to in your writing group, come to the Creative Academy.

Every week, there are motivation and accountability masterminds, as well as a ton of other group activities and you can pop into one of those and ask the group for help. And people will help you brainstorm what could maybe come off your list or get pushed to later, or get delegated to someone else. And you don’t have to figure it all out by yourself because trying to solve a problem with the tools that we always already had in our toolbox doesn’t always work. Sometimes those are the tools that caused the problem in the first place and we need a little bit of a reset or reboot. So we have that for you. We’ll make sure that the show notes have the link to Creative Academy and to where you can come and join us and participate in the 12 week year retreat that’s coming up. We hope you enjoyed today’s show. And remember to hit that subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to the podcast and to visit us@strategicauthorpreneur.com for show notes and links to the resources and tools we love. 

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Michele Amitrani: Until next week. Thank you very much for listening to us, happy writing, 

Crystal Hunt: Okay, everybody. And remember keep calm and write on.