Want to get more writing done?  Here are some tips:

1. Divide the work into steps.  Don’t look as writing as one big block of work.  Instead, treat it like a process that you can divide it into multiple steps.  Doing so compartmentalizes every task, allowing you to attend to each one with more focus.
2. Work from an outline or a mind map.  If the direction of your paper is clear in your mind, then proceeding directly to the draft is fine.  Otherwise, you’ll be better served working from either a mind map or an outline, where you can organize your thoughts first before proceeding to write the draft.
3. Start early.  Try starting every writing project as early as possible.  That will ensure you have enough time to set the draft aside to clear your head for the revision phase.   Not doing so can unnecessarily extend your editing time.
4. Use every software tool you can.  There are plenty of software tools designed to serve writers’ needs, from grammar checkers to text expanders to style correctors.  Find those that can help automate some of your writing tasks and shave time off from your work.
5. Draft loosely, edit thoroughly.  When you draft, just focus on putting your thoughts in words, ignoring mechanical issues like grammar and sentence flow.  You’ll have plenty of time to smoothen out the edges later during editing — stick to a rough draft for now.

Many writers have talent and skill.  While it may sound presumptuous, you probably do as well.  If you can’t work in a productive manner, however, you’ll hardly scratch the surface of what you can achieve.

The more productive you are, the more work you can finish.  It’s that simple.  Improving on this aspect allows you to create more — a situation that can lead to more income and, if you’re lucky, more success.

The first step to improving your productivity is measuring it.  If you don’t know your current mileage, after all, then you have no baseline for improving on.  Get hard numbers for your current performance, so that you can find areas to work on, as well as chart your improvement over time.

If you don’t have any idea where to start measurements, here are some things you can do:

1. Record how much time you spend on each writing activity for each project.  Make sure to segregate different activities, such as analysis, research, outlining, drafting and editing.
2. Record the number of lines you finish in a one hour period everyday for a month.
3. Record the number of lines you finish every 8 hours of work for a month.
4. Record the number of lines you finish every 40 hours of work for a month.
5. Record the number of lines you finish for the month.

From there, you can have a good starting data from which to look at the dips and rises in your productivity, as well as what activities you can do to create improvements in your numbers.

Looking for new tools that can get your writing productivity up a notch?  Here are some I’ve found very helpful:

• Speech-recognition software.  Titles like Dragon Naturally Speaking can take your dictation and automatically transcribe them to text.  That way, you can just speak into a mic, instead of typing.  Accuracy will depend on the software you pick, but the couple ones I’ve tested so far appear to work really well.   Expect to spend upwards of $100 for a good package, though.
• Notebook software.  I’m a huge fan of OneNote and Evernote, both of which allow you to maintain a notebook-like organization of notes, documents, pictures and other digital items.  It really helps streamline the work of managing and maintaining all your research material.
• Macro software.  We all have repetitive tasks that we do on our computer.  If I’ll do a task more than two or three times a year, I usually have a macro software record it and have it do them on schedule.  This saves me time I could otherwise put into my writing activities in the long term.
• Writing software.  We’ve harped on endlessly about the value of this, so I’ll be brief.  If you’re forcing yourself to perform tasks like grammar and spelling checks that a proofreading program can do all on its own, you’re wasting time and leaving money on the table.  Truth.
• Plagiarism-checking websites.  I’m talking about services like Copyscape and those like it, which help you check whether a piece of text has similar or exact matches online.  Personally, I use it to guarantee that my writing doesn’t read like anybody else’s work and to check whether some dirty schmuck decided to appropriate any of my old writing without authorization.

Being a more productive writer isn’t easy. For most of us, there’s a very real upper limit to how much writing we can produce in a given amount of time. However, there are ways you can optimize your work process such that you can hit that upper limit on a more consistent basis.

1. Keep track of your writing habits. Keep tabs on how many words you can write in an hour, how long it takes you to research individual topics, how quickly you can finish a standard project from start to finish with a proofreading software in tow and other writing activities. The more information you keep about your writing habits, the more you’ll find patterns emerge. Recognize behaviors that can serve to improve your writing’s speed and implement them as regulars in your workflow.

2. Try a different approach. It’s easy to build habits around the way you work, not all of them good. If you’re not happy with your results, try something else.

3. Inspire yourself. What motivates you to write? Surely, there was something that encouraged you to write more than the need to pay the bills. Find ways you can periodically remind yourself of that.

4. Add one technique at a time. Some people will read a book about writing and overhaul their entire process. While that could work for some, it usually ends up as a disaster for most. Changing your entire work process will require replacing all your existing habits – something that sounds just as hard as it actually is. A better approach is to slowly alter your workflow by adding one technique at a time and seeing how that works out.

People who regularly use a writing software like to harp on how much it benefits their productivity. While you’d certainly like to enjoy the same gains in efficiency, you may be held back by being unsure of how it can exactly help your situation. Here are a few ideas on how you can use a proper a writing software to foster improvements in your own work process.

1. Use it to save you editing and proofreading time.

The most obvious benefit of a writing correction software is the time and effort it takes off from having to edit and proofread your own piece. Multiply by thousands of pages worth of text and you can be looking at days upon days of productive time added to your life.

2. Use it to help organize your writing process.

What a lot of people don’t know is that many writing tools out there are designed for more than just editing and correction. In fact, there’s a good number of them geared specifically for helping you plan, organize and streamline your writing process.

3. Use it to improve your writing abilities.

One side effect of using writing improvement software is that you can see all corrections and suggestions it makes to your text (some even provide a log), turning the session into an indirect lesson that you can use to improve upon your own abilities.

4. Use it to save time ensuring that your work complies with stylebook guidelines.

You can use the stylechecking feature in more advanced writing software to ensure that your work adheres with a specific stylebook, whether you have to use the MLA, Chicago, AP or some other specialized guideline. Not only will it save you time you’d have to spend combing through the draft, it will also save you from having to pore through a thick manual you may not be especially familiar with.

Want to write more?  Here are some surefire techniques to get that done.

1.  Set milestones.  Most writers sit down and get busy.  Others set small goals and set out to get them done.   Contrary to what you may think, being busy doesn’t mean being productive.  You can be busy and accomplishing nothing.

2.  Outright reject activities not related to the goals.  We live in an ever-connected society where there are more things to do than we have time for.  It’s more important than ever to be vigilant about doing things that move you along to completing your milestones.

3.  Jealously guard your working hours.  Your working hours are precious – that’s when you earn your keep.  Guard it against non-productive distractions of all kinds.

4.  Find your most productive hours and schedule your work during that time.  Find blocks of time when you can be the most productive, whether that’s morning, noon, night or dawn.  Make sure you set them during times when you can work uninterrupted.

5.  Separate marketing, networking and other adjunct activities from your writing time.  Writers need to do more than write, of course.  However, all those other things – from querying editors to negotiating for pay – are best done at a different time that your actual writing.

6.  Use tools that help improve productivity.  From grammar checkers to software writing assistants, there are plenty of tools designed to take your productivity to the next level.  Embrace them.

Are you an extrovert? Some say writing is doubly harder for folks of your temperament, since you require more time among people, while writing typically requires the kind of focus you can get by spending time on your own.

Of course, I’ve seen my fair share of extroverted writers who do really well.  If you can’t count yourself among them yet, here are a few things you may want to try doing.

1. Learn how your temperament affects your productivity.  Most extroverts find it easier to attain peak performance when thrust among people.  That can be difficult, given how most writing is best done with complete focus, typically in solitude.  However, extroverts do have particular traits that can help too.  What particular qualities do you have that make you a good writer?

2. Set writing goals.  When you sit down typing on your laptop, do you get anxiety pangs?  Set goals for yourself, such as finishing a page of your novel everyday before giving yourself permission to feed the need to socialize.

3. Try writing among people.  Contrary to cartoon depictions, writers don’t have to sit at a quiet place to write their masterpieces.  I know writers who turn Starbucks into their veritable office, spending hours everyday there writing, amidst throngs of customers passing by.  Maybe, you’ll find the same thing effective for your own productivity.

4. Write about topics that play to your strengths.  As an extrovert, you tend to have insights about certain subjects that introverts won’t have.  Use that to your advantage by focusing your writing on those topics.  Ever read the social columns on the paper?  Most of the best ones are fashioned by extroverts who can get out there and really mingle.

5. Get a writing software.  Anything that makes you work more efficient should help you get out of the house quicker.  A competent writing software can do just that.  Use it.

I was reading a business article today, where the author rattled off productivity tips for small entrepreneurs.  For some reason, I kept relating the guidelines to writing.  As it turns out, good advice in the field of business can easily be rearranged to be applicable to us.

Remove distractions. While multi-tasking has been the norm for a lot of individuals, it is also the biggest culprit for sub-standard work.  This is especially true for writers, whose focus needs to remain on the job at hand.  Actively pursue being able to write uninterrupted by scheduling your activities (such as emails and phone calls), rather than taking them whenever they come in.

Not every idea is worth exploring. Everyone in a creative field tends to walk around with lots of ideas.  Just because you have them doesn’t mean they’re worth putting to paper, though.  You’ll have to weigh the value of one over the other, pursue those that could lead to better results and put the rest on a backburner.  Needless to say, trying to work on too many things at the same time can lead to extremely watered-down results.

Eliminate, delegate and automate. For small businessmen, being able to free yourself from routine jobs lets you open up more time for work that can lead to better results.  That’s the gist of what this technique is about: eliminate as much of the stuff you do yourself, either automating them or delegating them to someone else.

In writing, we’ve expounded countless times about the value of using software tools to help you – automated grammar checkers, writing assistant software and all that.  If you use them wisely, you can eliminate close to half of your entire work cycle for each piece, without your material suffering as a result.

If you have been asking yourself whether writing software can save you some time, then you should be relieved to know that the answer is yes; this software can help save time and subsequently save money as well. There are many features found in English software that can enable you work with comfortable pace and easily check the progress of your work. If you have a deadline to meet, like an article for a business magazine or any other magazine for that matter, or you have to finish a certain chapter before the publication of a particular book that you have been working on, you can have all your writing solutions taken care of by using writing software. If you are a journalist, a writer, researcher, student, attorney, technical writers, screenwriters or a novelist, you can be able to benefit from this software due to the following features that make the software more marketable and applicable to many users.

English software has a number of features like the drag and drop feature, which allows you to drop texts from any Windows program that allows this feature. There is also the importing and exporting feature, which gives users the option of converting any text document from most text editors. This writing software has a number of benefits to help you with their work. With English software, there is increased productivity as it enables you to arrange your creative ideas into a coherent piece of work with more ease and do this very fast and efficiently. This enables you get more work done in a short space of time. The other major benefit is that this software gives you the abilities to organize your work better.

Writing software also, gives you better structures where it will auto arrange your work in a systematic manner that is suited for you and the context. This makes it easy for you when it comes to formatting. It also gives you a way to outline your work faster and arrange your work after you have jotted your ideas in full using the software. After writing your work to completion, English software gives you the option of different view types that you want to view and print in. Be it a web page or a copy page, this software can cater to the writers needs in saving time and money. Therefore, writers are able to do more work and get better profits.

To read more about writing software, visit englishsoftware.org