GET YOURSELF A CALENDAR

Austin Kleon:

So I decided to make 250 poems in 25 weeks. 10 poems a week. I couldn’t see it happening, so I drew it. 25 rows, 10 checkboxes. Until all the checkboxes would be full 
And that’s how I’ve been living for the past four months. Every week, there are 10 checkboxes to be filled, and I fill them. At the end of every poem, there’s the satisfying X.
Creating any long work of art is all about time management. Any goal you want to accomplish: get yourself a calendar. Break the task down into little bits of time. Make it a game.

Number one productivity tip:

Get yourself a calendar, and schedule the work you have to do in there. Make sure the calendar is the type where you can see a day or a week at at time (not a month at a time), so there’s room to write under each day. Then, mark in any regular commitments you have…Once you’ve got all that there, you will be able to see how much time you really have to work….In the time you have for work, assign yourself very specific tasks…Taking a little time to get all this in your book will do several things for you.
It will become clear to you how much you can reasonably get done in a week. It will become clear where you might need to shorten your daily activities to fit in more work. And, most importantly, it will give you concrete goals, so that when you finish what you set out to do, you can cross it off and feel good about yourself, and you can also stop working, sometimes the hardest thing to do for a freelancer. Knowing when you’re on and what you need to get done makes your free time, once you’ve accomplished these goals, truly free, guilt-free. And that’s the most important part of learning to make a life as a working freelancer.
Once you get good at all this, you don't have to be so detailed about it, of course. But it really helps to follow this discipline throughout one project to get yourself in the rhythm of it. And even once you get more comfortable with your schedule, it still helps to make detailed to-do lists for a given day so you have something to cross off when you're done. Half the battle is tricking your brain into feeling that sense of accomplishment you might get if someone on the outside were praising you for a job well done. #