Happy 2021! I’m so excited to start out the new year with you.
Over the last few weeks of 2020, we’ve been talking about prioritizing and protecting your time for writing and creating. This isn’t a switch that can be flipped in a moment or even a day — it’s a change that happens by building and adopting small habits into your life and routine.
Habit-building can be hard, especially if you’re a free spirit who finds habits distasteful (whoops, guilty!). But it doesn’t have to be a miserable slog. And there are a lot of great tools that can help you stay on track. Here are just a few of my favorites:
Books:
- Atomic Habits by James Clear: This book helped me break down habit-building into manageable steps. It’s great.
- The Productivity Planner by Intelligent Change: I love this planner. It’s simple, clean, and uses the Pomodoro Method to help you prioritize and make progress every day.
Apps:
- HabitShare Habit Tracker: This iOS app allows me to check a simple “yes” or “no” for every day that I do a certain habit — and you can share your habits with others to keep you accountable. I use it to track my daily writing, exercise, affirmations, reading, and more.
- Freedom.to: This is a paid app for your computer that essentially blocks you from visiting/using distracting websites/apps like Facebook, YouTube, news sites, etc. during your precious creative time.
- Meet Edgar: This is another paid service, but it’s been invaluable in helping me prioritize my time for writing. Meet Edgar is a social media scheduler for Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And unlike most free social media scheduling apps, it recycles your old posts.
- Later: This free social media scheduling app is best known for Instagram, but it also allows you to schedule posts ahead of time for Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. Unlike Hootsuite (another well-known social media scheduling app), it uses a visual calendar that I really find helpful.
Other:
- Do Not Disturb mode on my phone: I am made of distraction, and will leap onto my phone the second it dings with a text, email, or social media notification. Do Not Disturb mode makes the dinging stop. It’s been invaluable.
- Disabling notifications on my phone entirely: In addition to Do Not Disturb mode, I also went into the notifications for each and every app on my phone and disabled notifications. It’s lessened my anxiety and made my life so much more peaceful.
- Coffee: This one’s self-explanatory. 🙂 For whatever reason, coffee really helps me focus.
(Quick note: Aside from the affiliate link above for Meet Edgar, I’m not getting paid to promote any of these tools — they’re just things I’ve discovered and like using. But if you represent any of them and want to send me wheelbarrows full of cash for my endorsement, please go ahead.)
Remember — as humans, we’re not perfect, and no one is asking us to be. One of the biggest and best things you can do for yourself is treat yourself with love, patience, and forgiveness. We’re all human, and we’re all figuring this out together. I’m cheering for you!
Words & warmth,
Sarah