How To Actually Start Planning Your Writing Projects Without Feeling Overwhelmed
Isn't a plan supposed to make writing less overwhelming?
In the writing community, we have 12-week-planning workshops four times a year.
In each workshop, I walk participants through the process of planning with nature's rhythms — the seasons, the moon, and even a menstrual cycle.
For most people, this is the first time they've heard about such planning methods. I break it down into simple steps because I know it can be overwhelming.
Also, most of these people avoid planning. I know because I was one of these people. Plans always felt so rigid, stale, and corporate to me. It was something that I thought I was supposed to leave in my corporate life, and when I went full-time into my freelance writing career, I thought I’d embrace the wild creative life.
Not quite.
In my corporate consulting and change management career, I operated mainly from masculine energy. No intuition, make big lists, get things done, crush my goals, and push forward. It would be years before I discovered how to embrace more feminine energy — letting my creativity come through and the wild, free, and intuitive energy I had ignored for so long.
Masculine and feminine energy aside, I resisted making my own plans. I can create a website copywriting plan for clients that wow their socks off every time, but those plans were ghosts in my business.
I used to hate all kinds of planning — goal planning, meal planning, and especially planning my writing.
Aren't creatives supposed to live adventurously and fly by the seat of their pants? The plans always felt rigid and like they had too many walls.
Rewind to 2012. I ran a plant-based food blog and side business and started creating meal plans for myself and my clients. I realized that the approach I took to food could be applied to business, too.
Now, I take an intuitive approach to planning all my writing projects and still get things done.
You'll love the intuitive approach if you can't stand feeling like you're being shoved in a box and forced to stick to a plan.
The intuitive approach is fluid and changes with me as I grow.
Instead of recapping the planning process, you can watch it in this free workshop and grab the free 12-week planning template — updated for 2024.
Now, what if planning feels overwhelming?
A few days into the new year, I heard from a few writing community members and some creative business owners that they were struggling with the plan.
This came up during our first co-working call of the year, and what I shared helped everyone there, so hopefully, this advice will help you, too.
I've been working with this planning process for about two years now. Right now, my plan is partially baked and a little raw in the middle.
It needs more time.
Important reminder: just because it's January, it doesn't mean your plan needs to be fully fleshed out through March (all of Q1). And especially not all of 2024.
I first started plotting some things into my 12-week plan in December. Only after mapping out what offers I'll promote when in 2024.
Over the holidays, I had plans to work on my plan so I could jump into January ready to rock, knowing exactly what to write and when.
I did some work (happily) over the holidays with some writing I was called to do, and while I had every intention to sit down and focus on my plan for an hour and get it done, that's not what happened.
Instead, I've left my partially baked 12-week plan open on my computer. I needed clarity on some things before I could move forward.
I could have sat around and waited for clarity, but I know how that game goes.
I need to take action to get clarity.
I started writing what I thought would be the year's first blog. I put the title in the doc and immediately felt a "nope." So I put it away.
As I did that, I realized a few more things I wanted to do, and I added them to my plan.
The next day, I started writing on another topic. Still, nope. That's not lighting me up, either. But it did give me clarity on some things. I quickly added a few items to my plan and moved some tasks to my parking lot.
By the fourth, it was coming into focus. I saw where I needed to go only by starting down a road. I could have very well sat and done nothing instead of taking action. I wasn't sure it was the right action. Are we ever 100% certain about any outcome? I knew I needed to go in this direction.
My plan is coming together, and that's fine.
What to do if you're working on a writing plan and are new to planning:
Start with ONE goal at a time for the quarter or year.
If "write website copy" is a goal, then that's too big of an item to live on your 12-week plan. It needs to be broken down into micro tasks: outline website copy, draft sales page, edit sales page, draft about page, and so on. Brainstorm all the little things you think you’ll need to do. Take your best guess. Even if it’s your first time writing a sales page, you’ve probably got a good idea about what needs to go in there.
You'd then space those tasks out over the coming weeks. Don’t write "write website copy" every week in your plan. It's too big. This makes your action vague and leaves you unclear on what to do first.
Start by planning one week based on the list of tasks you need to complete to reach your goal.
Block time on your calendar — maybe 1 hour, 3x a week
Stick to the time and do the work. Your feelings about the work don’t matter. Your mind will probably want to resist it. This is how you let the tasks slide and then suddenly wonder where your goals went.
Once you get the hang of planning a week, look ahead to the coming week (I like to do this on Fridays)
Spread out the tasks you need to do to get closer to your goal for the next week
Follow this process for another goal. Generally, I only work on 1-3 goals at a time to stay focused.
As you get the hang of it, start adding tasks to the coming weeks and plan one month, then flesh out the rest to get you to 12 weeks
What if your writing plan changes?
There’s a good chance it will. Life happens. As much as possible, stick to your plan. If a task slides, immediately create another time block on your calendar to make it happen, or move the task to the next week.
If you notice a task on your weekly plan keeps slipping, there may be some digging to do. Some questions to explore:
Why are you avoiding this task?
Could it mean that when you do it, you’ll have to do something else that you’re avoiding?
What does it mean when you finish it?
Is this something you really want to do, or are you doing it because you think you should?
Do you lack the skills to do the task?
Planning might feel awkward at first, but it’s worth sticking with it. Every time you successfully check off your tasks for the week and make meaningful progress toward your goal, you’re getting an important dopamine hit. Then, there’s the big rush when you hit your goal. Remember to celebrate when you get there!
If you found this article on planning helpful, you might like these too:
Writing With Nature's Rhythms (Writing with the moon — Intuitive Writing chapter excerpt)
Writing Is a Marathon and You Get to Decide If That’s a Good Thing
