What to Do When You’re Too Stressed to Write: Tips for Indie Authors
You wear ALLLL the hats as an indie author!
Not only do you write the books, you have to do all of the countless tasks to get them edited, designed, formatted, published, and into the hands of your readers.
AND everything in between.
Personal life: What’s that?
Self care: Never heard of it!
When struggling to do the thing and just not making any headway, it can be helpful to turn to those successful people who have come before to see how they made it through. After all, by the law of statistics alone, we can’t be the only ones faced with this.
Why not borrow a page out of their book, so to speak, and discover what has worked for them?
Indie Author Tips to Reduce Stress and Overwhelm
1. Read to Feed the Muse
R. F. Kuang reads extensively in the genre and about the topic she is exploring, and she finds this gets her creative juices flowing.
While you may have a hard time turning off your inner critic and reading strictly for pleasure, perhaps doing so can help you enjoy the process again.
Stephen King credits his voracious reading for helping him to learn from other authors and to hone his skill:
“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you . . . If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write.”
Allow yourself to get lost in another’s story and fully appreciate their story for what it is. Then, when it comes time for you to write, you just might find yourself re-inspired, and the words will come more easily since you spent time in someone else’s world.
“Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.”
2. Batch Your Tasks into Time Blocks
Dedicate blocks of time to work on similar tasks. This practice is a true time-saver since there is no time lost when switching between tasks, and online business mogul, Amy Porterfield, swears by this strategy.
While many people take pride in their self-proclaimed ability to multitask, in an article in the Harvard Business Review, Peter Bregman, a leadership expert, noted “that our productivity goes down by 40% when we attempt to focus on several things at once.”
Furthermore, just to continue to add insult to injury, “Every time we become distracted, it takes an average of 23 minutes to regain that initial focus.”
So, by batching similar tasks and by completing them in blocks of time, we are actually more efficient and have the added benefit of decreasing stress and overwhelm.
If, for example, you’re wanting to tell readers about your upcoming book release on Instagram, you can batch the tasks that it requires like this:
Step 1: Block out 30-60 minutes to brainstorm ideas for 10 posts.
Consider sharing such monumental moments of your journey in writing this book, such as a photo from when you wrote “The End,” the title reveal, and the cover reveal.
Your readers will love feeling like they’re on the journey with you and will want to share in the excitement!
Step 2: Block out about 30 minutes to map out on a calendar the date and time each of these posts will go out. Be sure to do this well in advance of your book’s release, since this is about alleviating panic rather than inducing it. 🙃
Step 3: Block out a few hours to create the 10 posts.
Step 4: Depending on the length of the caption for each post, you might choose to have an additional time block devoted to the writing of each caption and the addition of hashtags.
Step 5: Schedule all 10 posts.
An easily repeatable but time-consuming task, such as content creation, is a perfect item to delegate to an author PA! Click here to find out how Mint Copy Services can help take these tasks off of your plate!
If you’re considering when it’s time to hire an author PA and how to go about doing so, check out my free downloadable resource:
3. Templatize Repeatable Processes
As an author, there are many tasks that must be done; however, those tasks that are relatively rote can be templatized for greater efficiency.
Follow these steps to help streamline your workflow:
Step 1: Identify the tasks
To templatize rote tasks, look back through your planner, notebooks, calendars, and project management systems to see which consistent tasks take up your time.
In addition to writing, you might find that you spend a lot of time creating Instagram posts, writing your newsletter, reaching out to influencers, or responding to emails, for example.
Step 2: List out the steps
After you’ve identified a time-consuming task, list out each of the steps involved in completing the task.
Do this in your Notes app, Notion or in your Drive.
Step 3: Designate each step to a day/time
This is where time blocking and templatizing your workflow meet.
If the creation of your weekly newsletter is taking a lot of your time, for example, consider following the steps outlined in number two above, Batch Your Tasks into Time Blocks.
Then create a newsletter template, and save it as a Google Doc, in your Notion, in your email platform, or whichever works best for you.
Your newsletter likely follows the same format from week to week. You can create an outline, or template, to follow each time.
Simply duplicate this template when you’ve reached the “content creation” time block in your calendar. Rename it and then assign the tasks to the relevant dates in your calendar. It’s so gratifying to check off the boxes as you accomplish each task!
These templatizable tasks are perfect for you author PA, thus freeing you up for time to write!
“Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well.”
4. Build your own system by incorporating what works for others
As an author, your area of genius thrives when you’re able to enter a state of laser focus. This state is challenging to achieve thanks to the sundry tasks and endless interruptions.
The Indie Author vs. The Environment: The age-old battle rages 🤺
While the hacks above focus on strategies to employ, this point highlights four methods to create routines and habits, so you can achieve this ability to work deeply each and every day.
Dr. Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, shares that Deep Work is:
“Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”
Furthermore, “Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.”
As an author, you need to spend your time engaged in deep work, as opposed to shallow work, which is defined as:
“Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”
These are the tasks that are detracting from your area of genius and can easily be handed off to your author PA while you are focusing on writing.
Dr. Newport notes that scheduling blocks of time during which deep work occurs is critical (to finishing your book 📖).
He outlines the following four strategies that you might wish to incorporate into your schedule to see which one best fits you and your situation:
Monastic - remove all shallow work in order to focus on deep work; most used by authors and scientists, since their success is dependent on output quantity; can choose one day a week/month to answer emails, for example.
Bimodal - spend uninterrupted blocks of time in deep work; after that time block is over, then address all shallow work tasks; allows for some flexibility in scheduling, since can spend some days in deep work and the remaining days of the week in shallow work.
Rhythmic - make 3-4 hours of deep work a daily habit; requires that time blocks remain consistent and uninterrupted.
Journalistic - fit deep work into your schedule whenever possible; requires great flexibility in the level of focus, so you can get into that state quickly.
Regardless of which strategy you employ, know that you don’t have to do it alone!
When you’re too busy and stressed, Mint Copy Services is here to help, so you can focus on the deep work only you can do!
Not sure what’s next? Let’s chat and plan next steps together!
Your supportive side character,
Lisa