99 Writing Productivity Tips

Being a productive writer can be tough. Over the years, I’ve developed a series of recommendations that will help you write more productively. Each of these has been personally tested and guaranteed to work†. As with all of my free recommendations, I offer a 100% money-back guarantee.

1. Get more paper. You can’t have too much until it falls on you and smothers you. Fill rooms with it. The family can sleep in the garage.
2. Get more pens. You should always have a pen close to hand. Put one in each pocket. Behind each ear. If the lids won’t get dislodged too easily, up each nostril.
3. Pen-holsters. On the walls. Inside your suit jackets. Under the mantelpiece.
4. Officeworks. Have them on speed-dial.
5. Cover your walls in butchers paper. Have an idea? Grab your pen from its holster and scribble away. Don’t waste precious seconds.
6. Stop washing your car. Save time, and the dusty windshields are a useful backup for notebooks and scrap paper.
7. Overkill. Refuse to eat, drink, sleep, talk to people, move. Finish work. Not recommended for novels unless you’re close to finishing.
8. Outsource. Get someone else to do the bits you don’t want to. Have a picnic.
9. Wikify. Create an open-source effort. Collaborate. Control. Publish.
10. Clean your desk. File everything useful away. File everything useless away. A clean desk lets you make new and interesting piles.
11. Mess up your office. Messy offices are sexy, make you look productive, and the treasure hunts to find anything can provide inspiration.
12. Have a punching intern. Cheers to Questionable Content for this gem. Punching interns are better than stress balls and they can mix drinks if you yell hard enough.
13. Don’t do any paperwork. You’re an artist, not a worker drone!
14. Make your paperwork into art. Creative filling of forms delights and stimulates clerks. Their rage is a front in case their managers are watching.
15. Lie. Often. Creating a web of lies makes you work hard to maintain it. If it all comes crashing down, you’ll learn a valuable lesson about truth and friendship.                        Or something.                               Whatever.
16. Elope. Just you, a beach, and a laptop.
17. Hermitage. Just you, a cave, some pen and paper, and a few months of dehydrated surplus military meals.
18. Eccentricity. Writers get away with being a little crazy. Develop a reputation and maybe the gawkers will bring food, saving you the time and energy of cooking.
19. Blackboards. Useful.
20. Whiteboards. More useful. Don’t stand too close when writing or you’ll get high.
21. Wall sized Etch-A-Sketches. Most useful. For hardcore writers. “How do you write?” “By MAGNETIZING FLAKES OF METAL.”
22. Become invisible. People who can’t see you can’t interrupt you.
23. Traps. Lay them at the entrance to your study. Lethality and warnings up to the individual’s taste.
24. Dig a hole. Hide in it for a day. If your head’s below surface level, people might leave you alone for a few hours. Use this time well.
25. Invent religious holidays. Spend them writing.
26. Have a hangover. Extend your religious holiday… And spend it writing.
27. Get your appendix out. It’s easy, and you get a few free days in hospital…. To write.
28. Give up porn. Spend your weekends furtively browsing tvtropes, wikipedia, and Write-Thing.
29. Watch DVDs with subtitles. And at double speed. Save yourself an average of 45 minutes. That’s a chapter’s worth of writing!
30. Get arrested due to a mistaken identity. You ‘d be surprised how much writing gets done in prison.
31. “Help” your kids with their creative writing. Nothing says ‘I love you” than living vicariously through your children’s 8th Grade English teacher.
32. Toothbrushing + bathroom mirror + toothpaste + spare hand = productivity opportunity!
33. Jogging. Forget Podcasts. Dictation programs exist for a reason.
34. At the Gym, #1 1 set, 15 reps, 5 sentences cooldown. Repeat 2 more times. Next machine.
35. At the Gym, #2 Free weight? More like free hand! Write and curl!
36. At the Gym, #3 wanna get those crunches a little higher? Blast your abs by lifting your arms to the page stuck to the wall. Hold for a few words. repeat for 1 paragraph.
37. Tap-dance? Take a microphone and dictate away in Morse code.
38. Fence? Tip your epee with ink and work on your pointmanship.
39. Skydive? Squeeze in 5 minutes while the plane’s taxiing. Don’t write in the air, though, that’s stupid.
40. Snorkel and SCUBA with a handy laser-etching tool and some aluminum plates.
41. Ask banks for credit cards. Use the sheets they send you as character creation references.
42. Buy paper with pre-ruled margins. The time spent on those red lines adds up, y’know.
43. Invent time-travel. Then go and visit your future self, who can hand you finished, revised work. Publish immediately, then go get some more. Save years of effort.
44. The Pit and the Pendulum. I’m sure you could engineer a suitable variation. Achieve peak motivation!
45. Steal status updates from Facebook. They don’t have any real friends anyway.
46. Fake your own death. You’ll have a few weeks before the life insurance blokes start poking around.
47. Doodle on the steamed up glass in your shower. Archive it with a cheap photographer, or, for profit on the side, a webcam.
48. Sharpie ideas onto the inside of your morning train/bus. If they don’t seem so great the next day, leave them for someone else.
49. Take the I Ching on trips to the Zoo. Pull faces at the animals until they throw straw at you. Weave the results into a story.
50. Take the I Ching on trips to your Asian in-laws. Pull faces at them until they throw chopsticks at you. Weave the results into a story.
51. Take a Tarot deck to your Poker night. You’ll get some interesting readings and nobody else will know the rules.
52. Move into a dull, boring, white-walled apartment. Then indulge yourself with some crayons on the wall. Mind-mapping needs to be expansive.
53. Turn off all your music for a week. Write down the lyrics that pop into your head.
54. Turn up all your music for a week. Write to block out the noise. Beware neighbours.
55. Treat drinking as a social experiment. Ply interesting and embarrassing stories out of your friends and coworkers.
56. Assume the entire world’s operating under a GNU license. Give thanks as you publish.
57. Submit all homework in short-story form. Maths professors love experimental fiction.
58. Write meeting minutes in the first person. Get heavy with the adverbs.
59. Sponsor exchange students. Torment them mercilessly with fake social rituals. Then steal and publish their diaries.
60. Write resignation letters for disaffected colleagues.
61. Job title. Negotiate for it to include “Internal Columnist”, “Corporate Storyteller”, or “Voodoo Shaman”.
62. RSS the Whole Internet. Subscribe to the blogs of 20 writers more successful than you. Rage is a powerful motivator.
63. Have kids. Make them write for you.
64. Have kids. Get them enrolled in school-sponsored creative writing programs with successful authors. Tag along as parent help. Steal course notes. Kidnap the speaker.
65. Borrow kids. Fill them full of red cordial and amuse yourself with their hyperactive foibles. Return to parents.
66. Don’t have kids. You’ll get more done. Auction yours off if you have them.
67. Use Autocorrect. Every second helps.
68. Don’t spellcheck. That’s what proofreaders are for.
69. Use templates for everything. Dear [NAME]….
70. Take up smoking. It’ll give you something to keep you poor and motivated.
71. Give up smoking. Your struggles will inspire sympathy and maybe some free food.
72. Become a drug dealer. Eventually, you’ll be on the run from someone. Nothing focuses you on brevity like having to write your life story using your own intestines.
73. Bathe instead of shower. It’ll take longer, but you can soak and scribble.
74. Shower. With an Etch-A-Sketch.
75. Don’t bathe at all. It adds to your image and cuts down on valuable writing time.
76. Take public transport. You can write without worrying about the road, and cute Uni students dig Moleskines.
77. Clone yourself. One of you can go out and work, the other can stay home and write.
78. Develop telepathy. Stalk good writer’s houses. Steal their thoughts. Race them to publication..
79. Ninja skills. Bending time is the #1 Productiviy Tip in all reputable Japanese self-help publications.
80. Scam emails. “[...]As the Executor for the Late Prince Nabutu of Nigeria, I speedily await your prompt review of his dying short story. Your $1 MILLION DOLLARS will be forwarded to your bank account shortly.”
81. Become ambidextrous. Double your productivity in one easy step!
82. Get bitten by a radioactive Thesaurus. With your new super-powers, you’ll save on time previously spent referencing.
83. Set yourself on fire. Have a pre-determined word limit before you can reach for the extinguisher.
84. Employ a teenager to sneer at your incompetent efforts every day you don’t write. Shame is a powerful motivator.
85. Go local. General anesthetic’s for wimps. WRITE THROUGH THE PAIN.
86. Avoid RSI. Variety is key. Write with your elbows, knees, nose, and chin.
87. Charge your productivity. Join a writer’s circle who punish lack of new material with cattle prods.
88. Lick a leper. Being outcast from society removes temptations.
89. Schedule everything. Make a detailed, comprehensive schedule. Destroy it. Replace it with one block of color and some bold font saying “WRITE”.
90. Alphabetti Spaghetti for breakfast, lunch and tea. I don’t care how much you prefer the dinosaur variety. Get inspired by the spoonful!
91. Teach. Steal your student’s work.
92. Manage. Call it a team spirit exercise. Steal your employee’s work.
93. Learn. Attend classes. Steal your co-students work.
94. Run everywhere. The earlier you arrive, the more spare time you have for writing.
95. Walk everywhere. Write while you walk. Crossing roads can be hazardous.
96. Rollerblade everywhere. It won’t make you more productive, but the feeling of coolness that comes with whizzing around on ‘blades is inspiring.
97. Sharpen your elbows. Lets you claim valuable armrest space on airplane flights and crowded buses. Essential for good posture while writing.
98. Cultivate lackeys. Crush the weak-willed and make them subservient to your ego. The more you’re pandered, the better your writing will be.
99. Read fewer lists.  Don’t send me pedantic emails about the difference between count nouns and mass nouns, or I’ll set you on fire.

There you are!
99 useful tips that are, as mentioned, 100% guaranteed† to improve your productivity. Try them out!
† Please note: No actual guarantee offered. Any attempts to follow these suggestions is entirely at users risk and no liability or responsibility will be entertained, unless they work.

Did I miss anything?  Any more hints?  I’d love to get another list going…  And with these handy hints to back me up, it’d take but a second to publish a new update!  Full props for any suggestions.

Until next time…

Go write!