[Aliventures newsletter] Making your writing space more welcoming (even if you only have five minutes)

Published: Thu, 08/03/17

Hello!

Here at Aliventures HQ, we have a second child down with possible chickenpox (cold/flu symptoms but no spots appearing ... yet).

On the plus side, I'm making steady – if rather slow – progress updating my novel manuscripts, and I've got a bunch of freelance work in the pipeline for the next couple of months.

I'm also planning to take a bit of time this summer to get more organised with my writing (particularly important now that I've ramped up my freelancing) ... and each of this month's newsletters will tackle a different aspect of writing organisation.

If you ever miss a newsletter, you can easily catch up via the online archive here:

archive.aweber.com/aliventures

Making Your Writing Space More Welcoming (Even if You Only Have Five Minutes)

What's your writing space like?

It might be a corner of the kitchen table, or a desk crammed into a spare bedroom. Maybe, like me, you're lucky enough to have your own study (though it risks becomes a dumping-ground for all the junk in the house...)

When you don't have much time to write, let alone tidy, it's easy for your writing space to get overtaken by clutter. This can be a distraction when you're trying to get words down, and it may put you off sitting down to write at all.

Here's how to make your writing space a bit more welcoming ... even if you only have a few minutes. Set a timer for your desired length of time, and work as fast as you can to get it done!

Here's a photos of my own rather messy desk (and this is nowhere near as bad as it gets, as I did a fairly thorough clear off a couple of weeks ago...)

Five minute fix:

Do a quick blitz of your desk / table: chuck away any chocolate wrappers or snack packaging (these seem to proliferate at my desk!), shove scrap paper into a bag for recycling, return mugs / plates / etc to the kitchen, and gather your pens/pencils/etc into a pot.

If you've got a lot of bits and bobs lying around and you've only got a few minutes, just shove all of them into a box to sort out later.

Here's how my desk looked after just 5 minutes:

Fifteen minute fix:

Sort out any loose papers, magazines, etc that are on / around your desk and file them. If yours have built up quite as much as mine, you might have to stop wherever you get to after 15 minutes!

I sometimes find it helps to create a folder for papers that needed to be acted on within the next few days, and to roughly sort everything that can just be filed (e.g. finance-related in one pile, magazines in another pile, child-related in a third...)

Thirty minute fix:

Tidy out any drawers or bookshelves near your desk. If you tend to have reference books piled up on your desk, clear part of a shelf to hold them and just keep out the one(s) you're actually going to refer to on a very frequent basis.

Do the same with stationary: you probably don't need a hole-puncher or stapler on your desk, for instance.

I'd love to see your "before" and "after" photos too! Feel free to email them to me, or -- even better -- you can share them on the Aliventures Facebook page. Let us know how much time you spent and how it felt afterwards. :-)

Happy writing,

Ali

PS - Don't forget to check out the latest post on the Aliventures blog: How Can You Keep Writing if You Work Long Hours?

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