How I stay organized as a writer


This is kind of a look inside my life with how I start every Monday: with lots of stickers, pens, washi tape, and post its. The colors are wonderful, especially on dreary winter days like this one! (I’m not nearly as aesthetic as I look with the matchy colors. I wore these clothes yesterday too because hey they were technically clean and it was a fluke they matched lol.) I have a terrible memory, so Mondays I set myself up for the week and finish logging things about the previous week. This is mostly for writing, but I do keep a daily planner, too- that’s the thing on top- and use a sticky note of things I need to do/the times I need to have them done by.

But since this is my writing blog, I’ll ramble about how I keep myself organized in a writerly way. Hopefully this makes some kind of sense!

  • Different types of writing logs in my planner. The one that’s peeking out on my left is my weekly goals one and it’s the one that’s probably the most useful. I update this on Mondays, first with what I specifically wrote/worked on the week before, then with goals for the upcoming week. After I do this I update another page that’s condensed to just one line per week, so it covers about six months- on this I mostly just put the time worked each week and a quick word or two about what it was. That’s so I can see at a glance what I was doing verses the detailed one in the picture.
  • So many writing logs. Also in the planner is my daily log where I mostly just keep track of the date and how long/much I wrote. I use this to update the Monday logs.
  • Tumblr goals! On sticky notes! I love me some sticky notes. The pink sticky note is a list of the tumblr tasks I’d like to do that day; this gets changed every day. Right now it’s full because I fell behind with a lot this weekend. The other sticky is for what I have to do that day in general. These get written with the rest of my “to do” stuff, but migrate over to my desk when I’m done this. I spend a lot of time on Tumblr interacting with the writing community over there. 
  • Update any writing thing that has to be updated. Usually on Mondays (since that’s when my planner gets the most thought) but sometimes other days, I’ll update my “ideas/WIP” list. If I had any ideas for short stories I’ll write them down and if I finished any short stories I’ll add a sticker to show it’s done. If I came up with any new ideas about my dorks, that goes on their bio page in my planner. If I remembered something I need to add into the books, that goes into my “remember” section of planner that’s got a page per book.


This is probably clear as mud, but it keeps me moving and organized for the upcoming week. The other days take up much less time because Mondays I’ve already prettied up the goal sheets and planner pages with stickers and tape and done most of the planning work. And if you're curious about what kinds of things go into my writing planner, I made a post a while ago about what I keep inside it here.

~Meri

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