Some people need a boss or a higher power watching over them to make them produce.
Writers have to learn to impose this discipline on themselves.
Setting goals and then making sure you meet them is absolutely imperative to making a career online.
Not all writing goals are concrete, sometimes you are researching or thinking and for these tasks you will find a timer can help you define these tasks and remain productive.
In the end, you will have to learn how to define "good enough" for each task and move on to the next task at hand.
Writing Production Goals If you are going to make money online you are going to have to learn to write fast and the best way to ensure you write faster is to set and keep production goals.
Setting goals for production will help you impose order and ensure your career progresses.
Setting goals will show you over time how your production and quality have improved and will help you keep raising the bar.
Every day you should have a production goal you strive to meet, even if it is only one submitted article.
When you get comfortable with one goal, you can another one, increasing your production until your income reaches the point you need to support your financial goals.
Timed Sessions Keep You On Task Some of a writer's production steps do not appear on the surface to produce measurable content.
Things like research and deep thought cannot be avoided and yet must be contained if you are serious about making money online.
When you are engaged in a task like brainstorming or rewriting, you should set a timer and confine the time you will spend on the task.
This will yield a measurable task - you can add fifteen minutes of researching to each day's writing production goals and add accountability for getting the task done to the benefit of also containing the task in a fixed time limit.
Let "Good Enough" Go Ultimately, your writing production goals will force you to make some quality decisions based on the pay you can expect to receive for your work.
You have to weigh your income against the time you spend on the work.
You should always produce the highest quality work you can, but you must be able to produce your work on time as well.
Any piece of work will improve if you set it aside and let it rest and then come back and rewrite it later, but much of your online writing will not allow you this luxury.
News must be reported while it is still fresh, and the longer your work sits on your hard drive, the fewer views it will get in the end.
Production goals will help you measure the time you spend on each article and make the best decisions about when your article is done.
Armed with a timer and a to do list, you can impose the necessary discipline on yourself to become a full time writer.
Setting daily production goals will help you stay on track and keep improving as a writer.
Using a timer to contain activities that do not actually create content will help you find the right balance to stay productive.
Goals and timed events will help you recognize when you have spent as long as the pay warrants and the work is good enough to release to the web.