If you’ve never written a novel before, it can feel incredibly daunting. If you have written a novel before, it can feel incredibly daunting. It’s a big undertaking, requiring months or maybe years of commitment. It’s time-consuming. It’s energy consuming. It can become one of the most rewarding things you’ve ever done, but that doesn’t happen by accident.

With that in mind, I want to talk about three easy ways you can maximize your productivity as a writer and give yourself a little boost towards your dream of completing your first (or second or third) draft of a novel.

• Improve your typing speed.

Most of us are going to be writing on a computer, laptop, or tablet of some kind. But if you’re writing by hand, this can apply to you, as well – just with handwriting speed instead of typing speed.

Learn to type very, very quickly. Our brains are incredible, high-speed machines. We’ll probably never be able to type at the speed of thought. But we can get as close as possible. If you’re someone who picks out your words very slowly, you don’t feel comfortable typing at speed, or you find yourself having to stare down at the keyboard as you type, then this is especially for you.

Typing is the way you get your thoughts on paper. It becomes an instant productivity booster if you’re able to do this faster. There are free programs online that will help you learn to type faster. Spending an hour or two a week intentionally improving this skill will pay dividends in the future.

• Learn to write in short increments.

Don’t get me wrong. We all love those days when we can spend five or six hours devoted to the novel, un-harassed and uninterrupted. But how often do those days happen? How often do you find yourself bemoaning the fact that you didn’t have enough time to get into a rhythm with your work, never found your flow, and ended up having a lackluster session?

Practice writing with interruptions. If you can fit in three or four fifteen-minute sessions a day, that’s a decent session altogether. Practice sitting down, writing quickly for fifteen or so minutes, and then getting up and getting on with the rest of the day. This is a skill. It’s not a personality trait. It’s not something some people magically have. It’s a literal skill that you can hone. You might not have a two- or three-hour writing period for weeks on end. But you will have fifteen minutes here and there. Learn to take advantage of them.

• ONLY write during writing time.

Don’t get on Pinterest to mess with your book aesthetic. Don’t spend an hour making a cover mockup. Don’t get on Spotify to tinker with your book playlist. Writing time is for writing. All those extracurricular things are fun and have their place, but their place is not in writing time.

You have to carve out time for your book. You’re deliberately prioritizing it over other tasks. So be protective of that time and keep it for what it’s intended for.

Becoming a better, faster, and more productive writer is all about paying attention to the little areas that can give you one or two percent improvement, and then letting those percentages add up over time.

How do you protect your writing time from the busyness of the day, and how do you make the most of each session?