You can find a lot of this info in any decent book on project management, but in short: It's crucial to keep track of your deadlines. For small stuff I use excel a lot. The top two rows mark the calendar, 7 columns per week, with dates *and* days of the week clearly marked. The next set of rows are used for marking deadlines (competition submission dates, meetings, etc...), and the next set for my tasks. The leftmost column is reserved for priorities ( 1 to 10), which are used to sort rows (tasks/deadlines) by priority. There's a similar coloring scheme to Scott's, except for uncompleted tasks: green is for work that's not yet late, amber for work that's due and red for work that's overdue. Time allocated to working on stuff is indicated by filling blocks of cells in a row, with the color of that task changing color to indicate when a task will become late. I'll fill in blocks for the deadline rows to indicate when those projects are active. Also, if I need to mark a particularly important deadline, I can add an undated column, and just fill it with grey or black. Any tasks/deadlines in the spreadsheet, are then copied into thunderbird (mail/calendar/to-do lists), which can generate a prompt (by email or popup). Outlook, yahoo mail and gmail all work too. If you're on a mac or linux, and don't have access to excel, there are a bunch of on-line tools like the spreadsheet in google docs that'll do the job. Or if you need a native app, use gnumeric, which is both free and is what many serious academic spreadsheet jockeys use. Also, make sure to keep good notes about what happens once these tasks are completed, and you have a *deliverable*. In my day job, the people who need to be involved in the next step and the form/process by which things need to be delivered changes often, and you need to keep a track of that. No project is complete until it ends up in the customer's hands. The other key to effective project management is to make sure you've collected all your thoughts, organized in a way that's useful, allowing you to break down projects into smaller, more easily manageable pieces. As I've gotten older, and my bear trap memory has started to rust, I've found tools like mind-mapping and outlining software (freemind, lyx, etc...) to be critical.

Hmmm... well I guess I don't have a system that works. I set them up, they fail and I free fall for a while until I see myself getting behind. Right now, I print off monthly calendars on the internet and write in them. All was going well until I hit a roadblock in a story for a feature and trashed it. I've noticed that sometimes it feels like all I'm doing is scheduling and project management and nothing else is getting done simply because my hours to construct it are limited to evenings and weekends. I have a day job so most of my writing is done in the evening. I write in 25 minute spurts with 15 minute breaks in between. This method works well for me. Much of my research is done at work to aid in making me look busy. I use Excel to store story ideas but pliny's system detailed above is way too much for me. I also have a google calendar so maybe I'll try that next. Someone listed a couple of goal management sites on an earlier post, so I'm looking into those as well.

It's really not that complicated, and it takes no more than 10 mins/day to fill in (15 mins if I have a *big* project in my day job). Just use excel (or any spreadsheet) to make a calendar (across the page), and then block out time for targets (deadlines and milestones) and tasks (down the page). Here's a quick mockup I did in 10 mins, just to show you all how simple it really is. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuuJYiSdSBPEdExhMUR0clhETjN1Tnp4aEQ3UWNBenc

[...] Part 6: Schedule [...]

[...] little thing called – a life. I nabbed the idea from screenwriter, Scott Myers (as per his blog post on writing schedules), coming up with a structure that works with my current writing patterns, [...]