Time and Priorities for Writers

Photo credit: pOOfkAt on Flickr

So the other day I wrote a post about Why I'm Glad I Joined Twitter in which I basically wrote 500 words about how awesome Twitter is, especially for writers.

However. As awesome as Twitter and other social media sites (hello tumblr and Facebook) are, there is one very scary danger that we writers are particularly vulnerable to: the Time Suck of Doom.

All writers have their own time management challenges. Many of us have a full time job, or are full time students, or full time parents or some combination of all of the above, and then on top of that we're writers and we're putting together a book (or books) and maintaining a blog and popping in to Twitter and Facebook and tumblr to try to keep our web presence from shriveling up and dying, all while trying to remember to eat three square meals a day and keep a healthy lifestyle (oh, and someone needs to do laundry. You should probably get on that).

Point being, writers don't often have an abundance of time— and we rarely have any time to waste.

So when you consider just how easy it is to fall into the trap of spending hours scrolling through your Twitter/tumblr/Facebook feed (what I like to call the Time Suck of Doom), social media can be just as dangerous as it is useful.

Truth is, too much of anything can be a bad thing, and social media is no exception. For writers, our number one priority (after family, bills and remaining generally healthy) must be the writing. It doesn't matter what you're writing, what matters is that you constantly improve it, add to it, practice it until you have a finished manuscript (or four), and then when you've completely polished it and are ready for publication, you keep writing.

Because for writers, there is nothing more important than improving our writing skill. Because yes, the connections you make through social media are fantastic and yes, a web presence is important for writers in this day and age and yes, you do find some really incredible and useful links through social media, but the writing must always come first.

So next time you catch yourself surfing the web/streaming videos/playing XBox when you know you really should be writing that book/blog post/poem/short story, remember what your top priority is as a writer and get back to work.

You can tweet about it later.

What do you do to fight the Time Suck of Doom?