Nudge Reports: Making Impossible Dreams Come True

Do you yearn for a better way to organize your writing projects? Do you have a big one to manage, such as a novel or memoir? Does publishing your work seem like an impossible dream? Let me share a method that helped me.

A few years ago, while I was writing my memoir, a friend told me about a little book, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. The book includes this wise saying from Mark Twain, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks and then starting on the first one.”

Keller’s book about how do to what Twain advises, gave me a big push in the right direction, prompting me to focus on what my heart told me to do—write and publish.

Nudge Reports – The importance of being earnest

I put my focus where my heart was by generating weekly progress reports. These reports tracked what I was doing and what I was not doing. I filled them with tasks related to the book. Thus, Nudge Reports were born. The name derives from a friend who’d called herself a good “nudge” because at every opportunity, she asked me how my writing was going, was the book finished, did I have a publisher? She said, “If you don’t find a publisher soon, tell me you’ll publish it yourself.” She’s the kind of friend who is hard to argue with. I said, “I will.” I could have typed up the Nudge Reports and kept them to myself, but I didn’t.

Accountability

Instead of keeping my Nudge Reports private, I took a step towards accountability—a concept from Keller’s book. I asked another friend, a fellow writer, if I could email her my reports. Here’s how I asked her in an email dated 10/11/15.

“Dear [name],
… Since you are my most helpful critic who “gets” the writing life AND you care about me, would you be willing to just read a weekly report I’d send you regarding my writing progress and news of what stage I’m in as far as publishing the book?

This plan is to give me a person I am responsible to regularly inform, which should give me a reason to push myself more. If I know I have to report to you on Friday night each week, then I’ll be more organized in my planning. I think. We’ll see. On Fridays I go to yoga and get home about 7 pm. I’ll send you an email [report] afterwards. Anyhow, you don’t have to do anything. Just let me email you on Friday nights. Hey, how hard can that be? Of course, if you have any ideas to share back with me, you know I’d love that. But NO PRESSURE on your part.”

Nudge Report Content

My friend, thank goodness, agreed, and so I began. By that time, I’d worked on shaping a book for eight years. That extra step of making myself vulnerable to another person kept the fire burning hotter than it might have otherwise. The Nudge Reports came from daily task lists I’d handwritten on 5” x 7” notepads—yeah, I’m old-fashioned.

The lists simply detailed every task I wanted to finish each day. After I completed a task, I checked it off. The ones I didn’t do rolled forward to the next day’s list, or an appropriate one after that. Rule for self: Learn to be realistic about how much you can do in a day. Otherwise, discouragement nips at your keyboard.

Structuring Nudge Reports

I divided Nudge Reports into sections to keep tasks organized. Since I wrote them in emails, I could use the Search feature to find items of interest. Over time, these reports became a research library of steps to creating my book and related projects: my website, articles, blog posts, and networking contacts. The sections?

• GOALS SET FOR THIS WEEK – I copied and pasted the tasks from the previous week’s Nudge Report that appeared under the heading GOALS FOR NEXT WEEK. After each task, I typed DONE or NOT DONE. Rule for self: Reject feeling bad about items NOT DONE! You may discover some are needless. Drop those off the list.
• TASKS DONE THAT WERE NOT LISTED ON LAST WEEK’S REPORT – These were afterthoughts or unexpected things to do, such as revise a chapter in response to a first-reader’s comments.
• READING – This section tracked books I read while I was writing my own book, like The One Thing.
• GOALS FOR NEXT WEEK – Here, I copied NOT DONE items from the GOALS SET FOR THIS WEEK section and added new tasks.

Be Your Own Nudge

I admit that sometimes I was late emailing Nudge Reports, but I sent them anyway. Worth it? You bet! One year and one month later, I self-published my book.

Is your heart telling you to finish a book? Try The One Thing and find your Nudge Reports friend.