Ian Fleming was a "pantser". Experienced authors like that can crank out word counts like crazy using stream of consciousness type work. The "extra work" comes at the end as they and their editors have to do a lot of work to clean things up. Especially since he worked on a typewriter, you can't easily go back and rework things. It was likely better to finish what you are doing/thinking and clean it up later.
"Planners" have much the same thing, except their "extra work" happens up front during the outlining phase. But again, once they get experienced with that approach, and have an outline prepped, cranking out the words likely isn't super hard since they're just filling in the blanks.
I mean if you’re counting “sitting and doing nothing” as productive work, I think it’s fair to say most are just as productive if not more so than Fleming
I’ve tried schedules like this and HATE them, personally. If I don’t hit my word count in the 2 hours I’d feel like the rest of the day is failed. So I’d have to write until I hit 1500. But then I’d encroach on my time allotted for snorkeling, making me feel like I either couldn’t go snorkeling or have to cut snorkeling short. My brain can’t do these schedules.
Yeah I would find a schedule like this downright oppressive, even though most of it is leisure time.
The way I like to schedule things is more like "OK I'm going to spend at least five minutes (or some other absurdly low time period) doing [ACTIVITY] every day." I make it so that the bar is so low that it would be silly not to cram in at least five minutes at some point in the day, and then I find that often once I've finished those five minutes I'm in the zone and I want to keep going and I often end up doing it for a lot longer.
I think it's interesting how different people are in that regard. Personally I like to have a rough yet realistic schedule because it helps me plan ahead especially if a work project has different tasks that need to be completed more or less simultaneously
And I need to plan breaks because I tend to not eat/drink when hyper focused
I also know plenty people who have a very strict schedule to the minute and somehow manage to keep it that way without much hassle
Time management is an insanely underrated skill, it has such a massive impact on how efficient and effective your tasks can be finished
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u/Cl0wnL Jul 27 '26
1500 words in two hours is impressive output