Email, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites. The internet is full of distractions that suck time away from our writing. As writers we constantly hear that to promote ourselves we should be tweeting, chatting, updating our status, or even blogging. If you dive head first into all of these endeavors, you rapidly realize there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all, plus write, plus spend time with family, deal with your day job, etc.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that all of these lovely social medial programs that seem to suck up all of our precious time have created little tools that allow us to focus more time on our writing if not escape the keyboard completely for a while. Here is a brief run down of a few of these tools that I’ve found helpful.

WordPress and Blogger

To blog or not to blog? There is no right answer to that question. However, if you choose to blog both wordpress and blogger have a handy little scheduling function. With this function you can sit down at the start of the month and write out all of your posts, and forget about it. In WordPress if you click the edit button next to publish Immediately which appears just above the post publish button you can schedule the date and time your post should go live. Remember to hit the OK button and then click the schedule button. You can also do this with pages. Say you are going to run a contest, and you don’t want your contest page to appear on your site until a certain date. You can create the page in advance and schedule the posting date. Blogger has this same functionality, but you have to click different things in order to use it.

Facebook and Twitter

Talk about time sucks. Hours can disappear in the blink of an eye when you log into one of these programs, but you do want to have a presence there. To that end, you may want to consider linking your accounts. Facebook has a twitter app that will allow you to automatically post Facebook updates to your Twitter feed and vice versa. Connecting your accounts in this fashion you can post in one place and cover multiple social media forums. However, if you have distinctly different facebook and twitter personas, then you may want to consider using a program like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. These are programs that pull feeds from multiple social media sites into one program. So you can have a tab for your Facebook, Twitter, Linked in, and ping.fm and post to each site all from one place. I’m partial to Hootsuite because it is a web based program. I don’t have to install software to use it I can log in from any computer at any time. Plus, I can schedule my tweet or status update to post when I want them to which can be a real convenience. especially if I’m going to be away from my computer all day but have news that I want to post mid day.

The other nice time saving feature is that Facebook has an app which will post your blog to your feed. Or, if you use a wordpress.com hosted blog they have a publicize option which will automatically post a tweet and status update once your new post goes live on your blog.

Google Toolbar

For tips on social bookmarking and the google toolbar I’m going to quote my good friend and bestselling author Caridad Pineiro.

Social bookmarking lets you share your favorite websites, pages, etc. with others. Sites such as Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon are just some of the sites which store your bookmarks and share them with others.

If you’ve got the Google Toolbar, you can also post your content to Blogger, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Yahoo and a number of other services with just the click of a button.

What can you share? Articles or blogs that you’ve written, reviews for your books, videos, contests and basically anything that you have online and that you want to share.

These bookmarks are great tools for having people discover you and your work and will help drive people to your website.

So how does all of this save you time? By interconnecting these programs and/or using a multipurpose program for all of your social media outlets, you can feed your info to multiple places at once enabling you to reclaim some of that time we all lose in cyberspace.

Let’s face it, we can all procratinate with the best of them. I know I can. I sit down with the best of intentions. My plan is to open my document and get straight to writing, but that’s when it happens. The call of the wild email account (all three of them) beckons. Then I get sucked in by the seductive lure of twitter and/or facebook because I really have to make sure that all is well in Frontierville. Then overwhelming desire to research 14th century names or natural disasters kicks in(don’t ask). The next thing you know an hour or more has gone by and I still haven’t written word one. If it’s a weekend and I’m really in full procrastination mode the XBox 360 controller magically finds it way into my hands. Next thing I know it’s six or later in the evening and the guilt finally has gotten bad enough that I’m actually going to make the effort to get something written. The sad fact is that a short while later I will have fallen asleep on my keyboard and only have written a fraction of what I intended to write. Yes, folks, I have mastered the fine art of procrastination.

To conquer this, I find that making myself accountable to someone else can really help. I’ve recently joined a group for just that purpose. We keep each others on track by reporting in about our weekly progress, whether it be page/word count or simply checking things off of your to do list. There is also a certain aspect of pride, at least for me. I don’t want to be the only person with nothing to report. I want to be the person announcing that I got to The End.

Another suggestion is making yourself a progress chart. Melinda blogged about it a few weeks back. Figure out how long you want to take to write your book, how long you want it to be and then chart it out. Figure out what your minimum word count has to be per day to reach your end goal. For some the excitement of seeing that word count get smaller and smaller is motivating and exciting.

Another tip to fight procrastination, disconnect. No cellphone, no internet. Another writer friend of mine has a laptop that doesn’t have wifi. She uses that computer for her writing since she can’t connect to the net a waste time.

BTW, waiting for inspiration to strike is just another form of procrastinating. If you’re doing other things because the words aren’t coming then try shaking things up. Try getting out of your office and writing in a new location, something different then the norm. Or try another means of writing. Switch to your alpha smart, or try long hand. I know transcribing sucks, but sometimes that connection of pen to paper helps get the creative neurons sparking. Plus, they now have devices that will record and transfer your hand written pages to your computer.
These are just a few suggestions to battle procrastination. So please share some procrastination trials and what you do to battle them.

~Rayna