To finish NaNoWriMo you are going to need rock-solid habits, lest you give up due to a lack of motivation. That’s because habits don’t deplete, but excitement, discipline, and will-power do. NaNoWriMo isn’t a sprint you can finish by feeling joy alone. It’s a marathon. It will require more than talking yourself through the finishing line. You’ll feel joy, but you’ll encounter despair, too.
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It’s important to manage working time. Managing to-do lists is just one part of the equation to getting things done when it comes to immersive creative work where we need to make progress for a long time to complete the project. To ensure we make steady progress, we need to stay on track and handle interruptions and breaks well. A short Knowledge Cycle will help to get a full slice of work done multiple times a day, from research to writing. This will help staying afloat and not drown in tasks.
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Brian Crain talked about increasing productivity by tracking progress. To have a continuous metric is both motivating and informative. I, too, buy into the saying that you can only improve what you measure. The corollary is: when you care about something, when you really commit to it, you have to do your best to track it and improve. Writing is one such skill. You become a writer by writing more, and you can shift your identity consciously to make this change stick.