People who have been following me on my writing blog will know my answer to this question. But I want to reflect on it again here as it is one of the most important questions that we could ask ourselves as writers. We all have busy lives, and sometimes we bring that same kind of ‘busyness’ to our writing life. There is nothing that can destroy creativity like busyness. Just because you’re busy, doesn’t mean that we’re effective must less efficient writers. We can be very busy, and yet not achieve our writing goals as a writer. To be an effective writer, we must keep on track with our goals. We must fulfill our most important goals first thing during our writing period. Then we could do extraneous things. But do we even know what those extraneous things are or do just blunder around during our writing time, and do whatever we can get our hands on? If we can’t tell the difference between extraneous things and substantive things that will move our writing goals forward, we will never be successful as writers. We will merely be very busy but not effective. We must, therefore, take the time to slow down and to really take the time to reflect on where we want to go with our writing goals and to work towards them step by step. So, if we’re busy and exhausted every day after writing but have no plan in place as to what we want to achieve as a writer, we must go back to the drawing board and be much more reflective about what we actually are doing when we sit down to write. ~ Happy planning! ~ Irene S. Roth