This Mondays’s Ask Me Anything concludes our “How to Organize a Day, How to Organize a Year” podcast. Thanks to our First Look Access friends for the questions. Cate Emond asks … I recently quit my boring office job in order to pursue my writing and other creative projects full-time. I’ve been reading a lot of blogs and articles in preparation and one piece of advice that seems pretty universal to all people who work from home is the importance of having a morning routine. I would love to know what your morning routine consists of (if you have one).

This week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Scott Culley. Not related to this week’s question, but this is on my mind a lot lately. What do you do when you’re not “having fun” anymore? What do you do when a project has just become so overwhelmingly frustrating that showing up everyday becomes more of an exercise in frustration where the work isn’t moving forward? What then? Listen to the podcast, and then read this.

Elizabeth Lada, like many of us, struggles to decide which job to take. She asks … What to do when you have a number of medium-sized talents, and the ones that make you money aren’t quite as fun to do (that would be painting/illustrating) and the ones that are more fun to do are not (yet? ever?) remunerative (that would be screenwriting and playing music). How to focus? Reward so many hours of doing the money-maker with a half-hour of the fun stuff? Focus exclusively on the money-maker until some (arbitrary?) goal is met? Do the fun stuff first and…

Cindy Lou asks a question that we’ve all had to figure out over the years. How do you get your friends to understand you don’t work for free. Especially during the Holiday’s, friends seem to forget I work for a living. Listen to our podcast and then read I Will Not Read Your Fucking Screenplay. It’s great.

This week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Sheri Kleintop. She asks … In your book, The War of Art, the focus is recognizing and facing Resistance head on. Throughout the ages, women such as Gorgo, Jackie Kennedy and women in every household across the globe have (had) an obligation to nurture, serve and protect their children and spouses. While in the midst of our life of details, how can one go about honoring our obligations while also fighting to maintain our own identity and long term dreams? As a divorced mother, teacher and advocate for our…

Today, Lynn Barrett asks us … How do you know when you need a break? TRANSCRIPT: Steve: Are you asking me or yourself? Shawn: I’m asking you, and then I want to follow up because I have an idea, too. Steve: Okay. I come from this school of “I never need a break”. In fact, I think that when I hear that . . .  I have a maxim, which is if you’re trying to decide if the voice in your head is Resistance or it’s not Resistance—is it Resistance or is it legitimate—the maxim is: When in doubt, it’s…

This week’s question comes from Stelios Perdios. He ask … I’m half-tempted to apply the Foolscap method to 2014 to help plan my goals. It sounds silly, but there’s already a built-in protagonist (me) and a villain (Resistance). Also, I’d rather chose my own theme for the upcoming year rather than ponder it in retrospect. Furthermore, if I divide the year into three acts, then I know what scenes I need to be in to achieve my overall goals as a writer. Most importantly, the storyline for the year is on a single sheet of paper. I’ve tried other goal…

This week on Ask Me Anything we take a question from Joel Canfield. How do you decide how long to allow for writing a book? Do you set a time goal like one year, or do you let it take as long as it takes and trust the daily writing ritual to keep you on track? Recommended reading: Henry Miller’s Rules of Writing TRANSCRIPT: Steve: I think this is a great question when we’re thinking about organizing a year—and Shawn, jump in on this and Jeff, jump in on this whenever you want to. The key concept here I think,…

Today’s Ask Me Anything question comes from John Thomas. How in the world do you keep focused to do the work consistently with outside pressures of family (spouse and four kids who I want to spend time with) and financial pressures? How do you carve out an habitual practice of doing your work? PDF Transcript: Coming Soon Shawn: I have a question here Steve from John Thomas that I think I’d like to take because it’s something that I think we’ve touched on before, but it’s worth going over again. How in the world do you keep focused to do…

PDF Transcript: Coming Soon