Right now, many of us are finding ourselves with a lot more free time than usual. Now you might be like my mother who has no issues with staying at home and getting work done. But if you are like me, and have difficulty motivating yourself to be productive when on your own, then this article is for you.

As much as I absolutely love the idea of having all this spare time to write, I find I’m not actually using it. Before I go to bed each night, I tell myself that tomorrow I will finally start that short story that has been swimming around my head for months. Then, tomorrow comes and goes without me writing anything down and the cycle continues.

It makes sense that I have trapped myself in this cycle because I’ve never been one to get stuff done without a push of some sorts. One of my favourite parts about studying creative writing is that my classes give me deadlines which essentially force me to write. I’ve only ever written a couple of stories that weren’t for a class or for a competition with a deadline. This is a pretty big problem, especially in the early stages of my career when I should be writing as much as I can to develop a sufficient stockpile of drafts to send out to journals or competitions.

When I started thinking about how to motivate myself to write in social isolation, the answer was actually more obvious than I thought: deadlines. Just because there are no external deadlines on me right now, doesn’t mean that I can’t set any for myself. If I write a deadline down on a calendar or a piece of paper, I am much more motivated to go and do it.

To-do lists have also been my best friend lately. I try to break up my workload into as many small tasks as possible (brainstorm ideas, plot outline, etc.) so that as I cross more things off my list, I feel very accomplished. Another thing that helps is to reward myself after I get my work done. Most often, this means eating some chocolate but sometimes it means I don’t read my book, or play my video game, or watch a movie, until I am done working.

Now I’m pretty good at forcing myself to hold off on certain things, and I realize that not everyone is like that. Try putting your reward food, book, phone, or laptop in another room so you are less tempted to go use it right away. Or maybe you will work better if you set a timer for yourself, twenty minutes of work for ten minutes of your reward-task. There’s no harm in trying out different strategies and finding which one works best for you.

I hope you have found these tips as useful as I have. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start my short story draft now so that I can have some chocolate.