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Search results for mark porter
Book Giveaway Winners
Jul 21st
Time to announce the winners of the drawings for the book, The Time of Your Life: How to Accomplish All That God Wants You to Do.
Winner Number One is Sue Tornai, a regular subscriber to Blog4writers. Visit her site, www.suetornai.com. Also take a look at her blog: www.missue.blogspot.com.
The second winner is a regular subscriber whose e-mail address begins with ditelbat. I’ve received no response to e-mails asking for name and mailing address. Will you please e-mail me at akinemily@gmail.com and give me your mailing address so that I can mail your book?”
I’ll be doing book giveaways about once a month for the rest of this year. Subscribe to Blog4writers so that you will be eligible for future drawings. Go to http://emilyakin.com/blog/, and enter your e-mail in the Subscribe box and follow the directions. If you need help, don’t hesitate to e-mail me for help: akinemily@gmail.com.
Book Giveaway: The Time of Your Life
Jul 13th
Last month, at Kentucky Christian Writers Conference, I led a workshop on getting organized. I recommended Mark Porter’s The Time of Your Life: How to Accomplish All that God Wants You to Do. The book is meant for Christians seeking to integrate their work with their spiritual life, and I highly recommend it to Christian writers.
A review of The Time of Your Life is on Blog4writers here. In the Getting Organized posts, I mentioned some of the concepts in the book. See those posts here. More >
Get Organized: Evaluating Your Progress
May 17th
The final step in organizing your writing effort is periodic evaluation—measuring your progress and making adjustments. You may choose to evaluate monthly, quarterly, or annually. Just resolve to do it.
Review your intentions: Take a look at the goals you set for yourself. Did you accomplish any of the short-term goals? How are you progressing on the long-term goals? The more specific your goals, the easier it is to measure success. As an example, if you stated that you wanted to submit one article per week, this goal is easily measured by counting your submissions. At the monthly mark, you should have sent out four submissions. If you’re behind on your quota, you can make it up before the next evaluation date. Vague goals like “submitting as many articles as I can” aren’t easily measured. You can excuse a low submission count by citing distractions or unforeseen circumstances. More >
Get Organized: Time Management
May 10th
“Write for at least one hour every day.” I heard this a lot at my first few writers’ conferences. Of course, writers will write every day. And, why only one hour? Shouldn’t you write all the time? The fact is, writing your content is not all you have to do. Besides knowing the writing craft, you must spend time studying the markets, scoping out the “competition,” researching subject matter, meeting other writers and editors, and keeping your efforts organized.
If you devote full-time to your writing career, you may spend as much as an hour each day doing these additional writer jobs. If you consider yourself part-time, organize your time, either daily or weekly, to perform each of the following functions. More >
Get Organized: Intentions
May 3rd
Getting organized involves more than collecting your tools and managing your time. All of that effort is wasted if you don’t have clear intentions for your work. Ask yourself these questions as you plan your writing career
What are your goals for your writing? Organizations and individuals spend a lot of time developing goals and objectives to make their work more effective. A writer should have the same concern. If you don’t know what your goal is, you have no way to measure success.
Do you want to publish a book? The steps to publication for a published writer will be different from those of an unpublished writer. As you set your goals, be sure they are realistic. Miracles do happen, but it usually takes years, even decades, to see that first book in print. Attend conferences and learn what it takes to reach your goal. Then, set your sub-goals with your time constraints in mind.
For the Christian writer—do the goals you’ve set coincide with what God wants for your writing? The best resource on this topic is a book that is out of print. Published in 1983 and 1988, Mark Porter’s The Time of Your Life: How to Accomplish All That God Wants You to Do is not specifically for writers, but I highly recommend it. Porter outlines a time management method for Christians that includes several chapters on goal-setting. See my review of this book here. More >
The Time of Your Life by Mark Porter
Jun 13th
Subtitle: How to Accomplish All that God Wants You to Do. Because this book was published in 1988, many people would pass it by. But, don’t do that! You’ll miss a wonderful study of time management from the Christian perspective
Also, if you came to this blog because you are a writer looking for resources to advance your career, you might be wondering why this book is featured here. It’s because I found it very helpful to me in managing my time as as a freelance Christian writer.
A chemical engineer and teaching elder in his church, Porter was a busy man. He was caught up in what he called the “scurry syndrome,” running from one thing to another without thinking about which activities were important and which were merely urgent. This doesn’t sound new to us today, because others have picked up on it. Many things that are urgent are not necessarily important.
Porter takes the reader through a study of how to turn mere activity into accomplishment. In fact, the book is designed to be used in a 13-week study. There’s mention of a study guide, but I have not found it anywhere.
Porter covers goals, priorities, spiritual gifts, analysis of current time usage, identifying time wasters, and planning. All is presented from a sound Biblical basis, making this book a valuable resource for the Christian writer.
This book is available for sale at ECS Ministries. I’ve searched Half.com with no luck, but I did find it on www.abebooks.com.
