My long-awaited book, Your Time, Your Way, will be published this Saturday. It is the fruition of a little over three years of work. From planning to writing the first draft, finding a publisher, and editing, publishing a book is hard but rewarding work.

Writing this book has confirmed a few productivity lessons that border on laws and can help you with bigger, long-term projects.

Anything you want to do will require more time than you plan for.

When I began writing this book, I anticipated it would take twelve to eighteen months to complete. It’s taken nearly forty months.

When we plan projects, we generally only see the positives and imagine everything going smoothly. The reality is that no plan ever survives the real world, and the expected timeline is one of the first things to change.

This does not mean you should ever give up. Success comes from persistence, resilience and flexibility. More planning and trying to stick rigidly to that plan are rarely successful. Accept changes, be willing to adjust timelines and focus on completing the next chapter—those are the keys to successfully completing any project.

Consistency is critical.

When I began this project, I knew I would need at least ninety minutes a day, five days a week, over eight weeks to write the first draft. It was no good “hoping” I would find the time—hope is never a good time management strategy.

To do that, I chose to write late at night. My coaching calls are usually finished by 10 pm, so I blocked 10:30 pm to midnight to do the writing. That was the only time in a day when I knew I could write consistently.

Most people will baulk at the idea of working late into the night, and that’s fine. I find writing therapeutic and never a chore. There were days when I was tired and didn’t want to write, but I knew I had to be consistent, so I set the minimum writing time at thirty minutes and ensured that even on days when I didn’t want to write, I would still do thirty minutes. It worked. The first draft was written in twenty weeks (see lesson number 1)

Choose your tools carefully and stick with them.

I have been lucky as an author because fifteen years ago, I invested $40.00 in an application (it wasn’t called that in 2009—“software” was how it was called then) called Scrivener, a piece of software designed for screenwriters and authors and this is what I used to write the first draft.

I could have wasted weeks looking for and testing new applications or tried to learn Microsoft Word (something I haven’t used for twenty years). This would only have been a covert form of procrastination that prevented me from writing.

When I embarked on this project, I chose to use Scrivener. When I found a publisher, he wanted me to do everything in Word, I resisted and continued to do my part of the project with the tools I was familiar with. By exporting parts of the draft into Word format, I could send samples, edits, and anything else my publisher asked for in Word.

(There’s a lesson there about using tools that work for you and not being “persuaded” to use tools that don’t)

There are more lessons I’ve learned, but these three were the biggest ones. I hope in some way these help you as you embark on your next project.

Below are a few resources that will help you find the processes.

Ditch Your Projects! | The "Secret" Productivity Trick. →

Turning Projects Into Processes. →

Give Your Processes Time To Work. →

The Critical Part Of Any Productivity System. →

If you want to buy a copy of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived!, You can do so now on Amazon.