Ernest Hemingway Productivity Tips

1. Don’t Waste Words and Be Clear: when challenged to write a six-word story, Hemingway wrote “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”
2. Make a Schedule: Every day he woke up at 7am and wrote 500--1,000 words. Writer Jeanette Winterson says “Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.”
3. Quit While You’re Ahead: he said “The best way [to write] is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day…you will never be stuck.”
4. Keep Your Mouth Shut: he said it’s bad form for a writer to talk about his work. Discussing writing takes off  “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.”
5. Don’t Give Up: he once told F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of sh*t. I try to put the sh*t in the wastebasket.”
6. Work Standing Up: he wrote standing up because of a minor leg injury he got in World War I.

Most importantly: “Never mistake motion for action.”

FROM: "7 Productivity Tips From Ernest Hemingway"