Robert Moskowitz blogs twice a week on productivity and success in support of his book: "How to Organize Your Work and Your Life." Like all natural writers, he is at work on a novel: www.OrganizeYourWorkandLife.com

It’s less showy, less newsworthy, much less praised than creativity, innovation, and risk-taking. But conscientiousness is a critical element in building productivity and success in your work and your life as a writer.

As Hillary Clinton has said: “Showing up is not all of life – but it counts for a lot.”

Of course, just making an appearance is not enough; you also need to be conscientious enough to push forward on all your important tasks – including turning out pages and putting them in front of readers – consistently enough to get each one done.

Fortunately, “slow and steady wins the race” is what conscientiousness for writers is all about.

Here are some ways to be more conscientious:

Keep Your Eye on the Prize

One key to building conscientiousness is learning to avoid distractions, detours, and dead ends. To do this, it’s important to keep a steady focus on your major targets: what you are trying to write and how you will know when it’s finished.

Your major targets might involve reaching a specific performance goal (like writing a certain number of words or pages), or adhering to a set of operating principles (like writing for an hour a day, or submitting at least one piece every week or month).

Conscientious writers always know what they are trying to accomplish, why, and how.

Map Out the Situation

Conscientious writers recognize that complexities of work and life can easily obscure the best path forward. That’s why they routinely make an early effort to map, as fully as possible, the situation in which they are operating.

At a minimum, your map should detail:

• Who am I trying to please, or attract?
• What is stopping me?
• What is the allowable time-frame?
• What are the criteria for judging success?
• Who are the judges?

A comprehensive map of the situation helps you identify your biggest obstacles, as well as places where you can most easily make progress. An accurate map also provides a basis for planning your work and executing that plan.

Do the Job Fully

Rather than pick the low-hanging fruit, conscientious writers work hard to pick all the fruit. They are willing to hammer away at a difficult scene or paragraph for a fairly long time, until it finally yields to their efforts and begins to work as well as they want it to.

They recognize the importance of putting in enough time and energy to complete every writing project they start and offer it to a potentially receptive audience.

Establish Your Reliability

Conscientiousness involves not just showing up once or twice, but consistently spending significant amounts of time and effort, working hard on your craft and challenging yourself to turn out the best work of which you are capable.

Reliability also involves meaning what you say and keeping your commitments, so collaborators, agents, editors, publishers, and others can place their full trust in you, day after day, week after week, and month after month.

Commit to Completion

Perhaps most important, conscientious writers commit themselves to the goal. Despite any obstacles, setbacks, and personal problems, they work steadily toward completion of the writing project at hand.

Simply put: they are unlikely to quit.

If you think about your own work and life history from this perspective, you’ll likely recognize some key people who made major contributions to the success of various tasks, projects, and goals by virtue of – if nothing else – their conscientiousness.

It’s not flashy, but it’s an important trait to cultivate.

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