fiction - What can one do to get the most from limited writing time?

I do make an effort to write every day, and usually succeed, but I just have too much going on in my life right now to give my writing the time it would like to have. When I do have time, blog posts, tech papers, etc. try very hard to crowd out the fiction I do for fun (not that I'd mind publishing it some day, I just don't have the time to put in to pursue that goal in earnest right now).

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  I can't always take "just" a half hour or an hour or two more to get to a stopping point. I hate stopping when I'm on a roll, but it's just a fact of life. How do you grab what you had when you left off and lose as little of the "juice" as possible when you sit back down to write?

  
  


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  How can one shorten the time from "sitting down to write" to "oh, yeah, that's where we were..." and productive writing?

  
  


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  Are there any productivity tools you recommend to make the planning process less disjointed? I'm happy with my editor; however I'm using mindmapping software for general notes, and paper index cards for rearranging timeline, and would like to replace the index cards, or possibly both, with something better suited to the task. (I'm not interested in an IDE-like all-in-one such as WritersCafe.)

  
  

Any other tips re: productivity despite limited writing time would be appreciated, too.

Answer

When I'm on a roll writing, I always make sure I stop before the roll ends. In other words, if my "writing time" is almost up, and I have a great idea and I know what I want to say, I will often stop before I'm done, take a few notes on how I want to complete the idea, then stop for the day.

While on one hand it may be stupid to ignore the flow, this approach allows me to get started quickly the next day - I scan where I left off, and have little problem getting right back to the pace of the previous day.

I can't do it every day, but I do it when I can because it has never failed to get me into the "writers zone" quickly.