Day 220: I'm back
I'm back, after two weeks of health problems (over a month of physical and mental health problems if you ignore the FIVE days I did work in December).
I took a break around Christmas, but then my allergies started acting up and I had bad sinus headaches for almost two weeks. I'm feeling better now, but my body is still dragging so I'm easing back into work.
Since my health has taken a nosedive lately, I decided to back off on marketing, since that takes the most energy out of me. I haven't planned for a January newsletter, and I haven't been on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Goodreads in several weeks. It's just too difficult to climb online to post and to respond to readers when I'm feeling poorly.
I'm not sure how that will impact my writing career, but I'm beginning to realize that my default mode, especially when I'm not feeling 100%, is no social media. I fought against it for a while, especially when I was reading so many marketing books, and so I tried to keep up with my social media. It doesn't usually take a long time, unless I see an article I want to read or a writer's discussion that interests me, but since I'm mostly offline when I'm working, it does take a bit of inertia and energy for me to get online and respond. I don't want to ignore personal messages on social media, so I think I'll have to check it every so often, but right now I'm not checking it regularly.
I also realized that one reason I was feeling unmotivated to get back to work was because I was reluctant to do dictation again. Even though I wanted to fully commit to the dictation, the thought of doing it made me balk, which made me procrastinate in getting back to work on my book.
I still think that if I devoted more energy to dictation, I might be able to get it to work. However lately, I've been feeling so blah health-wise that it might be better for me to put that off until I feel better. Learning something new just requires more energy than I have these days.
So that's where I am. I'm a bit disappointed I hardly got any work done in December, but maybe it's for the best. I feel like I've been going at a hard pace for a few months because I've been wanting to improve my productivity, but I think I've been taking on too much. I could keep up when I was feeling fine, but since my health has been unreliable lately, I decided to back up and focus on the bare minimum that I should do.
I'm going to look at what I have to do on volume 3 in my series. I think I have to do some editing of the last dictation session I did. Then I'll try to get some more writing done on it. I'll probably be typing on 4thewords.com rather than using dictation. I'm not going to do dictation unless I really want to do it--it's just been too difficult for me to motivate myself to do work if i know that work involves dictation.
Even though I'll be typing in 4thewords, I will still be trying to silence my editor in order to try to get into flow state. But now that I think about it, I had a hard time doing that with dictation, too. I spent time re-dictating the opening of the scene because I wasn't happy with it, although eventually I moved on. I wonder if that's just my default method, and maybe I just need to commit to a longer time period in order to get over that hump? I guess I'll try that today and see.
***
I'm rather frustrated because editing the short section I did via dictation took a really long time. The writing was very wooden and so I had to completely rewrite a major chunk of it.
This was written in about 40 minutes of dictation, so even in that length of time I wasn't able to get into a good writing flow. It makes me wonder if I would have written it better in the rough draft if I'd typed instead of dictated it. I'm pretty sure my editing time would have been less, but my writing time might have been more.
After finishing the editing, I started feeling tired and decided to take a break, but I ended up not getting back to work after that.
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 1 hour, 28 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: 0
Writing: Average speed: 0
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 10 minutes
My takeaway for today: Because of my unreliable health, I’ve decided to just do the bare minimum of marketing and resort to my default mode of limited social media.
I took a break around Christmas, but then my allergies started acting up and I had bad sinus headaches for almost two weeks. I'm feeling better now, but my body is still dragging so I'm easing back into work.
Since my health has taken a nosedive lately, I decided to back off on marketing, since that takes the most energy out of me. I haven't planned for a January newsletter, and I haven't been on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Goodreads in several weeks. It's just too difficult to climb online to post and to respond to readers when I'm feeling poorly.
I'm not sure how that will impact my writing career, but I'm beginning to realize that my default mode, especially when I'm not feeling 100%, is no social media. I fought against it for a while, especially when I was reading so many marketing books, and so I tried to keep up with my social media. It doesn't usually take a long time, unless I see an article I want to read or a writer's discussion that interests me, but since I'm mostly offline when I'm working, it does take a bit of inertia and energy for me to get online and respond. I don't want to ignore personal messages on social media, so I think I'll have to check it every so often, but right now I'm not checking it regularly.
I also realized that one reason I was feeling unmotivated to get back to work was because I was reluctant to do dictation again. Even though I wanted to fully commit to the dictation, the thought of doing it made me balk, which made me procrastinate in getting back to work on my book.
I still think that if I devoted more energy to dictation, I might be able to get it to work. However lately, I've been feeling so blah health-wise that it might be better for me to put that off until I feel better. Learning something new just requires more energy than I have these days.
So that's where I am. I'm a bit disappointed I hardly got any work done in December, but maybe it's for the best. I feel like I've been going at a hard pace for a few months because I've been wanting to improve my productivity, but I think I've been taking on too much. I could keep up when I was feeling fine, but since my health has been unreliable lately, I decided to back up and focus on the bare minimum that I should do.
I'm going to look at what I have to do on volume 3 in my series. I think I have to do some editing of the last dictation session I did. Then I'll try to get some more writing done on it. I'll probably be typing on 4thewords.com rather than using dictation. I'm not going to do dictation unless I really want to do it--it's just been too difficult for me to motivate myself to do work if i know that work involves dictation.
Even though I'll be typing in 4thewords, I will still be trying to silence my editor in order to try to get into flow state. But now that I think about it, I had a hard time doing that with dictation, too. I spent time re-dictating the opening of the scene because I wasn't happy with it, although eventually I moved on. I wonder if that's just my default method, and maybe I just need to commit to a longer time period in order to get over that hump? I guess I'll try that today and see.
***
I'm rather frustrated because editing the short section I did via dictation took a really long time. The writing was very wooden and so I had to completely rewrite a major chunk of it.
This was written in about 40 minutes of dictation, so even in that length of time I wasn't able to get into a good writing flow. It makes me wonder if I would have written it better in the rough draft if I'd typed instead of dictated it. I'm pretty sure my editing time would have been less, but my writing time might have been more.
After finishing the editing, I started feeling tired and decided to take a break, but I ended up not getting back to work after that.
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 1 hour, 28 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 0
Writing: Total number of words: 0
Writing: Average speed: 0
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 10 minutes
My takeaway for today: Because of my unreliable health, I’ve decided to just do the bare minimum of marketing and resort to my default mode of limited social media.
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