Day 254: Scheduling my day
During breakfast, I did another schedule, this time detailing how long it takes me to do what each day. I had done something like this earlier, but my daily To Do list has changed since then. I estimated the time in half hour increments.
I listed everything I had to do for house chores, health, and hygiene and was shocked to find that took up 7 hours a day! Assuming I sleep for 8 hours, and that I don’t waste time, that leaves me about 9 hours to do work.
I allocated 2 hours a day for reading fiction, although I’m not sure if that’s enough since sometimes I’m feeling pretty burnt out.
Right now, I’m aiming for 5 hours of writing and editing. It hadn’t seemed like a lot before, but now that I realize I only have 9 hours for all my non-home related things, it seems like I won’t be able to do much more than 5 or 6 hours a day.
When looking through my general To Do lists, I realized that I need to allocate time each day for editing the Japanese version of The Spinster’s Christmas, because I want it to match the editing we did for the Japanese version of Sushi for One. I can do the editing, but it’ll take a long time and it’s tedious, so I’m hoping I can do half an hour each day.
That leaves 1.5 hours for blogging and miscellaneous writing related things, like planning my monsters in 4thewords.com (which is one of my key motivators for self-discipline in doing my work each day). I am going to try to limit my blogging to 30 minutes a day. That gives me one hour leeway for everything else.
***
I started off doing self-editing today since I’m WAY behind. I really need to keep up my cycling every day before I start writing. I had skipped it because I was feeling anxious about not getting enough words done, but I need to stick to my system.
Right now, book 3 is a little over 69,000 words. I’m guessing it’ll be another 10,000 words before I finish, although it might be less if I decide to cut a scene from the end of book 3 and instead put it at the beginning of book 4. I haven’t quite decided yet, it’ll depend on how the story flow is going once I get to that scene.
***
Ugh! I forgot to set an alarm (as opposed to a timer) when I took my break in between sprints. I decided to start looking at doing the editing for the Japanese version of The Spinster’s Christmas and got distracted trying to figure out if I could do it in Mac Pages (as opposed to Word).
While I eventually needed to do that work, I don’t know that I should have spent 2 hours on it, when I haven’t yet done my writing sprints for today.
***
My back is starting to bother me! This is very frustrating!
***
I took a break and my back feels better now. I have to remember to keep good posture when I’m sitting and to stop slouching.
I ended up spending some time doing self-publishing work. I had originally planned on a preorder period for my books and I had written the release emails and scheduled them to go out. But then I heard from authors on Facebook about Amazon having glitches and preorders being cancelled through no fault of the author, and I got a bit paranoid.
So since my ebook file is ready to go anyway, I moved up my preorder release date to this Friday, and I also rewrote and rescheduled my newsletters. I also rewrote my release calendar and release schedule for my next books so that instead of doing a preorder, I’ll just make the ebook live and then email my newsletter about it.
Now I’m going to try to get a little more words done today. So far my writing speed has been really slow. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it’s because these are more emotional scenes, and so they’re harder for me to write.
***
I actually thought about continuing writing, but ended up stopping because I haven’t done any reading today yet. I still may not get much reading done because I’m tired.
I didn’t quite stick to my work schedule today. I spent WAY too long editing the Japanese Spinster’s Christmas, I checked social media (which I shouldn’t have), and I also did some self-publishing that wasn’t planned. But I did figure out a way to do my next release without a preorder, which will probably be much less stress and make the release much easier for me.
I also did an extra 25-minute writing sprint because my word count for the day was pretty bad. My writing has been very slow the entire day, but in hindsight, I probably did a lot of editing as I wrote today. I wanted to get the passages down right since they’re strongly emotional scenes, so I was occasionally adjusting lines of dialogue.
I’m also a bit unhappy with the scene I’m working on currently, where I stopped for today. I just don’t have a lot of conflict going on at the beginning of the scene. I even did a free write before starting to try to decide if I wanted to try to come up with some extra tension, but because there’s more tension coming midway in the scene, I decided to leave the first part without the tension. However, now I’m second-guessing myself because it might make the scene a bit boring, and that might be why it’s been slow going for me to write it.
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 2 hours, 37 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 3 hours, 5 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 2245 words
Writing: Average speed (sprints): 820 words per hour
Writing: Overall writing speed: 730 words per hour
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 4 hours, 43 minutes
My takeaway for today: It was rather helpful to know exactly how many hours a day I have to be able to do various parts of my work.
I listed everything I had to do for house chores, health, and hygiene and was shocked to find that took up 7 hours a day! Assuming I sleep for 8 hours, and that I don’t waste time, that leaves me about 9 hours to do work.
I allocated 2 hours a day for reading fiction, although I’m not sure if that’s enough since sometimes I’m feeling pretty burnt out.
Right now, I’m aiming for 5 hours of writing and editing. It hadn’t seemed like a lot before, but now that I realize I only have 9 hours for all my non-home related things, it seems like I won’t be able to do much more than 5 or 6 hours a day.
When looking through my general To Do lists, I realized that I need to allocate time each day for editing the Japanese version of The Spinster’s Christmas, because I want it to match the editing we did for the Japanese version of Sushi for One. I can do the editing, but it’ll take a long time and it’s tedious, so I’m hoping I can do half an hour each day.
That leaves 1.5 hours for blogging and miscellaneous writing related things, like planning my monsters in 4thewords.com (which is one of my key motivators for self-discipline in doing my work each day). I am going to try to limit my blogging to 30 minutes a day. That gives me one hour leeway for everything else.
***
I started off doing self-editing today since I’m WAY behind. I really need to keep up my cycling every day before I start writing. I had skipped it because I was feeling anxious about not getting enough words done, but I need to stick to my system.
Right now, book 3 is a little over 69,000 words. I’m guessing it’ll be another 10,000 words before I finish, although it might be less if I decide to cut a scene from the end of book 3 and instead put it at the beginning of book 4. I haven’t quite decided yet, it’ll depend on how the story flow is going once I get to that scene.
***
Ugh! I forgot to set an alarm (as opposed to a timer) when I took my break in between sprints. I decided to start looking at doing the editing for the Japanese version of The Spinster’s Christmas and got distracted trying to figure out if I could do it in Mac Pages (as opposed to Word).
While I eventually needed to do that work, I don’t know that I should have spent 2 hours on it, when I haven’t yet done my writing sprints for today.
***
My back is starting to bother me! This is very frustrating!
***
I took a break and my back feels better now. I have to remember to keep good posture when I’m sitting and to stop slouching.
I ended up spending some time doing self-publishing work. I had originally planned on a preorder period for my books and I had written the release emails and scheduled them to go out. But then I heard from authors on Facebook about Amazon having glitches and preorders being cancelled through no fault of the author, and I got a bit paranoid.
So since my ebook file is ready to go anyway, I moved up my preorder release date to this Friday, and I also rewrote and rescheduled my newsletters. I also rewrote my release calendar and release schedule for my next books so that instead of doing a preorder, I’ll just make the ebook live and then email my newsletter about it.
Now I’m going to try to get a little more words done today. So far my writing speed has been really slow. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think it’s because these are more emotional scenes, and so they’re harder for me to write.
***
I actually thought about continuing writing, but ended up stopping because I haven’t done any reading today yet. I still may not get much reading done because I’m tired.
I didn’t quite stick to my work schedule today. I spent WAY too long editing the Japanese Spinster’s Christmas, I checked social media (which I shouldn’t have), and I also did some self-publishing that wasn’t planned. But I did figure out a way to do my next release without a preorder, which will probably be much less stress and make the release much easier for me.
I also did an extra 25-minute writing sprint because my word count for the day was pretty bad. My writing has been very slow the entire day, but in hindsight, I probably did a lot of editing as I wrote today. I wanted to get the passages down right since they’re strongly emotional scenes, so I was occasionally adjusting lines of dialogue.
I’m also a bit unhappy with the scene I’m working on currently, where I stopped for today. I just don’t have a lot of conflict going on at the beginning of the scene. I even did a free write before starting to try to decide if I wanted to try to come up with some extra tension, but because there’s more tension coming midway in the scene, I decided to leave the first part without the tension. However, now I’m second-guessing myself because it might make the scene a bit boring, and that might be why it’s been slow going for me to write it.
Blocking: time spent: 0
Editing: Time spent: 2 hours, 37 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 3 hours, 5 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 2245 words
Writing: Average speed (sprints): 820 words per hour
Writing: Overall writing speed: 730 words per hour
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 4 hours, 43 minutes
My takeaway for today: It was rather helpful to know exactly how many hours a day I have to be able to do various parts of my work.
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