Day 430: Use an interval timer

Unfortunately, I had another bad night’s sleep so I’m not sure how much writing I’ll get done today. I’m feeling rather tired as I’m writing this.

Ironically, my poor sleep is because I’m trying to get to bed earlier so I can wake up early, but I’m only getting 3-5 hours of sleep and then waking up TOO early. Then I’m tired and go to bed even earlier, and wake up only a few hours later. My sleep schedule is so messed up right now!

But I am very determined that this time I’m going to put more effort into getting onto a stricter sleeping schedule of going to bed between 10 and 12. I am aiming for this schedule so that I can more easily discipline myself into doing my exercise and work every day, and also going to bed at the same time every day.

So I know that I'll have a few rough days (or weeks) of trying to adjust my body and feeling tired as a result. It’s just hard suffering through it at the moment.

I woke up a bit too early to be able to exercise first thing, so instead I did my other “frogs”—my daily Bible reading, house chores (I even did a few extra chores), and my Japanese study. Now I’m going to start work on my book, and I hope I’ll have the discipline to be able to exercise later today. I’m still working on blocking book 4 of my Regency series.

Since I’m feeling tired, I put on some soundtrack music to hopefully help stimulate my brain and give me more energy.

***

Okay, i admit I was procrastinating a little bit. :) Mostly because my brain is so tired and foggy right now, so my self-discipline is rather lacking.

Anyway, I was on the forum boards at 4thewords.com and in a thread about writing full time, a couple freelancers mentioned using timers and alarms for everything. That might be a good idea to have a timer that goes off every hour that will at least jar me out of it if I’m zoning out (like today), and to remind me to stand and stretch. I have a Pomodoro-type timer on my computer desktop, so I set it up for 55 minute work intervals, with a 5 minute break in between. Hopefully that will help me.

I did a bit of stretching before starting my writing session, and it actually helped me wake up a bit.

***

I actually got almost 4 hours of work done, but then my IBS flared, so I took a long break.

Despite how badly I slept, I’m not feeling too tired (yet). I’m rather glad about that.

(I’m frustrated that I don’t know what I’m eating that is causing my IBS to flare. The intermittent discomfort (and sometimes it’s really painful) makes it really hard for me to focus on my writing.)

Setting my desktop interval timer worked really well, especially during the first four hours of work I did this morning. The only problem was this afternoon when I paused it to do some chores and then when I got back to my desk, I forgot to turn it back on. I got a bit distracted adding some writing to a blog post for my Story Sensei blog, and so I ended up spending too much time blogging rather than getting back to writing work. Even though the blogging will eventually be posted on my Story Sensei blog and used for general marketing purposes, I should have spent the time on my writing FIRST, and then done the blogging later.

I got a bit of work done on my book after I stopped blogging, but then I really started to feel the effects of too little sleep. I discovered a problem I needed to fix with the scene, and realized I was too tired to really think clearly, so I threw in the towel.

I didn’t get the full 6 hours of work I wanted to get done, but I got close, which I think was pretty good considering I didn’t sleep well. I’ll be able to tackle the problem with the scene with a fresh mind tomorrow.

Outlining: time spent: 0

Blocking: time spent: 5 hours, 11 minutes

Editing: Time spent: 0

Writing: Time spent: 0

Writing: Total number of words: n/a

Writing: Overall writing speed: n/a

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 2 hours, 15 minutes

My takeaway for today: Use my desktop Pomodoro interval timer to remind me when to stand up and stretch and to jar me out of it if I space out being distracted by some other task.