Day 432: Lost to exhaustion

I went to bed too early yesterday since I was so tired, so I woke up too early again. I slept a little longer last night (almost 7 hours), but I didn’t sleep much better/deeper (keep waking up), so today I’m still feeling a bit tired.

Since I’ve been having so many issues with exhaustion lately, as I blogged about yesterday, I’m trying to get my writing done earlier and skimping out on my “frogs” in order to try to get my writing done while I still have the energy. Hopefully I can get my sleep stabilized soon. I’m so frustrated that I’m feeling so tired during the day and that I can’t get deep sleep even if I go to bed early.

I did my Japanese this morning, but I took less time than usual. When I woke up, it was too dark to exercise, and I couldn’t do house chores since husband was still asleep, but I set alarms to make sure I do my exercise later. I didn’t set an alarm to do chores since I intend to do that after my writing work, and I don’t know when that’ll end.

***

I was going to check my email later, after I finished writing, just like with my chores. It meant I may not get to my email at all, since I have a tendency to not want to do it if I put it off to later, but I figured it would be okay to not check email for a week or two.

However, just from the way things worked out, I only had about 45 minutes from the time I finished Japanese until I had to get ready to go exercise, and I didn’t feel like getting into my blocking for only a short time before I had to drop it. I’ve done sprints before, but it was usually several sprints in a row, during a period where I had a few hours to devote to my writing, so my brain never really left that writing headspace, even during breaks. It’s a little more difficult for me to get into the writing for only a short time and then switching to doing something else entirely. (It’s that whole momentum thing I blogged about a few days ago.)

So I just did 45 minutes of email rather than leaving it for later. Then I exercised and I feel pretty good now.

I’m continuing my blocking of book 4 of my Regency series. I’m steadily working through the scenes, although as I blogged about yesterday, I had to add a scene that wasn’t in the synopsis and it was a bit difficult since I had to build it from scratch. I’m almost done with it, though. However, the next scene needs to be completely revamped (it was rather vaguely worded in my synopsis to begin with) so it might take a long time to block that. However, I am hopeful the other scenes won’t take quite so long to block.

***

I don’t want to blame everything on my exhaustion, but I’m having a really hard time focusing today. It could be I’ve gotten out of practice of doing it since I’ve had a difficult few weeks, health-wise, and I’ve had to deal with the distraction of IBS pain while I’m working.

I think I’ll try sprints and see if I can focus for shorter periods of time. I reset my desktop Pomodoro timer for 25 minutes and I’ll see if I can train myself to focus better.

***

Unfortunately, I never got a chance to try sprints because I was so exhausted I actually fell asleep at my desk.

I didn’t get as much work done as I had wanted to get, and it was only a slight improvement over yesterday. I will see how well I sleep this weekend, and see how I feel next week.

Outlining: time spent: 0

Blocking: time spent: 3 hours, 14 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: 1 hour, 57 minutes

My takeaway for today: Next week, try to train my focus by doing sprints.