Day 580: Evaluation 6
I haven’t done an evaluation in a while, so I thought I’d do another summary of what I’ve learned from this blog about improving my productivity.
Health issues
I’m still dealing with IBS problems. Some of my issues were experiments in figuring out what I could or couldn’t eat, and I ate things that apparently I shouldn’t. There are so many things which I don’t know if I can eat or not, so all I can do is try them and see.
Things are slowly starting to get better, but my eating choices are severely limited. The upside is that I’ve lost weight.
I am clinging to the few foods I actually can eat—like french fries and potato chips—and also trying to exercise when I have the energy. The exercise tends to make me feel better when I work, so I’m trying to make that a priority.
Eating my frogs
I’m still finding that there are important things which, if I don’t do them first thing when I get up, they won’t get done. Right now, those things are: 1) exercise, 2) daily Bible reading, 3) Japanese language study.
I used to include house chores in that, but those have fallen by the wayside since my IBS started acting up more, so now I only do them at the end of the day if I have the energy. If they don’t get done, it’s not a big deal (to me, anyway).
The downside is that I don’t get started on my writing work until about 3 hours after I wake up. I usually work better starting about an hour after I wake up, but doing those 3 things is more important to me. Also, it’s not like I’m not productive at all in the afternoon. And maybe this is helping me to be more productive during that time of day.
I absolutely CANNOT do marketing work or writing-related business before I do writing or I just lose motivation to write. I’m not sure why that is, but it has happened several times already so I just have to accept that it’s part of how my brain is.
Work hours
I found that I don’t work well around dinner time and afterward, so I’m trying to get up earlier to get my frogs done before lunch, and then spending time in the afternoon to get my work done before I have to start cooking dinner.
Because of my IBS, my work hours were sometimes only the bare minimum for the day (100 words of writing, 100 words of blocking). But slowly I’ve been feeling better and increasing the amount of time I spend on work.
I was reading about how a lot of writers only spend about 3 hours on work each day, especially since they often have other family commitments or maybe they do more marketing work than I do.
Right now, I’m struggling to even do 3 hours of writing a day. I feel a bit guilty to be doing less than 5 or 6 hours—I spend 60-90 minutes on Japanese study, which I consider part of my work, and another hour or two on reading, which is also essential for refilling the creative well and that should leave me with 5 or 6 hours for writing, which would give me a regular 8 hour work day.
But then I started thinking about it a bit more. Recently I started doing more like 3 or 4 hours of reading a day, and I actually felt more creative when I wrote. I also found myself to be less distracted if I’ve been doing 2-3 hours of reading for the past few days. So I decided to increase my reading time to 3 hours, which leaves about 4 hours each day that should be for writing. So 3 hours actually isn’t that bad.
I also started doing a more detailed daily schedule in my bullet journal for my day, and I’ve found it helps a lot. Having a detailed daily schedule probably gives other writers hives, but since I started doing it, I’ve found that it’s a crutch for one of my biggest weaknesses, which is decision making. It takes me SO FREAKIN’ LONG TO MAKE A DECISION. I don’t remember being this way as a kid, but maybe I was almost as bad. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten worse/longer as I get older.
So having my schedule written out in my electronic bullet journal helps me to know what I need to do next without needing to think about it or make a decision about it. It has helped me to be WAY more efficient with my time. I have found I don’t have long stretches of time where I can’t remember what I did during that time.
Not writing fast
After waffling over this topic ad nauseam, I finally settled on just not caring how fast I’m writing. I was mostly influenced by the book Dear Writer, You Need to Quit by Becca Symes, but other writing books also influenced me.
I was especially impacted by the injunction that writers are all different and you need to embrace with and work with your differences in order to prioritize what’s most important to you and then accomplish your goals.
Another writing book also mentioned that you want to make your writing process enjoyable. Otherwise, what’s the point? I absolutely don’t want to suffer with every book I write. And I enjoy writing more when I edit as I go and take my time rather than vomit writing and struggling with the self-editing.
I know I could probably be more productive if I wrote faster, but essentially it came down to wanting to put out the best work I can. In order to do that, I need to write a cleaner first draft so that my abysmal self-editing skills can handle it better.
When I wrote faster and had a messier first draft, my self-editing was not as thorough or detailed, which resulted in a less polished final book. I want to put out the best work I can, so if that means a cleaner first draft and slower writing, then so be it. My priority has shifted to a high quality book over writing faster and putting out more books a year.
To be clear, I’m not saying that writing fast means poor quality. It’s just that for me, personally, writing fast is poison for my poor self-editing skills. Other writers are fabulous at self-editing and can polish a turd into a diamond in no time flat. I can’t do it. So to ensure I put out the best books I can, I have to have a clean first draft.
To stop myself from obsessing over my writing speed, I eliminated the column in my writing log that calculated words per hour. I kept wanting to write faster when I saw that writing rate go down. Now that it’s not there, I just look at the total number of words I write each day and I’m either happy with it or I push myself to write a little more.
I’m also doing Cycling, which is self-editing the portion of writing I wrote the day before, and then doing my writing for the day. The little bit of self-editing helps to ground me in the story a bit better, and it gives me an additional self-editing pass through the scene. After the book is done, I’ll do another self-editing pass through the entire book to see how the story flows, and which will hopefully catch continuity errors.
I’m still keeping track of how many hours it takes me to do each portion of my book creation process for each book, so that after each book is done, I’ll have the total number of hours it took me. I have a feeling the editing time will decrease and the writing time will increase.
Also, starting with book 4, I’ve started taking more time to do the blocking so that I can have more detail in my blocking notes. That way I don’t have to think up so many things while I’m writing, such as character and street names.
The rest of the books in the series will likely take me longer than it did for books 2 and 3 (book 1 already took a really long time because I decided to switch the plot around after spending dozens of hours on it). But since my self-editing will be better, I think the finished products will also be the best I can produce.
I also remembered that ultimately, my book’s release is in God’s hands. So I don’t have to worry about how slowly I’m writing. I just need to keep pushing on.
Dictation
I’m not giving up on dictation—I do believe that if I practice enough, the dictation will be cleaner, as clean as typing. But so far, I haven’t had the physical and mental energy to devote to dictation, so I’ve been writing using typing instead. I think that until my health is consistently good enough that I could devote a few weeks to doing this, I should hold off on practicing dictation.
Writing Streak
I initially didn’t think a writing streak would work for me because my health is so terrible. And to be honest, the first few weeks of keeping the streak, I actually felt resentful when I had to do a little bit of writing on days when I felt like the bug on the windshield. There were lots of days when I seriously considered just quitting the streak.
But after the 30 day mark, I started feeling better and I found myself more motivated to keep up the streak.
Part of it is because I’m an achievement-oriented personality, so I get my kicks from accomplishing goals, and I didn’t want to break the streak. This is just me, though—a more socially-oriented person wouldn’t care so much about breaking the streak, but they might feel pressured if they’re recording the streak publicly and they don’t want to have other people know they’ve broken the streak.
Another reason the streak started working was because I was feeling better physically. If I were still feeling terrible like I did the first 2 or 3 weeks when I started the streak, I don’t know that I’d have continued it. Forcing myself to write—even the measly amount of 100 words—was really hard when I wasn’t feeling well. I basically had to try to find a 10 minute time when I was feeling less crappy than the rest of the day and try to get my work done quickly before the discomfort came back.
So I don’t think a writing streak would necessarily work for a writer combating a chronic illness of some sort. But for me, it has definitely helped me.
It also helped that for my streak, I set a very low bar for minimum amount of work to be done each day—only 100 words. It makes it much easier for me to do it when I’m feeling sick.
The way the streak has helped me is not really getting a little work done every day, although every little bit does help. The streak forces me to revisit my manuscript every single day and keep the story and current scene in my head.
Before, when I wouldn’t write for a few days because of my health, I would need to take some time to reread the scene and my blocking notes to reorient myself in the story world and in the scene. I don’t need to do that now since the streak forces me to work on the book every single day.
Also, if I hadn’t done writing in a few days, for some reason I would procrastinate a bit before diving back into work. I’m not sure why I felt like I had to overcome this inertial hurdle, but there you go. However, since I started doing a little bit of writing every day, I haven’t had that inertial hump when I started writing. I’m able to just start writing, no resistance or procrastination.
So the streak isn’t really helpful in making me productive every day. It helps me more by making me more efficient and productive on the days when I feel better and can spend more time working. I don’t have to waste time reorienting myself in my manuscript, because I’ve been keeping it in my thoughts even during the days when I didn’t do much work on it. And I don’t have that strange resistance/procrastination before starting work.
However, I still haven’t figured out a good reward system for when I reach streak milestones. For now, I just create a badge that I post on my blog and put on my sidebar to mark each 30 days of my streak. I’d like to come up with a really good reward I give to myself to help motivate me on my streak, but unfortunately I’m very food-oriented. Normally I’d reward myself with something yummy to eat, but at the moment there’s very little I can eat which I enjoy. And the few things which I can eat which I enjoy, I just eat them when I want to in order to remain sane on this horrendous diet for my IBS.
Public accountability
I thought at first that the streak would take the place of public accountability, but I was wrong. I actually still need this blog—and to post my progress everyday—in order to force myself to work on the days when I’m feeling okay. I find myself descending into laziness on those okay days, especially since there are some days when I feel genuinely crappy and can’t get much work done at all.
But when I have to post on my blog how much—or how little—I got done each day, it forces me to not be lazy and to push myself to work a little bit more. As a result, I’m progressing better on my book since I make more of an effort to work each day that I can.
Blocking
Since I’m trying to keep up my writing streak, I am writing in book 4 of my series, but I’m also trying to do the blocking for the same book. However, flipping back and forth between two different time periods in the same series is giving me mental whiplash. I am always forgetting what I’ve already written and sometimes writing in things that haven’t happened yet.
So I decided to only do the bare minimum of writing each day until I can get more books blocked in the series. I’ve done the preliminary extended outlines, but I haven’t blocked any of the scenes for the other books. I am going to try to do all the blocking for all the rest of the books as fast as possible, and then once that’s all done, I can increase the amount of time I spend writing each day.
Unfortunately, this means it’ll take me longer to release this next book. But it will also mean that I will probably be able to release the rest of the books in the series faster if the books are already blocked.
Once the series is blocked and I’m writing the books, I can switch my blocking time to working on my next series, a contemporary romantic suspense series set in Hawaii. I think that the difference in time period and genre will keep me from getting confused about what has or hasn’t happened yet in my Regency series, and I’ll stop writing weird things into the books.
Once I can switch to blocking my Hawaii series, I can spend a couple hours on writing the Regency and a couple hours on blocking the Hawaii series each day. It will hopefully help me release the Regency series in good time, and by blocking the Hawaii series in advance, I can immediately start writing it once I finish my Regency series.
Anyway, I’m going to try this, because it’s obvious that blocking the same series I’m writing is only confusing me and making me make mistakes when I write.
Stress
I realized that stress in my life was causing my IBS to flare up even when I haven’t eaten something bad for me, so I had to be rather ruthless about cutting out stressors in my life. The biggest no-brainer was cutting out social media, since that’s not only a huge black hole time-suck, but it can also cause me anxiety if someone says something hurtful on my author page.
I tried compartmentalizing my marketing and writing-related business tasks to only one or two days a week, but that just didn’t work. I often just didn’t want to do it, and other times they took so much time that I didn’t get any writing done that day.
At the moment, the only marketing I’m doing is putting out my newsletter once a month and posting on my blog about twice a week. I am also doing a lot of knitting in order to reduce stress.
I also did what I could to cut down the stress of releasing my books and marketing them. I made out a comprehensive checklist to remind myself of everything I need to do once a book is written. Checklists make me relieved because then I don’t have to worry about forgetting to do something. The checklist made releasing book 3 SO much easier.
I also decided NOT to do preorders of my books. I had heard from other authors about technical issues with preorders, and the thought of that was just incredibly dismaying. So to eliminate that stress, I decided to just put the book up live when it was done and then do my marketing in the week afterward (however I had to have prepared in advance to do that marketing). Since I’m writing a serial novel series, the marketing for each book isn’t that important (the marketing for the first book is most important), and I just didn’t want to have to deal with the pressures of a preorder and trying to get a lot of sales that first week.
I have also started adjusting my writing/work schedule around family chores and appointments so that I just don’t do as much work on the days I have other family stuff to do. It reduces my stress because I don’t have to worry about getting work done on days I have other things to do. I only do the bare minimum of writing on those days, and treat it kind of like a partial vacation day. I also try to schedule all those things for the same day so I don’t have several of those kinds of days each week.
Series Character Overview Spreadsheet
I had to solidify the series premise for my Hawaii series because the first book in the series was being included in a multi-author box set. For each series, I try to do a Series Character Overview Spreadsheet. For any writers interested in it, it’s here: Series Character Overview spreadsheet
4thewords
Since I started writing slower, thee wasn’t much of a need for me to use distraction-free writing tools like the Alphasmart and Freewrite Traveler, so I’ve been writing only on 4thewords.com recently. It is just very motivating to be writing in the website editor and battling a monster. I have often found myself writing a bit more than I intended just to win against a monster battle that’s running.
I also found that when I’m writing in 4thewords, since I’m battling a word monster, it encourages me to freewrite when I get stuck. The words I freewrite help to defeat the monster, and the freewrite often helps me get unstuck so I can keep writing. For some reason, when I write in Scrivener, I don’t always think to freewrite when I get stuck, so I’m glad that 4thewords motivates me to do that.
I have found that self-editing in 4thewords with small word count monsters works really well. I can usually finish a small-word-count monster even if it's only adding bits here and there, and I don't start a monster while I'm only deleting stuff. It's very motivating to be able to defeat monsters while editing, and it makes the self-editing not so unpleasant for me.
Also, having a monster battle running while I take a break forces me to get back to work quickly rather than getting distracted while I’m on a break.
Motivation
I’ve found that not many writers enjoy gamifying their writing like I do, but I don’t think I would have gotten so much done without 4thewords. I just really enjoy battling monsters and defeating them, and it has helped me be more productive.
This might be because I’m an achievement-oriented personality. If someone is more socially-oriented, they might be more motivated to write on a website like Word Sprints (mywriteclub.com), where you can compete against other writers real-time.
I read an interesting book on writers’ motivations called Motivate Your Writing: Using Motivational Psychology to Energize Your Writing Life by Dr. Stephen P. Kelner, Jr. Okay, to be honest, there are some parts of it that are kind of dry, but I liked how he separated writers into different categories and talked about the different things that motivated writers in each category.
The book perfectly explained why I enjoy 4thewords so much and also why I have been motivated by keeping up my writing streak.
Battling distraction
I stopped doing short writing sprints because I stopped trying to write as fast as I can in a short amount of time. I found that I can focus better when I spend a longer period working (about an hour) before taking a break. It will take me a little while to get into that focused mindset, but once I’m there, I find I’m able to tune out everything and just concentrate on what I’m doing. (I was especially impacted by the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World to help me learn to focus better.) My focus isn’t perfect, but the more I practice it, the better I get.
Also, the act of deep focus like this has helped reduce the times I’m distracted from my work and go off on a tangent. I still do get distracted some days, but I haven’t been as derailed as I used to be.
Sometimes when I’m distracted while I’m working, it can be because I’m having issues with a plot problem. Sometimes if I get up and walk around (or go outside for a walk) it helps me think through the problem and I can refocus when I get back to my desk.
I figured out that I tend to be distracted during breaks, so having longer work periods reduces the number of times I go on break, which reduces the chances I’ll get distracted by something.
Also, I mentioned above that running a monster battle before I go on break reduces the chances I’ll get distracted, because I’ll want to get back to work to finish battling the monster. I absolutely hate losing to those monsters!
I’ve also noticed that the detailed schedule in my bullet journal has made me confront what exactly I do during the day. If I don’t follow the schedule, I have to justify to myself why I’m spending time on something, and if it’s derailing my productivity. It has helped me to not be distracted quite as much.
I mentioned it above, but when I increased my reading time each day to 3 hours, I found myself getting less distracted during my work hours. So even though I primarily do reading in order to refill creatively, it also helps me to be able to focus during the hours when I’m writing. Sometimes instead of reading, I’ll watch Netflix instead, but I try to input some kind of fiction.
Summary
I am still making progress on my book despite my health issues. In fact, I’m learning to work around my health issues so that I can be maximally productive each day. I don’t always keep to schedule and I derail myself occasionally, but I think I’ve been doing pretty good recently.
I will continue to post my daily word count and time record on my blog just for the public accountability, but I won’t always have any kind of productivity tactic that I learned. I will try to do more of these evaluation posts, though, to summarize how things have been going for me and what productivity hacks worked or didn’t.
Health issues
I’m still dealing with IBS problems. Some of my issues were experiments in figuring out what I could or couldn’t eat, and I ate things that apparently I shouldn’t. There are so many things which I don’t know if I can eat or not, so all I can do is try them and see.
Things are slowly starting to get better, but my eating choices are severely limited. The upside is that I’ve lost weight.
I am clinging to the few foods I actually can eat—like french fries and potato chips—and also trying to exercise when I have the energy. The exercise tends to make me feel better when I work, so I’m trying to make that a priority.
Eating my frogs
I’m still finding that there are important things which, if I don’t do them first thing when I get up, they won’t get done. Right now, those things are: 1) exercise, 2) daily Bible reading, 3) Japanese language study.
I used to include house chores in that, but those have fallen by the wayside since my IBS started acting up more, so now I only do them at the end of the day if I have the energy. If they don’t get done, it’s not a big deal (to me, anyway).
The downside is that I don’t get started on my writing work until about 3 hours after I wake up. I usually work better starting about an hour after I wake up, but doing those 3 things is more important to me. Also, it’s not like I’m not productive at all in the afternoon. And maybe this is helping me to be more productive during that time of day.
I absolutely CANNOT do marketing work or writing-related business before I do writing or I just lose motivation to write. I’m not sure why that is, but it has happened several times already so I just have to accept that it’s part of how my brain is.
Work hours
I found that I don’t work well around dinner time and afterward, so I’m trying to get up earlier to get my frogs done before lunch, and then spending time in the afternoon to get my work done before I have to start cooking dinner.
Because of my IBS, my work hours were sometimes only the bare minimum for the day (100 words of writing, 100 words of blocking). But slowly I’ve been feeling better and increasing the amount of time I spend on work.
I was reading about how a lot of writers only spend about 3 hours on work each day, especially since they often have other family commitments or maybe they do more marketing work than I do.
Right now, I’m struggling to even do 3 hours of writing a day. I feel a bit guilty to be doing less than 5 or 6 hours—I spend 60-90 minutes on Japanese study, which I consider part of my work, and another hour or two on reading, which is also essential for refilling the creative well and that should leave me with 5 or 6 hours for writing, which would give me a regular 8 hour work day.
But then I started thinking about it a bit more. Recently I started doing more like 3 or 4 hours of reading a day, and I actually felt more creative when I wrote. I also found myself to be less distracted if I’ve been doing 2-3 hours of reading for the past few days. So I decided to increase my reading time to 3 hours, which leaves about 4 hours each day that should be for writing. So 3 hours actually isn’t that bad.
I also started doing a more detailed daily schedule in my bullet journal for my day, and I’ve found it helps a lot. Having a detailed daily schedule probably gives other writers hives, but since I started doing it, I’ve found that it’s a crutch for one of my biggest weaknesses, which is decision making. It takes me SO FREAKIN’ LONG TO MAKE A DECISION. I don’t remember being this way as a kid, but maybe I was almost as bad. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten worse/longer as I get older.
So having my schedule written out in my electronic bullet journal helps me to know what I need to do next without needing to think about it or make a decision about it. It has helped me to be WAY more efficient with my time. I have found I don’t have long stretches of time where I can’t remember what I did during that time.
Not writing fast
After waffling over this topic ad nauseam, I finally settled on just not caring how fast I’m writing. I was mostly influenced by the book Dear Writer, You Need to Quit by Becca Symes, but other writing books also influenced me.
I was especially impacted by the injunction that writers are all different and you need to embrace with and work with your differences in order to prioritize what’s most important to you and then accomplish your goals.
Another writing book also mentioned that you want to make your writing process enjoyable. Otherwise, what’s the point? I absolutely don’t want to suffer with every book I write. And I enjoy writing more when I edit as I go and take my time rather than vomit writing and struggling with the self-editing.
I know I could probably be more productive if I wrote faster, but essentially it came down to wanting to put out the best work I can. In order to do that, I need to write a cleaner first draft so that my abysmal self-editing skills can handle it better.
When I wrote faster and had a messier first draft, my self-editing was not as thorough or detailed, which resulted in a less polished final book. I want to put out the best work I can, so if that means a cleaner first draft and slower writing, then so be it. My priority has shifted to a high quality book over writing faster and putting out more books a year.
To be clear, I’m not saying that writing fast means poor quality. It’s just that for me, personally, writing fast is poison for my poor self-editing skills. Other writers are fabulous at self-editing and can polish a turd into a diamond in no time flat. I can’t do it. So to ensure I put out the best books I can, I have to have a clean first draft.
To stop myself from obsessing over my writing speed, I eliminated the column in my writing log that calculated words per hour. I kept wanting to write faster when I saw that writing rate go down. Now that it’s not there, I just look at the total number of words I write each day and I’m either happy with it or I push myself to write a little more.
I’m also doing Cycling, which is self-editing the portion of writing I wrote the day before, and then doing my writing for the day. The little bit of self-editing helps to ground me in the story a bit better, and it gives me an additional self-editing pass through the scene. After the book is done, I’ll do another self-editing pass through the entire book to see how the story flows, and which will hopefully catch continuity errors.
I’m still keeping track of how many hours it takes me to do each portion of my book creation process for each book, so that after each book is done, I’ll have the total number of hours it took me. I have a feeling the editing time will decrease and the writing time will increase.
Also, starting with book 4, I’ve started taking more time to do the blocking so that I can have more detail in my blocking notes. That way I don’t have to think up so many things while I’m writing, such as character and street names.
The rest of the books in the series will likely take me longer than it did for books 2 and 3 (book 1 already took a really long time because I decided to switch the plot around after spending dozens of hours on it). But since my self-editing will be better, I think the finished products will also be the best I can produce.
I also remembered that ultimately, my book’s release is in God’s hands. So I don’t have to worry about how slowly I’m writing. I just need to keep pushing on.
Dictation
I’m not giving up on dictation—I do believe that if I practice enough, the dictation will be cleaner, as clean as typing. But so far, I haven’t had the physical and mental energy to devote to dictation, so I’ve been writing using typing instead. I think that until my health is consistently good enough that I could devote a few weeks to doing this, I should hold off on practicing dictation.
Writing Streak
I initially didn’t think a writing streak would work for me because my health is so terrible. And to be honest, the first few weeks of keeping the streak, I actually felt resentful when I had to do a little bit of writing on days when I felt like the bug on the windshield. There were lots of days when I seriously considered just quitting the streak.
But after the 30 day mark, I started feeling better and I found myself more motivated to keep up the streak.
Part of it is because I’m an achievement-oriented personality, so I get my kicks from accomplishing goals, and I didn’t want to break the streak. This is just me, though—a more socially-oriented person wouldn’t care so much about breaking the streak, but they might feel pressured if they’re recording the streak publicly and they don’t want to have other people know they’ve broken the streak.
Another reason the streak started working was because I was feeling better physically. If I were still feeling terrible like I did the first 2 or 3 weeks when I started the streak, I don’t know that I’d have continued it. Forcing myself to write—even the measly amount of 100 words—was really hard when I wasn’t feeling well. I basically had to try to find a 10 minute time when I was feeling less crappy than the rest of the day and try to get my work done quickly before the discomfort came back.
So I don’t think a writing streak would necessarily work for a writer combating a chronic illness of some sort. But for me, it has definitely helped me.
It also helped that for my streak, I set a very low bar for minimum amount of work to be done each day—only 100 words. It makes it much easier for me to do it when I’m feeling sick.
The way the streak has helped me is not really getting a little work done every day, although every little bit does help. The streak forces me to revisit my manuscript every single day and keep the story and current scene in my head.
Before, when I wouldn’t write for a few days because of my health, I would need to take some time to reread the scene and my blocking notes to reorient myself in the story world and in the scene. I don’t need to do that now since the streak forces me to work on the book every single day.
Also, if I hadn’t done writing in a few days, for some reason I would procrastinate a bit before diving back into work. I’m not sure why I felt like I had to overcome this inertial hurdle, but there you go. However, since I started doing a little bit of writing every day, I haven’t had that inertial hump when I started writing. I’m able to just start writing, no resistance or procrastination.
So the streak isn’t really helpful in making me productive every day. It helps me more by making me more efficient and productive on the days when I feel better and can spend more time working. I don’t have to waste time reorienting myself in my manuscript, because I’ve been keeping it in my thoughts even during the days when I didn’t do much work on it. And I don’t have that strange resistance/procrastination before starting work.
However, I still haven’t figured out a good reward system for when I reach streak milestones. For now, I just create a badge that I post on my blog and put on my sidebar to mark each 30 days of my streak. I’d like to come up with a really good reward I give to myself to help motivate me on my streak, but unfortunately I’m very food-oriented. Normally I’d reward myself with something yummy to eat, but at the moment there’s very little I can eat which I enjoy. And the few things which I can eat which I enjoy, I just eat them when I want to in order to remain sane on this horrendous diet for my IBS.
Public accountability
I thought at first that the streak would take the place of public accountability, but I was wrong. I actually still need this blog—and to post my progress everyday—in order to force myself to work on the days when I’m feeling okay. I find myself descending into laziness on those okay days, especially since there are some days when I feel genuinely crappy and can’t get much work done at all.
But when I have to post on my blog how much—or how little—I got done each day, it forces me to not be lazy and to push myself to work a little bit more. As a result, I’m progressing better on my book since I make more of an effort to work each day that I can.
Blocking
Since I’m trying to keep up my writing streak, I am writing in book 4 of my series, but I’m also trying to do the blocking for the same book. However, flipping back and forth between two different time periods in the same series is giving me mental whiplash. I am always forgetting what I’ve already written and sometimes writing in things that haven’t happened yet.
So I decided to only do the bare minimum of writing each day until I can get more books blocked in the series. I’ve done the preliminary extended outlines, but I haven’t blocked any of the scenes for the other books. I am going to try to do all the blocking for all the rest of the books as fast as possible, and then once that’s all done, I can increase the amount of time I spend writing each day.
Unfortunately, this means it’ll take me longer to release this next book. But it will also mean that I will probably be able to release the rest of the books in the series faster if the books are already blocked.
Once the series is blocked and I’m writing the books, I can switch my blocking time to working on my next series, a contemporary romantic suspense series set in Hawaii. I think that the difference in time period and genre will keep me from getting confused about what has or hasn’t happened yet in my Regency series, and I’ll stop writing weird things into the books.
Once I can switch to blocking my Hawaii series, I can spend a couple hours on writing the Regency and a couple hours on blocking the Hawaii series each day. It will hopefully help me release the Regency series in good time, and by blocking the Hawaii series in advance, I can immediately start writing it once I finish my Regency series.
Anyway, I’m going to try this, because it’s obvious that blocking the same series I’m writing is only confusing me and making me make mistakes when I write.
Stress
I realized that stress in my life was causing my IBS to flare up even when I haven’t eaten something bad for me, so I had to be rather ruthless about cutting out stressors in my life. The biggest no-brainer was cutting out social media, since that’s not only a huge black hole time-suck, but it can also cause me anxiety if someone says something hurtful on my author page.
I tried compartmentalizing my marketing and writing-related business tasks to only one or two days a week, but that just didn’t work. I often just didn’t want to do it, and other times they took so much time that I didn’t get any writing done that day.
At the moment, the only marketing I’m doing is putting out my newsletter once a month and posting on my blog about twice a week. I am also doing a lot of knitting in order to reduce stress.
I also did what I could to cut down the stress of releasing my books and marketing them. I made out a comprehensive checklist to remind myself of everything I need to do once a book is written. Checklists make me relieved because then I don’t have to worry about forgetting to do something. The checklist made releasing book 3 SO much easier.
I also decided NOT to do preorders of my books. I had heard from other authors about technical issues with preorders, and the thought of that was just incredibly dismaying. So to eliminate that stress, I decided to just put the book up live when it was done and then do my marketing in the week afterward (however I had to have prepared in advance to do that marketing). Since I’m writing a serial novel series, the marketing for each book isn’t that important (the marketing for the first book is most important), and I just didn’t want to have to deal with the pressures of a preorder and trying to get a lot of sales that first week.
I have also started adjusting my writing/work schedule around family chores and appointments so that I just don’t do as much work on the days I have other family stuff to do. It reduces my stress because I don’t have to worry about getting work done on days I have other things to do. I only do the bare minimum of writing on those days, and treat it kind of like a partial vacation day. I also try to schedule all those things for the same day so I don’t have several of those kinds of days each week.
Series Character Overview Spreadsheet
I had to solidify the series premise for my Hawaii series because the first book in the series was being included in a multi-author box set. For each series, I try to do a Series Character Overview Spreadsheet. For any writers interested in it, it’s here: Series Character Overview spreadsheet
4thewords
Since I started writing slower, thee wasn’t much of a need for me to use distraction-free writing tools like the Alphasmart and Freewrite Traveler, so I’ve been writing only on 4thewords.com recently. It is just very motivating to be writing in the website editor and battling a monster. I have often found myself writing a bit more than I intended just to win against a monster battle that’s running.
I also found that when I’m writing in 4thewords, since I’m battling a word monster, it encourages me to freewrite when I get stuck. The words I freewrite help to defeat the monster, and the freewrite often helps me get unstuck so I can keep writing. For some reason, when I write in Scrivener, I don’t always think to freewrite when I get stuck, so I’m glad that 4thewords motivates me to do that.
I have found that self-editing in 4thewords with small word count monsters works really well. I can usually finish a small-word-count monster even if it's only adding bits here and there, and I don't start a monster while I'm only deleting stuff. It's very motivating to be able to defeat monsters while editing, and it makes the self-editing not so unpleasant for me.
Also, having a monster battle running while I take a break forces me to get back to work quickly rather than getting distracted while I’m on a break.
Motivation
I’ve found that not many writers enjoy gamifying their writing like I do, but I don’t think I would have gotten so much done without 4thewords. I just really enjoy battling monsters and defeating them, and it has helped me be more productive.
This might be because I’m an achievement-oriented personality. If someone is more socially-oriented, they might be more motivated to write on a website like Word Sprints (mywriteclub.com), where you can compete against other writers real-time.
I read an interesting book on writers’ motivations called Motivate Your Writing: Using Motivational Psychology to Energize Your Writing Life by Dr. Stephen P. Kelner, Jr. Okay, to be honest, there are some parts of it that are kind of dry, but I liked how he separated writers into different categories and talked about the different things that motivated writers in each category.
The book perfectly explained why I enjoy 4thewords so much and also why I have been motivated by keeping up my writing streak.
Battling distraction
I stopped doing short writing sprints because I stopped trying to write as fast as I can in a short amount of time. I found that I can focus better when I spend a longer period working (about an hour) before taking a break. It will take me a little while to get into that focused mindset, but once I’m there, I find I’m able to tune out everything and just concentrate on what I’m doing. (I was especially impacted by the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World to help me learn to focus better.) My focus isn’t perfect, but the more I practice it, the better I get.
Also, the act of deep focus like this has helped reduce the times I’m distracted from my work and go off on a tangent. I still do get distracted some days, but I haven’t been as derailed as I used to be.
Sometimes when I’m distracted while I’m working, it can be because I’m having issues with a plot problem. Sometimes if I get up and walk around (or go outside for a walk) it helps me think through the problem and I can refocus when I get back to my desk.
I figured out that I tend to be distracted during breaks, so having longer work periods reduces the number of times I go on break, which reduces the chances I’ll get distracted by something.
Also, I mentioned above that running a monster battle before I go on break reduces the chances I’ll get distracted, because I’ll want to get back to work to finish battling the monster. I absolutely hate losing to those monsters!
I’ve also noticed that the detailed schedule in my bullet journal has made me confront what exactly I do during the day. If I don’t follow the schedule, I have to justify to myself why I’m spending time on something, and if it’s derailing my productivity. It has helped me to not be distracted quite as much.
I mentioned it above, but when I increased my reading time each day to 3 hours, I found myself getting less distracted during my work hours. So even though I primarily do reading in order to refill creatively, it also helps me to be able to focus during the hours when I’m writing. Sometimes instead of reading, I’ll watch Netflix instead, but I try to input some kind of fiction.
Summary
I am still making progress on my book despite my health issues. In fact, I’m learning to work around my health issues so that I can be maximally productive each day. I don’t always keep to schedule and I derail myself occasionally, but I think I’ve been doing pretty good recently.
I will continue to post my daily word count and time record on my blog just for the public accountability, but I won’t always have any kind of productivity tactic that I learned. I will try to do more of these evaluation posts, though, to summarize how things have been going for me and what productivity hacks worked or didn’t.
Comments
Post a Comment