Day 634: Motivation was awful today

-
My motivation to work has been terrible today, and it’s frustrating that I really don’t know why. I did have some IBS discomfort earlier, and so I waited a little while until I felt better, then got some writing done.

But ever since lunch, I’ve been feeling terribly lazy and unmotivated. But I have to force myself to get work done. After all, if I don’t write, I don’t get paid.

To give myself a kick in the pants, I started a 700 word count monster on 4thewords with a 3.5 hour time limit so that I’ll have to write at least 700 words to beat the monster. On days like this, I’m so thankful for 4thewords as an external source of motivation. It helps that it’s something I can’t cheat at.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit how lazy I can be. However, confessing it in my blog post does spur me to do work so that I’m not a total loser.

***

I did spend more time working, but I didn’t feel like I got a lot of work done. I was really distracted, my mind kept wandering, and I kept having to pull my attention back to my book. :(

What can I do to improve my focus? Maybe I need to read Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World again to refresh my memory about focused concentration. I might just need to practice it more often to get better at it.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 32 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 478 words

Writing streak: 113 days

Blocking: time spent: 2 hours, 10 minutes

Blocking streak: 107 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 1 hour, 2 minutes

My takeaway for today: Reread the book Deep Work to refresh my memory on how to focus when I’m distracted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 21: Bullet journal, Surrender statement

-
Today was my writing Sabbath so I didn’t do any writing today, but I spent a lot of time doing writing-related things. I did some blogging, and I also reviewed my writing To Do list. I cleaned it up by checking off what’s been done, deleting what I no longer need to do, and making note of what I need to do this coming week. Before I started bullet journaling (in an electronic journal app, Day One Journal ), I had my To Do lists in a couple different places and I’d usually forget things I needed to do. Now I have them in my bullet journal, which combines journaling with task organizer, and I’m less likely to forget. I still set reminders for myself in my phone, but since I’m using my journal throughout the day every day, I’m more likely to see things I need to do. I found some of my old To Do lists today and incorporated some things in my bullet journal. One of them was my writing Surrender Statement, which is a prayer I pray before starting each day’s work. What’s a Surrender Sta
Read more

Day 783: Evaluation 7

-
It’s been almost seven months since I wrote my last Evaluation 6 , but I finally got around to Evaluation #7! Here’s the gist of what I’ve learned over the past few months about my writing and productivity. New schedule My IBS was slowly been starting to feel better recently. I am still extremely strict with my diet, but I am also starting to experiment with what foods I can and can’t eat. I have also started a new eating and sleeping schedule, which I have dubbed my “chrono-diet” because I’m trying to take advantage of my circadian rhythm, according to the book Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life (I had borrowed a copy from the library but I enjoyed it so much I went ahead and bought it). I have started waking up at 6 am and exercising first thing, then having breakfast after exercise. I do house chores and/or work until noon, which is when I eat lunch. I’m supposed to not eat until dinner around 5:30 or 6, but I haven’t been able to break the habit of snacking in the aftern
Read more

Day 91: Evaluation 3

-
Even though I was taking a few days off because of my health issues, I ended up doing some work after all, and also came up with some new ideas. But first, let me summarize the past month. Outlining my series Something which I thought was interesting was looking at the raw numbers of how long it took me to outline my Lady Wynwood’s Spies series. It had a rough start, especially because I changed my mind about it several times and had some bouts of writer’s block, but things picked up this year especially when I wrote down my writer’s process and began systematically doing the Snowflake method on each of the volumes in the series. I finished outlining all the books in the Lady Wynwood’s Spies series on August 1st! Yay! This included the serial novel. Unfortunately those numbers were not included in the above post on my raw numbers, but I will eventually do a follow-up post and also list how many hours it took me to write and edit the volumes in the series. Hopefully it will take
Read more