Day 655: Distracted by social media

-

UGH! I was terribly distracted and didn’t get straight to work today. I got really excited about some new books coming out and added them to my book catalog, which I probably could have done later but I got into it and next thing I know, it’s an hour and a half later.

It’s because after I did some Japanese reviews on Bunpro, I clicked on an interesting forum thread and heard about some new books coming out, so of course I had to go see what they were. I should have been more mindful and not checked the forum boards after doing my Japanese grammar reviews. I know very well that checking any news or social media before work is a recipe for disaster, but at that moment, I had forgotten. I actually haven’t been distracted by social media in a long time, so I got complacent about guarding against checking social media.

A lot of authors I know simply unplug and don’t go online. That would certainly keep me off of social media, but I often need to do some research or look up a word while I’m writing, and I need the internet for that. I used to leave a note for myself and look it up later, but I think that giving myself more work to do during the self-editing stage prevents me from being able to fully follow the flow of the prose and be able to do the smaller, detailed revisions that are needed to polish it to the best it can be. My self-editing just isn’t as deep and detailed if I have to correct lots of things from notes I’ve left for myself.

I just need to be more mindful about NOT checking social media before work. Even the Bunpro forum boards can be distracting, as I found today.

Even when I got started on the writing, I go distracted by some research. It was necessary that it be done, but I should have put it off until later when I was doing the blocking rather than stopping in the middle of the scene to do the research. The research wasn’t really relevant to the scene I was writing, and fell more under the task of outlining, so it would have been more appropriate to do it while blocking.

Luckily, I had set my watch alarm to go off every hour to remind myself to spend a minute breathing. Originally that was to help me focus if I couldn’t concentrate, but lately it has been helping to snap me out of it when I am distracted by some other task.

After I got back into the writing, I was able to focus pretty well, but the overall writing time was longer because of the time I spent on research rather than writing.

***

I only got 30 minutes of blocking done before I started feeling certain womanly issues. Man, I hate this! Unlike IBS, this will not get better so I decided to quit for today.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 12 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 2 hours, 16 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 945 words

Writing streak: 134 days

Blocking: time spent: 35 minutes

Blocking streak: 128 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 0

My takeaway for today: I need to be more mindful and vigilant about not checking any forms of social media before I start work, so I don’t get distracted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 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 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