Day 655: Distracted by social media

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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.

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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.

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