Day 670: Practicing deep focus

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Surprisingly, it was a little hard to get back to work after taking a sick day yesterday. I felt kind of sluggish today, but I think it’s mostly that inertia I feel when I’ve been taking it easy—I want to just keep doing nothing because it’s the easiest thing to do (or in this case, not do). I’m not normally a very active person, I think I’m rather like my dad in that I’m slow-moving and more likely to take things easy. It’s probably one of the reasons why my productivity isn’t as high as other authors—my natural, everyday energy level just really isn’t all that high.

However I really want to change that. I don’t intend to spur myself to work faster, but I do want to train myself to concentrate better and not be distracted so that I can get more done in less time. I think that short bursts of intense focus will enable me to be productive in my writing, and still get all my house chores and Japanese language learning done each day. Lately, since I wasn’t feeling well, the Japanese learning was only at the bare minimum, but I’m slowly starting to get more done each day, just like with the writing.

I’m getting back to work today (whether I feel like it or not). However, I did get a late start today so I hope I have enough time to get my work done before I have to cook dinner.

Lately I’ve been aiming for 800 words of writing each day (if it’s not a bare minimum day), but I think today I’ll try focusing as intently as I can for 90 minutes and seeing how many words I can write. I’m going to try to keep distractions to a minimum so that my productivity in that time will be the best I can make it.

After the writing, I will try to do the same thing with blocking, and try to focus as intently as I can for 120 minutes and not be distracted. I might need to take a break in between, but I’ll see how I do without one first.

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I actually did manage to focus quite well today while writing, but I was trying to finish the end of the scene and had to do some rearranging of the dialogue, so I didn’t spend the entire time writing, I did a fair bit of editing. However, I finished the scene, which is great!

I took a break for (late) lunch, but I had a hard time getting back to work. I still don’t know why it’s so hard for me to get back to work after breaks! It’s very frustrating! Maybe I should have taken a shorter lunch. I wonder if that would have made it easier to get back to work. I think I’ll try that next week. Actually, now that I think about it, I might have made plans to do that before but forgot about it, so I hope I don’t forget this time.

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I was relatively focused during my blocking time. I still don’t think I have the intense concentration I’d like to have, but I wasn’t too distracted and was able to keep my mind on the scene and the work that needed to be done. I’m glad for this time blocking because I discovered a logic problem that I needed to solve, which would have stood out if I wrote the scene the old way.

The problem with such a long time of concentration is that I’m really tired now! I think I need to build up my stamina so I can focus for longer periods of time. However, I’m pretty happy at the amount of work I got done today. I hope I can increase the amount of time I focus like this so that I can get more work done.

I’m pretty tired and I have to go cook dinner, so I think I’ll stop for today. Unfortunately I won’t get any work done on my Hawaii book today. I hope I’ll get some work done on that next week.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 35 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 807 words

Writing streak: 149 days

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 57 minutes

Blocking streak: 143 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 0

Time spent doing other writing-related business:

My takeaway for today: Try taking shorter breaks for lunch to see if it makes it easier for me to get back to work after lunch.

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