Day 690: Doing other things first

I don’t remember why, but I had stopped doing my Japanese study time before my writing time each day—probably so that I would prioritize the writing and get more done each day. Unfortunately, that also caused me to stop doing all but the bare minimum of my Japanese study each day.

I know by now that if I don’t do these kinds of things first, I won’t get to doing them at all at the end of the day. So I decided to once again spend a couple hours doing my other work before starting on my writing each day.

Aside from my Japanese study, I also want to spend more time doing research reading, so I’m going to try to do about 30-45 minutes of that each day. I prefer diving straight into my writing work each day, but I’ve realized that my Japanese and my Regency research are too important for me to slack off on anymore. So I’ll just have to knuckle down and force myself to get this done before I start writing.

Yesterday, I also had a hard time getting to my Hawaii book and also checking my email, so I think I’ll also start doing those before starting on my writing for the day.

Even though my writing is the highest priority and the most important task for me each day, and even though all these things are not urgent, they are nevertheless important, and I want to make sure I get them done. I realize that with my personality, I’m usually too tired after finishing my writing for the day to want to do these things, so if I want to make sure they get done, I will have to spend the time to do it before writing, even though the writing is a higher priority task.

I didn’t record the time taken for my Japanese study today since I wasn’t sure if I should or not, since it’s only marginally writing business related. But between that, my Regency research reading, checking email and doing some work on the Hawaii book, I didn’t start work in the Regency manuscript until 3 hours later. I’m a bit dismayed that all that work took so long, but I might have taken too long to do my Japanese simply because I wasn’t recording the time, so I think I’ll record the time tomorrow.

I also should have done some work on marketing—I had wanted to do a little bit of marketing work each day so that I wouldn’t have to devote an entire day to it each month. I will try to do that tomorrow.

If I take only an hour for Japanese each day, 30-45 minutes for Regency research reading, and then 15-20 minutes each for the Hawaii book, checking email, and doing some marketing, that would take up about 3 hours. I don’t like that it’ll be 3 hours before I start my writing work, but I don’t think I have a choice: My Japanese study has completely stalled since I stopped doing it first. I need to read a number of books for research for my Regency series, but I’m way behind. I recently cleaned up my email inbox and I want to keep checking it and keeping it clear, which means I have to make checking my email every day a priority. I need to work on the Hawaii book so that I have something for my contemporary readers while I’m working on the Regency series. And as I mentioned above, I need to do a little bit of marketing each day so I don’t have to take a ton of time on one day a month.

So even though it pains me, I’m making the decision to again do all these things before starting work. These things could be considered my “frogs”—from the book Eat That Frog!—or they could also be part of what is called “clearing the decks”—from the book 5,000 Words Per Hour. Whatever I call them, they’re tasks I absolutely need to do before I start writing each day, simply because they’re important and I know I won’t get them done if I don’t do them first.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 9 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 8 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 166 words

Writing streak: 169 days

Blocking: time spent: 4 hours, 23 minutes

Blocking: Total number of words: 2850 words

Blocking streak: 163 days

Hawaii series:

Writing: time spent: 16 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 191 words

Time spent doing other writing-related business: 54 minutes

My takeaway for today: I need to do my Japanese study, Regency research reading, email, marketing, and the Hawaii book before I start work on the Regency every day, or else those things won’t get done at all.