Day 717: Splitting my frogs

-

Today, I managed to wake up a little earlier and so I felt like I had a little more time to get things done. However, I decided to split my “frogs” up and rather than doing all of them before my writing work, I only did a few of them before writing work.

I did my email, marketing, and 100 words on the Hawaii book first. I did set a timer to try to keep me from spending too much time on marketing, but I still ended up going half an hour longer than I should have. I really have to either learn more discipline or maybe shunt my marketing work to the afternoon, after I’ve done my writing work.

After that, I worked on the Regency until lunch. During lunch, I managed to do my Regency research reading. I wasn’t intending to do it, but I ended up doing my Japanese at that time, rather than waiting until later this afternoon to get it done. I would have had to do it later anyway, but I had been hoping to do it after my writing.

After lunch, I had a lot of house chores to do. I should have remembered that on Thursdays I usually have to spend 1 or 2 hours doing house chores because it’s our co-op pick-up day. So didn’t get back to my Regency writing until late in the afternoon.

I had been hoping to do 3 or 4 hours of blocking, but I ended up doing only 2 hours.

Even though I wanted to spread out my “frogs” instead of doing them all before my writing work, I ended up doing all of them earlier in the day rather than later. I think my personality likes it best when the smaller, but important tasks are done first. I usually do the small tasks first before larger ones, so maybe it’s just a character tic.

While I had feared that I wouldn’t get to my non-urgent but important tasks if I didn’t do them all first, I did end up getting the research reading and Japanese done even though I shunted them to a little later in the day. So maybe my weeks of training my discipline by doing them first thing have finally started to pay off.

Tomorrow I think I will again try to do my email, marketing, and Hawaii book first, then my writing until lunch. Lunch seems a good time to get my Regency research reading done, and as long as I don’t have so many house chores, I should get back to writing fairly quickly, and then I can finish my Japanese study at the end of the day just before dinner.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 3 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 20 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 369 words

Writing streak: 196 days

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Blocking: Total number of words: words

Blocking streak: 190 days

Hawaii series:

Editing: Time spent: 3 minutes

Writing: time spent: 22 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 184 words

Writing-related business:

Regency research reading: time spent: 28 minutes

Email: time spent: 5 minutes

Marketing: time spent: 39 minutes

My takeaway for today: Tomorrow I think I will again try to do my email, marketing, and Hawaii book first, then my writing until lunch. Lunch seems a good time to get my Regency research reading done, and as long as I don’t have so many house chores, I should get back to writing fairly quickly, and then I can finish my Japanese study at the end of the day just before dinner.

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