Day 722: My new schedule experiment

For about a week I’ve been trying out this new schedule, and now that I’ve switched to doing half writing/half blocking during my writing time, my schedule is set for now. I’m intending to try this to see how things go.

I’ve been trying to wake up early, and I exercise, then eat breakfast. After breakfast I do some house chores.

Then I do four “frogs”—important items that I have to do first in my day or else they won’t get done. These are: my Bible reading, checking my email, doing about 15 minutes of marketing work, and then doing about 15 minutes of work on my Hawaii serial novel, which will be posted as a free read on my blog.

After that, I start work on my Regency series, which is the main series I’m working on. I’m trying to aim for a total of 3-4 hours a day working on this series, with about 1.5-2 hours of writing and 1.5-2 hours of blocking. 

As I mentioned before, this isn’t ideal for me. Ideally, I’d be writing a book in one series, and then blocking another book in another series. Writing and blocking books in the same series is giving me mental whiplash since I have to immerse myself in one time point in the series while writing, and then shift to another future timepoint in the same series for blocking. I often forget what has and hasn’t happened, and I have to be extra vigilant about not making continuity errors, which is stressful and makes for more mental effort.

However, I made the mistake of starting writing this series and releasing the first book before the entire series had been plotted out and blocked. I finished plotting the series entirely before continuing writing book 2, but I’ve been trying to do the blocking while writing. I should have just taken the time to block the entire series before finishing book 2, because then I wouldn’t find myself in this problem.

But while writing books 2 and 3, I also discovered some methods of improving my previous method of blocking by adding more details, which has made the writing go faster. If I’d done all the blocking before finishing book 2, I might not have realized this and the blocking would have been too sparse. Now, the blocking I’m doing is detailed and the writing should go faster because of it.

I take a break for lunch at noon (actually I stop at 11:30 so that I have time to make my lunch). For a little while, I was doing another “frog,” Regency research reading, first thing to ensure I did it every day, because when I was leaving it to do at the end of the day, I was usually too tired and ended up skipping it. However, I had so many frogs to do first thing that I was starting work on the Regency series very late in the day and getting tired by the end of the day. Now, I do 30-45 minutes of Regency research reading while I’m eating lunch. It’s a good time to make myself do it, ensuring that it will get done.

After lunch I have started going for a short walk. Since I’m reading Regency research material while I’m eating, lunch doesn’t feel very relaxing, but a walk afterward makes me feel like I’m taking a break from work.

Previously, I had a huge problem with taking breaks. This is just my personality—I have a tendency to go with the flow of inertia and continue whatever I’m doing at the moment, and switching tasks is a huge energy hurdle for me. So when I take a break, I would often get distracted or procrastinate getting back to work. I tried solving this by reducing the number of breaks I take (not very good health wise since I would be sitting at my computer for hours at a stretch), but I found that what I do while taking a break also makes a big difference in how easy it is to get back to work. However, if I only do work during a break, it’s not much of a break.

A walk, on the other hand, is a solid unit of measurement. When I get back to the house after a walk, I find it’s easier for me to get right back to work. This might have something to do with my achievement-based personality, since I’ve “achieved” a walk as a modular unit of time, so it’s easier to move to another modular unit of time. Anyway, now I take walks after lunch, which has prevented me from procrastinating in getting back to work or being distracted from getting back to work.

I continue working on the Regency after lunch, but I try to stop by 5 or 6. Then I do my Japanese study, which used to be another “frog” that I did before starting work. However, I found that Japanese flashcards are easy to do when I have short stretches of time when I’m waiting on something, such as when the tea is steeping or I’m waiting for something while I’m cooking, so in leaving it for later, I still get it done in little pieces during the day. At this time at the end of my day, I finish any flashcards I haven’t done yet and then do a little reading of a Japanese light novel that I’m trying to translate. The light novel was fan-translated, so I can check how close my translation is with the fan-translation as well as with Deepl.com’s machine translation. My grammar is not yet there so I only translate a sentence or two, but I’m hopeful that will change soon as I learn more.

Then I cook and eat dinner, and spend a couple hours doing some fiction reading so that I can “refill the creative well.” If I don’t spend enough time reading fiction every day, I get very unmotivated and mentally tired when I’m trying to write, so now I have to schedule it in to make sure I do some each day.

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How I did today:

I hope this isn’t indicative of the norm, but I didn’t get to my Regency writing until after lunch. This was entirely my own fault because in the morning, I spent a bit too long on house chores, and then a little too long on blogging, and so I only just finished work on my Hawaii book before I had to cook lunch.

However, I started work on the Regency after my walk after lunch, and I only got half an hour less work done than I wanted (3.5 hours versus 4 hours).

So far, this schedule seems to work to help me get all my work done, and in a way that feeds my strengths in my habits while accounting for my weaknesses. My writing work gets done every day, other important things get done every day, and I’m productive.

I’ll see how this schedule does over a few weeks. If needed, I’ll adjust it depending on what my most urgent tasks are.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 24 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 1043 words

Writing streak: 201 days

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 31 minutes

Blocking: Total number of words: 572 words

Blocking streak: 195 days

Hawaii series:

Editing: Time spent: 3 minutes

Writing: time spent: 25 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 168 words

Writing-related business:

Regency research reading: time spent: 49 minutes

Email: time spent: 19 minutes

Marketing: time spent: 19 minutes