Day 746: Procrastinating work with work

-

I admit that this morning, I procrastinated work with other work. It’s easier to procrastinate with work that I’ll eventually have to do anyway, although it wasn’t particularly urgent, it was just a particular blog post that I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I didn’t have anything else more urgent to do for my marketing work for today, but this particular blog post just took a while to do when I should have stopped after 15 or 20 minutes and finished it over the course of several days rather than all in one day. But I didn’t want to stop my inertia (momentum?) and just kept at it until it was done.

I’m torn about how I feel about my procrastination today. On the one hand, I should have had more discipline and stopped myself after a certain amount of time so I could finish it another time. Because I kept at it, it took an extra hour of time that I could have spent working on my Regency.

On the other hand, it was work that did need to be done eventually. And stopping to pick it up again later would mean that next time, I’d have to take a few minutes to figure out where I stopped and where I need to pick up again, which is just inefficient. There’s also the fact that I could just not do marketing tomorrow and Monday in order to make up for the time I took today.

I decided to not do marketing tomorrow and Monday to make up for it. It doesn’t address my lack of discipline, but the reality is that marketing is a necessity and I will need to devote time to it. Most of the time I would procrastinate even doing marketing, so if I’m not procrastinating doing my marketing, that’s a win for me, even if it does cut into some writing time today. Hopefully I can make up for it tomorrow and Monday.

***

I wanted to get more done than I did today, but I had a hard time focusing for some reason, and then my IBS started acting up. I hope I can get more done tomorrow.


Writing streak: days 225

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 52 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 681 words

Writing-related business:

Regency research reading: time spent: 29 minutes

Email: time spent: 10 minutes

Marketing: time spent: 1 hour, 34 minutes

My takeaway for today: If I spend too long on marketing one day, just skip marketing the next day to make up for it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 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 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