Day 773: Scheduling experiment

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Today is Thursday, which is when I usually have a lot of house chores to do, so I had decided to reserve Thursdays for work on my Hawaii serial novel. Originally, I had been doing about 100 words a day on my serial novel, which was completely doable. However, when my IBS flared up for several weeks at a stretch, I had to adjust my work schedule around my IBS, which sometimes made me too uncomfortable to write for several hours every day.

Since I was finding myself with fewer hours a day to get my writing done, I decided to practice “batching,” which I read about in the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Instead of doing a little work on several things every day, I reduced the number of things to do each day to as low as I could go. There are certain things I absolutely need to do every day—my Japanese study, a little bit of marketing work, and checking my email—but instead of doing two different series each day (my Regency and my Hawaii book), I only work on one series each day.

Technically, I should only work on one series at a time, because switching mental gears can be difficult for me, personally. However, since I’m writing in two different genres, I don’t have a choice, so I’m just sucking it up.

I was late getting started on my writing work today because I had so many other house chores to do, and yesterday I had decided to try my experiment in leaving my marketing work for after my writing. But I hadn’t thought about the fact that I had to stop writing a little earlier in order to take care of our bumper crop of peaches today. I ended up not having time to do my marketing before it was time to eat dinner, and after dinner I was pretty tired.

I still forced myself to do some marketing work, which was really great. But at the same time, I don’t want to have to push myself to get work done when I’m so tired, and right before bedtime.

Tomorrow, I will still give it another shot to try to do marketing work after my writing. I’ll try to stop my writing around 5 pm and then do some marketing before I eat dinner. I don’t usually have to do urgent house chores (like the peaches today), so I don’t yet consider the experiment of switching my marketing to the end of my workday to be a failure.

Writing streak: 252 days

Hawaii series:

Editing: Time spent: 17 minutes

Writing: time spent: 1 hour, 23 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 1986 words

Writing-related business:

Email: time spent: 46 minutes

Marketing: time spent: 32 minutes

My takeaway for today: Stop writing work at 5 pm and get some marketing work done just before eating dinner.

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