Day 895: Lying to myself with the Pomodoro Method

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I managed to have the self-discipline to go to bed on time last night and I got up early this morning, but I’ve still got some IBS issues that are making it hard to concentrate on my work. The nausea is especially making my body feel fatigued. However, I am only 9 scenes away from finishing this book and I really want to try to get it done by my self-imposed deadline of the end of the day on Wednesday. 

Yesterday, since I usually don’t write on Sundays, I didn’t work on the manuscript, but I had lots of marketing tasks that needed to be done yesterday, and I ended up doing marketing for several hours. So while I usually don’t work on Sundays, I did anyway. :P I got a lot done and I did my best to get tasks out of the way so that I wouldn’t have any urgent marketing tasks to do until Thursday this week, clearing my time for as much writing as possible.

I’m not sure how much I’ll get done today because of my IBS, but I’m going to try my best. I was reading a nonfiction book and was reminded of the Pomodoro method, which can be effective simply because you trick yourself into thinking you’re only working for 25 minutes before you stop. I was thinking that it might help me take my mind off how crappy I’m feeling so that I can get work done.

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The Pomodoro Method kind of worked. I got 25 minutes of work done, but I took a long break because I wasn’t feeling great. Then I did another 25 minutes a while later, followed by another long break. So I’m not sure if that can count as “working” since I only got 25 minutes of work done in between long breaks.

However, I suppose the Pomodoro Method (or specifically, lying to myself that I “only” had to write 25 minutes) helped me get started on my work for the day without procrastinating very much, and it forced me to push through and get work done despite feeling sick and tired.

Also, doing some of that work earlier in the day might have helped get the writing motivation rolling, because I felt better later in the afternoon and ended up getting more work done then. I worked about 3.5 hours today before it was time for dinner, and I got 3600 words done. I suppose that’s actually a terrific amount of words considering how awful I felt this morning. However, I’d been hoping for more than 5000 words today.

But I’ll take what I can get. I finished a scene and started a new one, but ended up stopping in the middle. I have 8 scenes left to write for the book, although one of them is the climax scene and it’ll be pretty long. I’m probably not going to finish by Wednesday, but how long it takes me to finish the book will also depend on how I’m feeling the rest of this week.

Writing streak: 374 days

My takeaway for today: The Pomodoro Method really works because I can tell myself I’m only writing for 25 minutes, to get myself to start and push through with some writing even when I feel sick. And doing some writing can get my writing motivation rolling so that I can jump into writing more if I feel better later in the day.

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