Day 895: Lying to myself with the Pomodoro Method

-

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.

**

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.

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