Day 945 - Procrastination after vacation

-

Wow it’s been a long time since I blogged! I don’t have a very good excuse for the few days after my last blog post because I was just lazy about blogging (right after I’d blogged that I needed to blog daily for accountability). But then I went traveling for Christmas and was only doing the bare minimum of work during those days.

I have to admit I was really tempted to stop the writing streak during the holidays because it was hard to do even a little writing every day. Some days I was busy all day and only remembered a few minutes before midnight that I hadn’t yet done some writing.

After that happened twice, I decided to try to write on my phone when I was waiting in the car or driving somewhere with family. But I hadn’t prepared enough and belatedly discovered that I couldn’t write on 4thewords on my phone because the new website isn’t optimized for mobile. I had all my writing notes and the last paragraphs I wrote in the scene in 4thewords, but I couldn’t add more writing using the website word processing editor. I had the scene and my notes in Scrivener, but I hadn’t closed the Scrivener files on my computer, and whenever I sync Scrivener on my phone or tablet without closing Scrivener on my computer, it messes up the synced file. This is the reason I was mostly using 4thewords to write on my phone before they did the website update sometime in October, but I hadn’t tried writing on my phone since then and didn’t realize I couldn’t.

Was that TMI? That was probably TMI. Anyway, I hadn’t prepared to write on my phone and had to go home to do that.

After I did that, I was able to more easily keep up with my writing streak, but I had a few hairy days when I was frantically trying to write a few minutes before midnight while my family was gathered in the other room in the house without me.

Ultimately, I was glad I kept to my writing streak—I worked a little in my manuscript every day and it kept the story fresh in my mind. I also managed to finish one scene and start another while on vacation.

I had worked hard to watch my diet before going on vacation, and my IBS didn’t bother me the entire week I was gone. I tried to be careful about what I ate, but it was hard when others were cooking for me, and I started having IBS symptoms the day after I got home. I also needed to unpack and do house chores, so I took a break and only did the bare minimum of writing for the few days after I got back home.

Today was supposed to be my first full day of writing, but I spent a lot of it doing marketing tasks. It’s partly because my IBS is bothering me a bit, making it hard to concentrate, but also because one of my New Year’s resolutions is to be better about my social media, so I was setting up a new system for taking care of that so that I could fit it in in the midst of my other daily writing tasks.

All that to say that I procrastinated starting my writing work, and now it’s really late. I don’t know why it’s always like this, it’s hard for me to get back into a full writing day after I’ve had several days of doing only the bare minimum each day. I think if I hadn’t kept up my writing streak and done a little writing each day, the procrastination would probably be even worse.

I probably should have prepared myself better before starting work today. Last night I should have set up my writing space so everything was ready for me, and I should have gone to bed early so I’d have more energy today. I couldn’t have predicted my IBS would get bad, but I could have at least done what I could to set everything up for myself so I could more easily sit and start work.

Still, that’s no excuse to slack off. I did a few minutes of work on my manuscript, but I’m already too tired. I’ve been beating myself up tonight over my lack of self-discipline, so I think I’ll go to bed early and try to get a fresh start tomorrow.

Writing streak: 424 days

My takeaway for today: Try preparing my writing space the night before as much as possible so that I can more easily get started on work, especially if it’s been a while since I’ve had a full writing 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