Day 961 - Trying to make good progress on my manuscript despite my illness

My IBS has been bothering me a bit lately. I think I ate too much of a food that is okay for me to eat, but only in moderate amounts. The pain has not been as bad as it has been before, but it has still been distracting.

I'm doing a little bit of dictation every day. My bare minimum is only five minutes of dictation, but most days I do about 30 minutes dictation, and then the cleanup editing is another 30 minutes. I also try to do my cycling edit every day. So even though my IBS has been bothering me, I am still able to get work done on my book.

I am approximately one third of the way through the book, but I had hoped to have more done on it by now. I started the book in early December, but I was busy because the previous book released in mid-December, and then I had a couple promotions to set up after that. Then I was traveling over Christmas, and got hardly anything done for about two weeks.

I thought I would start getting more writing done after Christmas, but I have been having IBS issues almost constantly since the new year. I had somewhat expected that I might have IBS issues when I returned home from Christmas, because even though I tried to be very careful about my diet over the holidays, this was difficult because I was not the one cooking the food. But some of my IBS problems after the New Year's was simply because I made a couple mistakes in my eating.

It is already the 18th, and although my IBS is bothering me a little, it's not too bad, so I want to try to get more done on my book. I feel a little bit like I wasted the past six weeks, but I know that some of that time was because I was unavoidably busy. So I have been trying not to beat myself up too much about that.

I know that I am most productive in my writing when I am not suffering from IBS. When I’m healthy, I tend to get started on my writing work early in the day since I don't have intestinal issues. I also tend to work for longer hours.

When I have IBS issues, I have been trying to still be productive even though I am in pain. I have been doing marketing work in the morning, when the IBS is the worst, and then doing a little writing in the late afternoon or early evening, when my IBS symptoms have calmed down or when my medicine kicks in.

However, no matter how hard I try, I simply cannot write for as many hours if I start my writing later in the day. If my IBS is so bad that I have to do marketing in the morning, I am usually tired at the end of the day since my body has been dealing with the pain and nausea for many hours. It makes it difficult for me to do writing work for an extended period of time.

The system of doing marketing in the morning when I have IBS symptoms is good in that it enables me to get some writing-related work done even when I'm not feeling well. However, I want to try to figure out something so that I can be more productive in writing in my manuscript even when I have IBS. Even though I am careful with my diet, I can't always expect that I won't have issues. I need to better learn how to work around my illness so that I can finish my books in good time.

I think part of the reason I am less productive than I want to be on days I have IBS is because I have not been as disciplined in my sleep schedule. A bad bout of IBS caused me to go to bed very late, and since then, rather than getting up with my alarm, I turn it off and go back to sleep, so I am getting up later in the morning than I want to. When I try to go to bed earlier, I'm simply not tired because I woke up so late, and I end up falling asleep late anyway.

I think I need to make more of an effort to go to bed on time and get up earlier, but especially getting up earlier, because then I’ll feel tired enough to go to bed earlier that evening. I think that my IBS is more predictable when I have a more disciplined sleep schedule. I don't really know if my sleep schedule will solve the problem, but I do know that I tend to be more productive if I get up earlier, so I will need to try to improve my discipline. It is very hard for me to go to sleep early because I am a night owl, and I tend not to be very tired late at night. But even though I’m a night owl, I’m still too tired to be able to write for very long, so it doesn’t help me very much. I think getting up even a little earlier will still be helpful.

I'm not entirely sure how to discipline myself to go to bed earlier. Unfortunately, I have trained myself not to pay attention to my alarms anymore. I'm too quick to turn them off rather than snoozing them.

Maybe what I need to do is try to train myself to snooze my alarms rather than turning them off. It's only a small change, so it might be easier for me to change my behavior.

***

I have to admit that the dictation has been helping me to get a lot of writing done. The dictation itself already helps me write a lot of words in a short amount of time, but what makes it really efficient is that I tend to be less easily distracted when I’m dictating. I think it’s the fact that I tend to walk when I’m dictating, and it gets me away from the computer.

I also have to admit that the fact that I can’t see what I just wrote helps me to focus, even though I absolutely hate this aspect of dictation. Not being able to see what I wrote is like those four little lines on an Alphasmart word processor. I can’t go back and edit if I don’t see the words, I just have to keep moving forward. When I’m dictating, sometimes I will have forgotten what I dictated a few minutes earlier (I blame menopause brain), which I absolutely hate, so I’ll just repeat myself and figure that I’ll edit it out later. But it makes me keep moving forward rather than trying to make a previous paragraph sound just right.

On the downside, I have to spend a lot more time editing, not just to catch typos from the transcription, but also because my dictation writing isn’t always very elegant. I have to rely on my self-editing to make the prose more refined rather than sounding like a grade-school novel (“See Spot run. Run, Spot, Run.”). I’m not very good at self-editing, so I have to consciously slow down and spend more time on my cycling edit to ensure that the writing is up to my own personal standards.

But despite the extra time needed for cleanup editing and cycling editing, dictation has been more efficient because I get a lot of words written without many breaks or distractions, and I think it encourages me to spend more time working overall.

For example, today I went dictating and walking but had to cut my walk short because I had to go to the bathroom (despite going just before I set out—I hate menopause). So I only got about 20 minutes of dictation done. I was dissatisfied with that because I’m aiming for at least 3000 words a day, and I really wanted to finish writing the scene I was in the middle of, so I ended up dictating while walking around my office. I ended up dictating a total of 90 minutes, and then did another 90 minutes for the cleanup editing.

Because the writing was split into two separate tasks—dictation and cleanup editing—I only took breaks in between the two dictation sessions (when I had to go to the bathroom) and in between the dictation and cleanup (while the voice recording was being transcribed). So I didn’t take as many breaks as I would have while typing (usually I take a break every 30 minutes). So I got more done in the hours before dinner than I would have while typing.

Also, the dictation is a lot harder than the cleanup editing, but I got all the dictation done when my brain was fresher, and doing the editing even though it was later in the day was a bit easier. It certainly was a lot easier than trying to write via typing at that time of the day.

So, I guess, the dictation was 90 minutes of difficult work, but it was done without distractions since I was away from my computer (and in the beginning I was away even from my house). Then I could take it a bit easier for the 90 minutes of cleanup editing. This seems to work for my brain better than a total of 3 hours of writing via typing, when all 3 hours are difficult.

My only real concern is that dictation isn’t faster than typing, for me. At least for now. All the hype about faster writing speed isn’t true for me since the cleanup editing takes the same amount of time as the dictation, and the resulting prose is the same quality as typing at the same speed.

Maybe I’ll get faster dictating—but I’m not so sure. I’ve been dictating every day for 16 days now, but I haven’t been getting faster at my dictation speed.

Still, I got almost 3000 words written today in a total duration of 2 hours, 50 minutes, with only 2 breaks in between sessions, whereas I would have taken 4 or 5 breaks if I were typing. So I think it was more efficient, even if my writing speed at the end of the day was only 1000 words an hour, which is the same as when I type.

Writing streak: 440 days

Dictation streak: 16 days

My takeaway for today: Try to readjust my sleeping schedule which might help with both my writing productivity and my IBS.

My second takeaway for today: While dictation isn’t any faster (when I take into account the time needed for both dictation and cleanup editing), it seems to be more efficient with my time and help me to write for longer hours in a day.