Day 975 - Changes in routine to increase productivity

During lunch today, I was reading Elana Johnson’s Writing and Marketing Systems, because she has such good advice (at least, it really resonates with my personality) and I was hoping for reminders on how to improve my productivity.

Re-reading it was a good idea, because I picked upon things I had only skimmed over before. Or maybe it’s just that my life is in a different place this time when I read the book, and so different pieces of advice were more apropos.

First I made a definite goal for myself. I’ve been wanting to increase my writing time and word count, but I haven’t actually set a goal. So I set a minimum goal of 10,000 words a week, and a stretch goal of 20,000 words per week on the Regency, and then for the Hawaii book, I set a minimum goal of 2 chapters a week and a stretch goal of 4 chapters a week.

I also set a couple bribes for me. When I finish a scene, I can have a piece of candy. I can only eat a small amount of it because of my IBS, but since moderation is something I have problems with, I haven’t been eating it at all. But if I can treat it as a reward, then one piece is fine.

My other bribe is that if I make my Regency stretch goal of 20,000 words this week, then I will give myself permission to order a gluten-free pastry box from a seller on Etsy. It’s pricey (but super delicious).

Yesterday, I decided to start setting alarms to remind me of when to get started on certain things, which will hopefully stop me from being so distracted all the time. But the book made me think about the times I’ve simply dilly-dallied instead of just getting started on work. It made me realize that I’ve been like this since I was a kid! I distinctly remember my mom always scolding me for dillydallying and telling me to just do my chores.

The alarms might help with that, but alarms will only prompt me to get started on work, not to help me concentrate or motivate me to keep at it rather than being lazy. So I decided to set stricter time deadlines during the day. I have to get my writing done before a certain time (just before dinner). So if it’s getting late and I haven’t gotten it done yet, then hopefully it will force me to focus and do my work.

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The chapter bribe seemed to work, although it was only revising the chapters today rather than dictating them.

I’m really glad I decided to do the revisions first before moving forward, because the edits are really, really hard. I have to make changes to several different scenes, and I found another slight plot hole in one scene today which necessitates making changes to an additional scene.

I’m glad I’m doing the edits now, because if I’d waited to do them on my editing pass after the book was done, it would be really hard and very discouraging. I know myself very well, and since I dislike editing so much, I suspect I’d be rushing through the revisions and then not pay as much attention to doing the rest of the editing on the manuscript. In doing all the revisions now, I get it out of the way so that the final editing pass won’t be as hard, and I’ll be more likely to be more detailed and diligent.

I didn’t even finish all the revisions today, despite working for over 4 hours on them. I decided to stop after finishing editing the 3rd scene (out of 6 that I have to do), since it seems that stopping at the end of a scene is a natural cutoff point for me. It would also be hard for me to do only a partial revision on the next scene and then have to figure out what I was doing when I picked it up again tomorrow.

I was also near the time deadline I set for myself to stop work for the day, which is just before dinnertime. I did notice that knowing I needed to finish by a certain time did make me a bit more diligent in my work since I wanted to get as much done as I could before then, so I think the time deadline does work for me.

I don’t think I’m going to make my stretch goal, but I did add almost 2000 new words to the manuscript today. I’m hopeful I can finish the revisions tomorrow and then keep going on the manuscript.

Unfortunately, I broke my dictation streak today since I didn’t have any dictation to do. I’m a bit sad since it would have been 30 days today, but today made me realize that while the streak was helpful to force me to dictate regularly, it wasn’t as necessary by this point. Not that I could magically create a dictation habit in only 30 days, because I had done a lot of dictation last year, which adds up to a lot of cumulative days of dictation. So I think that helped to make me more comfortable with dictation this time around when I decided to try it again. If I were going to try dictation for the first time, I would definitely try to do a streak, which is what is recommended in Sean Platt’s dictation book.

Writing streak: 454 days

My takeaway for today: I made definite goals to increase my writing time and word count—a minimum of 10,000 words and stretch goal of 20,000 words on the Regency, and a minimum of 2 scenes and stretch goal of 3-4 scenes on the Hawaii book.


My second takeaway for today: I have bribed myself with a candy for every scene finished and a gluten-free pastry box if I make my Regency stretch goal for the week.

My third takeaway for today: I have set a stricter time deadline every day to get my work done by a certain time to hopefully force me to focus and do my work.

My fourth takeaway for today: It might be better for me to do major revisions on the book when I discover they need to be done rather than leaving them to do at the end, because if the revisions are really extensive, it will make the final edits harder and I may not be as diligent in my editing.

My fifth takeaway for today: I think I don’t need the dictation streak anymore, although I’ll revisit it if I start to struggle with dictation later.