Day 1051 - A blah dictation day

I stayed up too late last night doing marketing work for my release next week. It was all stuff that needed to be done, but it took a lot of time, and I went to bed too late. I slept in this morning, which made it feel like I had less time to get stuff done in the morning.

I’m taking a course on launching your book, but it didn’t have homework last night which was why I spent so long doing marketing. However, they have office hours every weekday, which is really nice because you can ask questions and listen to other people’s questions and learn a lot. But it also does take up time during the day, and I have to plan my activities around those office hours.

As a result, I got some house chores done in the morning rather than going walking and writing right away. I went to office hours, and then went walking and dictating right after it ended.

I got about 90 minutes of dictation done, which was great! But it was late by then and I ate dinner. Now I’m feeling tired since it’s late in the evening, and I haven’t done the cleanup editing on my dictation.

I think I’ll just do the editing tomorrow. It’s not ideal—I usually try to do the cleanup editing right after I do the dictation so that if I come across a really bad error, I still remember what it was I was trying to say.

But today I have to do homework for my book launch course, and since I paid so much money for it, I want to make sure that I take advantage and do all the homework and go to office hours. I’m not sure if I’m using the course as an excuse to be lazy about the cleanup editing, since it’s not my favorite task. But it actually is important so I don’t feel too guilty about skipping out on my cleanup editing.

As for the dictation today, my dictation speed was really slow and I’m not sure why. I did notice that I kept being distracted by people who were passing me on the trail, as well as some clouds of bugs I had to walk through. It reminded me why I had started dictating at home, where I wasn’t distracted. But the key advantage of going walking and dictating is that it forced me to get work done. I was feeling tired about halfway through my walk, but since I was at least 30 minutes away from home, I still just continued dictating since there wasn’t anything else for me to do. If I’d been home, I might have taken a break and then never gotten back to my dictation.

I don’t know why it’s been so hard for me to motivate myself to dictate lately. I’m having a lot of problems battling procrastination and distraction.

Part of the reason might be because I’ve been having intermittent IBS flare-ups, which make my body feel tired, and I know my motivation to work is affected too much by how I’m feeling physically. My back has also been giving me problems, and I woke up with a headache that never really left me all day today.

Now that I typed all that out, it’s no wonder I had a hard time getting myself to dictate today. Dictation requires intense focus for me to even do it, so it’s especially hard when it’s difficult for me to focus for one reason or another.

I think I’ll do my homework, then try to get to bed early today and see if that helps me to write better tomorrow.