Good bye burnout; hello Eisenhower Matrix!

So the Writing in Public thing failed miserably. It was a success in that I felt guilty for not writing, which was the point, but I realized that I'm burnt out. My schedules never really had any leisure time, so I never really got a chance to recharge (turns out washing clothes is not rejuvenating). I would feel burnt out, not work on the novel to relax, but because my schedule said I was supposed to be working on the novel, I never truly relaxed, and instead was full of guilt. All time. So, I gave myself permission to be lazy. Wow. What a difference it makes to sit back at the end of the day and not have a cloud of "I should be..." hanging over my head. This is why people enjoy weekends!

While relaxing, I read a fabulous post on procrastination. At it's core was the "Eisenhower Matrix" popularized in "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. It looks like this:

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Q1 Urgent and Important	Q2 Not urgent and Important
Not Important	Q3 Urgent and Not important	Q4 Not urgent and Not important

This was paired with a cool Eisenhower quote: "What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important." The author then goes on to describe how the things that get you ahead in an entrepreneurial side business aren't usually urgent (like writing a novel) but are nonetheless quite important. We will never achieve our long-term dreams/goals without working on Q2; it's what gets us ahead. But these lofty goals get overwhelmed by using urgency as the sole method to prioritize where we put our effort, when in reality there should be very few things in Q1. Which means we spend more time in Q3, doing those urgent but not important tasks that keep us busy.

The post goes on to describe where different types of procrastinators fall, and the section on "Impostinators" fit me almost exactly: we look productive, but we're working on tasks that aren't all important and won't get us closer to our goals. He gives examples of "spending the whole day answering emails, running errands, making phone calls, organizing lists and schedules," etc. If this is a problem for you, I encourage you to read his lengthy post.

So now I want to look at my major goals in life and put them in this matrix. This task, in and of itself, is classic of procrastination -- lots of planning, little doing -- but it makes me feel better! Why do I want to put all of my goals in the matrix, instead of just my novel writing ones? Well, that was a major point I took away from the post. Q1 and Q2 tasks, the important tasks, should take priority, and urgency should be defined as "what would benefit most from being done sooner" rather than what has the closest deadline. Q2 tasks could be spending time with family, which is just as important as improving my craft.

Goal: Develop my self-publishing business
	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Q1 Write new words	Q2 Update scene metadata Improve craft Learn nonverbal behaviour
Not Important	Q3 Update "Writing in Public"	Q4 Read self-publishing news (The Passive Voice) Read KBoards Read author blogs Listen to podcasts Work out better schedule

Goal: Everything else (Family, Health)
	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Q1 Sort out taxes Sort out bills Book camping site	Q2 Spend time with kids Exercise Get kids' back-to-school supplies Make basement livable space List stuff to sell
Not Important	Q3 Do Laundry	Q4 Watch Netflix Go down internet rabbit hole

Writing in Public: Day 1

Ok, I need some accountability. I've switched schedules... again. Now I'm trying working after the kids go to bed and staying up until midnight, catching up on sleep with naps whenever I can get them. It's not working out. No schedule seems to work out. I'm tired. All the freaking time. It takes me an hour just to warm up to the idea of doing more thinking after a day of thinking and then trying my hardest to be patient while looking after children and being sleep deprived. Drained is an understatement. Ugh.

I really like Dean Wesley Smith's idea of "writing in public" Basically, he posts what he does every day. I had considered writing my daily successes into an agenda (because there are more things to capture than word counts), but I have a bias against analog. I hate the idea of something not being backed up somehow. So I'll try this blog. We'll see.

So today I am coming off last night's attempt to recover from burn-out (my medicine was 5 episodes of "Lie to Me" on Netflix). I actually find the show a good resource for my writing, and it inspired me to pick up a few books on nonverbal communication which have really enriched my writing. I plan to review them. Eventually. Some day. Because time.

So, long story short, I only got 5 hours of sleep. Still managed to get 841 words in though. I'd really like to get up to 2k/day, but 1k/day is already a stretch with the way I'm going. 10k a week would be more awesome than awesomeness. Since today is Thursday, I'll aim for 5k this week.

I'm starting to realize that my book is going to be long. Act 1 is 25k, and I'm well into Act 2a and it's going to be much longer. Might have to consider making my transition from Act 1-2 a midpoint, and cluing up the book at the end of what I had originally envisioned as the true midpoint. Would make a good cliffhanger, but would still probably weigh in at 50-60k, which is novel length. At least then I can get a book out sooner!

Book 1:
Day   1 ............    840 words
Total .............. 38,881 words

Productivity analysis

Well, April didn't go exactly as planned. Between making a final exam for my students, holding tutorials, giving said exam, and then spending hours and hours marking it for all 225 students, I didn't get much done on my work in progress. The good news is that since the last time I posted I've written something, even if it's only 3500 words. As of now book one stands at 30,861 (and yes, that final word is counted!).

I find it difficult to focus unless I know that I am working at optimal efficiency. It doesn't escape my notice that if I just spent more time writing, and less time optimizing, that I'd have a lot more words written by now. My problem is that I just can't do anything halfway; when I want to analyze something, I analyze it.

And so, with a little bit of excitement, but also knowing that the following may be taken as evidence of my idiosyncrasies, I present to you my productivity analysis:



Isn't it beautiful in its bland grayness? Bear with me.

If you have been reading this blog (I can't imagine why you would be, but lets pretend), you will note that I track on awful lot of things. The above chart was made from four months of tracking data. Every time I sat down to write, I recorded the time of day, how I was feeling (in the zone, just okay, tired, or groggy), and my average words per hour, amongst other things.

Why you may ask? To be honest, I've read a lot about people being productive in the morning, but my angry, murder-esque tendencies tend to come out at that time of day, when I am loath to meet the day star. In the nighttime, I am a zombie waiting to breathe my final breath before falling into my pillows. In short, the ends of my days are miserable no matter which one I choose, but when you have a day job and children, that's all you've got to work with. So if I'm going to be miserable, I damn well want to be efficiently and optimally miserable.

The bars above indicate my writing speed, using the axis on the left, while the line represents my level of cognitive unfuzziness, represented by the axis on the right. I thought I'd see more of a correlation between writing speed and when I thought I was "in the zone," but this doesn't seem to be the case. I think my writing output has less to do with how awake I'm feeling, and more to do with how much creative juice I have left to give.

My two options are really only the 4:30-6:30 am time slot, or the 8:30-10:30 pm timeslot. The cognitive unfuzziness levels of these timeslots are similar (63% vs. 67%), but the output is drastically different -- 407 wph vs. 255 wph. Needless to say, I am not pleased with these results, but I'm glad I wasted a few hours looking into it, because I was just about to commit to staying up late instead of getting up early.

So there you have it, a night owl whose efficiency patterns follow those of the lark. But the data doesn't lie, and I'm sure as hell not going to collect another four months of it looking for a different answer.

How will I get out of bed, and not fall to the trap of going back to sleep after the one-week honeymoon period runs out? Well, my husband has a very bright halogen work lamp, and I have a programmable outlet timer. Those two are about to get acquainted.

Three month plan: GAME ON!

I've just finished my first round of taxes as a business. Complicated. I don't have any revenue yet, but I'm claiming my craft/marketing books and training programs. Still have to figure out how to bring my personal library into a partnership. Fun times.

I'm also trying to plan out my next three months. I've negotiated having Tuesdays and Thursdays off at work from late Feb - July. February and March will be taken up with my second job (teaching as an adjunct), but I've got from March 29 - July 7 to make something happen (the last 3 weeks of July will be taken up with family activities, since the kids are off school).

So that gives me 14-15 weeks, or about 29 full work days plus whatever additional time I can steal from evenings and weekends (with my family responsibilities, it won't be much).

I've edited down Act I of my WIP, and a bit of Act II, and I'm at 27,300 words. Good words! I think I've gotten into a groove now in terms of style and voice.

Each Act looks like it will be 24,000 words after editing. I'm a taker-outer rather than a putter-inner, so I have to learn to write in the leaner style I've developed while editing. In any case, this would make each book 96,000 words, and I want 3 books ready to go for launch, so 288,000 words less the 27,300 equals 260,700. That means I have to write 17,380 words/week.

Holy crapola!

Assuming I can get 7 hours in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and an hour in on every other day, I'll get 19 hours a week. Let's make it 20 to have round numbers. That means I need to write 869 words per hour. My top speed was about half that. Let's hope I'll be a bit quicker now that I'm more practices in my protagonist's voice; yikes!

I'm going to make my goal 17 k/wk, 1100 words on MWFSS, and 6000 words on TR.

For the next two weeks, I'll focus on doing scene-by-scene outlines of the three books. I've got a 9600 word narrative of where I want Book 1 to go, and another 3400 of ideas of the overall series, but I need to flesh out the nuts and bolts of how I'm going to translate that into scenes, and need to work on Books 2 and 3. I've got about 18 hours in the next two weeks to make that happen.

GAME ON!

Motivation

So much of the battle to become an established self-published offer boils down to motivation. When I plan out my schedule, it looks like I can get in 10 to 15 hours a week to work on this business, but when reality knocks I'm exhausted, the kids want attention (and to be honest they should be getting more), and it seems impossible to work constantly without having some down time to read, watch a movie, or otherwise unwind.

Readers of this blog will know that I've waffled between getting up early or staying up late to get things done. Alarms don't seem to work for me for longer than a one week period – no matter how much sleep I get it, even if it is 9 or 10 hours, I despise getting up in the morning. Conversely, if I stay up late my creative juices have run dry, extracted in the masticator that is my day job.

I've tried many ways to get around this conundrum. Since waking up to an alarm is so difficult, I have instead started setting an alarm to remind me to go to bed at a reasonable hour, and since my faculties are usually not as compromised in the evenings, this is easier to stick to. My latest is to set an alarm to remind myself to get ready for bed at 8:30 pm, and when I inevitably awake at night, if the clock says 4:30 or later, I get up. There's a bit of science around this. If you wake up naturally, you are usually at the end of the sleep cycle, and thus even if you have had less sleep, you will be significantly less drowsy. This was how I managed to get up this morning. Let's see how it goes.

I've also upped my game when it comes to cues, particularly after reading Heidi Grant Halverson's book Succeed. I've made some very specific goals (related to my novel, healthy eating, exercise, and family), printed up some Don't-Break-the-Chains, and have written some goal statements on the whiteboard that I pass every morning on my way to the shower:

"When my alarm sounds, I will finish whatever I am doing as quickly as possible and go to bed."

"If I get up early, focus, and avoid distraction, I will develop my indie career and make steps toward being my own boss."

Next week, I will once again request to go down to working 3 days a week at my day job, instead of 5. This will be the third year that I have reduced my workload in an effort to make this indie career work. In the first year, I continued to work 5 days a week, but got off a few hours earlier each day. That didn't work out because no one else seemed to respect the fact that my workday ended earlier, and where I am management I don't get paid overtime, so essentially I was working normal hours for less pay. I learned from this when the second year rolled around, and asked to work just 3 days week. This time I was sabotaged by my need to take on a teaching job that consumed the other 2 days more than I had anticipated. By the time that job ended I was burnt out, but did manage to put in about 25,000 words, so there's that. This year I will again go for the 3 days a week, but unfortunately I do have another teaching job. I've taken the last 2 weeks off from my main job to try to do all of my lecture prep in advance so that the month of March isn't a complete wash. Looking good so far, but only time will tell.

Getting back on the train

I'm not one for excuses, but when I'm looking over this blog I want to know the type of things that tend to set me back. My last post was in May. May. That's not to say that I stopped working toward my goal. During that time I devoured information about the indie publishing market. I've read many, many nonfiction books on the topic. I also started listening to the Rocking Self Publishing Podcast, with Simon Whistler, and it has been absolutely fabulous.

My in-laws visited for about three weeks, so things were a wash during that period, but since then I've been trying to get back into a regular routine. I still waiver between wanting to stay up late at night, and getting up early. During the day, I'm energetic, and think it won't be any trouble to stay up late, after all I did it all through university. At nighttime, as soon as the kids are down, I may be able to make it for a half an hour or an hour or so before my eyelids start closing on their own. And I say to myself, "well, just get up early!" And yet when the alarm clock tolls the dawn of a new day (and I set it so that the new day starts before the actual dawn), I have become a zombie.

So I printed off a sheet for Monday through Sunday, when I would wake up, work on the novel, have leisure time, and sleep. I entered a period of optimization. I realized that I am not a robot. You would think that would be immediately apparent, butt it's not. I love to read. I'll often start a book at night when the kids are in bed, and because it is so good I will read until 2 o'clock in the morning and therefore be a zombie for several days. Yet when I was trying to maximize the amount of time I would spend writing, I essentially eliminated all leisure time. This does not work for me. I've also realized that I need more than the standard eight hours of sleep a night, and benefit from occasionally getting extended periods of sleep. Thus, I bring you my new schedule:

Day	Wake-up	Shower	Write	Leisure	Sleep
Monday	5 am	5-5:30 am	5:30-7 am	8-9 pm	9 pm / 8 hrs
Tuesday	5 am	5-5:30 am	5:30-7 am	n/a	8 pm / 9 hrs
Wednesday	5 am	5-5:30 am	5:30-7 am	8-9 pm	9 pm / 8 hrs
Thursday	5 am	5-5:30 am	5:30-7 am	8-9 pm	9 pm / 8 hrs
Friday	5 am	5-5:30 am	5:30-7 am	8-9:30 pm	9:30 pm / 8.5 hrs
Saturday	6 am	Later!	6-7:30 am	8-9 pm	9 pm / 9 hrs
Sunday	6 am	Later!	6-7:30 am	8-9 pm	9 pm / 8 hrs

Week of May 4, 2015: Cannot find simple floor plan software to help me visualize my world

Stat summary for the last two weeks can be found here.

I think it's good that I'm starting to track how much time I spend on the business side of indie publishing and how much I spend on actual writing. For the week of April 27, 2015 I spent a total of 13:25 on the author career, and 9:41 of that was used on business related things (learning the business, trends, advice, etc). This is not an acceptable ratio!

I got my butt in gear the next week but came to a point in the novel where my Main character is exploring the school, and I realized I needed a clear picture of the school in my mind. I tried program after program to draw a "simple" floor plan of the school so I could orient myself. It was a major block; I couldn't keep going unless I knew where I was. Going through the motions made me realize that the space I had envisioned was physically impossible because I had huge rooms next to ones that were very small, but for the plot they had to be similar in size. It was a mess.

I spent 26:07 last week on this career, and used 15:17 for trying to come up with a good map. I'm still not there. That said, the exercise was not entirely fruitless. I added more groups inside the school, and came up with their past histories, which groups conflict on a number of different controversial topics, and how the groups work together. Lots of this will be important to the plot, and I feel I have a much better grip on who these people are. I started an excel sheet to lay out what the different groups think about various things (I'm being intentionally vague).

That said, I still do want to make a floor plan. I tried several software programs. I just want one that lets me edit the walls with a snap feature, and let's me copy floors for multi-level buildings, and maybe see the floor beneath. Just something simple to let me draw boxes and stick windows and furniture in them! Here's a quick summary of the software that fell short:

• Sweet Home 3D was nice, and let me see the floor beneath, but the interface wasn't great, and it was slow. Amazingly, they had no pan ability in the 3D view. The only way to get around it was to do a "virtual tour" and make the person 20 feet tall. The walls wouldn't line up well, but at least I could copy them. 
• Room Arranger was the best I think; it had a nice guide feature, but you had to edit the walls separately from the contents of the room (including windows and doors), and there was no easy way to copy a bunch of walls to make multiple storeys. I did the most work in this program, but in the end it took almost a whole day to plan out the first floor of a dorm and the bathrooms. o_O'
• I tried Home Designer but it wouldn't run under my Windows XP Virtual Machine. 
• EZBluePrint 3D seemed ok, but lacked a grid and the interface was just plan odd, but the snapping feature was one of the best. 
• I even watched some video tutorials on Google SketchUp, but you have to make things like windows and doors from basic shapes and that's way too time consuming.

There seemed to be quite a selection of online options, but I have to make a massive building and grounds, and don't trust that my information won't go piff. I like having things as files that I can put on Dropbox and my external hard drive.

I don't yet have an answer to this issue, except maybe drawing everything by hand. I think it would go faster that way, but my space perception is about as good as a one-eyed newborn kitten's. Software programs let you add furniture to the room so you I can say things like, "gee, when I put everything I need in that room I only ill 20% of the space... it must be the size of a football field!" To draw it by hand I'd have to lookup the normal sizes of things for scale, and I couldn't just drag a wall smaller to get it to fit. 

Next week I'll probably come in here with my head between my legs and say I drew the damn thing by hand, and spent the whole week doing it... at least it gets me thinking about the world.

Oh I just thought of something! I'll ask the folks on KBoards! Stay tuned...

Weekly Progress

I'm a new writer who's still trying to work out how to be productive and write faster. I also love data, and track my output in a spreadsheet. Here I just wanted a place where I could post the weekly totals that I discuss in my Sunday updates, so I could see everything at a glance. I'll be updating this every week.

This form of progress tracking replaces the one I used previously, which didn't differentiate between editing and writing, and as a result the words per hour calculation wasn't accurate. I also realized that I was spending a lot of my time on the business aspect of self-publishing, such as reading about marketing and promotion on KBoards, but I wasn't tracking this at all. So when I would look back on the total amount of time I spent each week on developing this side career, it looked quite low. My old way was like tracking the production line, but paying no attention to the hours logged by the marketing division or the research and development team. This new way of tracking truly captures how much time I am spending on launching my writing career.

Key: W/E = Writing and Editing; B = Business (learning, production, marketing, management); O = Other (learning craft, outlining); WPH-W/E = Average words per Hour when writing/editing.

Wk	Week start	W/E	B	O	TOTAL	WPH-W	WPH-E	Net words
W-1	Jan 26, '15	6:15	n/a	n/a	6:15	273	-	1,707
W-2	Feb 2, '15	10:10	n/a	n/a	10:10	236	-	2,533
W-3	Feb 9, '15	8:05	n/a	n/a	8:05	364	-	2,365
W-4	Feb 16, '15	9:22	n/a	n/a	9:22	375	-	3,435
W-5	Feb 23, '15	10:25	n/a	n/a	10:25	295	-	2,768
W-6	Mar 2, '15	11:16	n/a	n/a	11:16	446	-	4,367
W-7	Mar 9, '15	10:19	n/a	n/a	10:19	450	-	4,955
W-8	Mar 16, '15	-	n/a	6:36	6:36	-	-	735
W-9	Mar 23, '15	2:31	n/a	1:20	3:51	413	-	n/a
W-10	Mar 30, '15	-	n/a	-	-	-	-	0
W-11	Apr 6, '15	-	n/a	-	-	-	-	0
W-12	Apr 13, '15	3:02	n/a	-	3:02	572	-	2,239
W-13	Apr 20, '15	9:42	n/a	-	9:42	475	2,099	476
W-14	Apr 27, '15	3:44	9:41	-	13:25	-	2,735	50
W-15	May 4, '15	5:33	5:17	15:17	26:07	530	4,004	1,584

Week of March 9, 2015: Best week yet, but writing takes so long... getting discouraged.

Week	Week start date	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH (avg)	WPH (writing)
W-7	Mar 9, 2015	6	4969	12:31	397	449

Re: Scheduling

So this is the end of my second week of early mornings, and it's working out fairly well. I fall asleep quite easily between 8:30 and 9:30, but still have a bit of trouble hauling myself out of bed. Also I've noticed that when I first started this I used to start writing right away, but now that I'm getting used to the schedule I spend time "waking up" with email checks just like I used to do in the evenings, so even though I get up 2 hours earlier, I only get about 1h20 of writing time in. And I hate when I'm on a roll and have to stop because I have to go to the real job.

This of course makes me flip flop back to 'why not just go back to nights?' If I'm going to 'waste' 40 minutes, I rather use that time to 'wake up' with a jog after the kids are in bed and then plow away with writing. That would also mean my social schedule gets less perturbed, and if I was on a roll I could run with it and push through work on less sleep, going to bed early to catch up. That inconsistent sleep schedule is bad for your overall health though. And my husband says I'm less cranky when I get up early, and less dead when I come home from work, heh. It's what I've been doing all my life though, so I feel myself gravitating to it.

Re: The long, long road...

This week was also the first major discrepancy between what I wrote and what I kept. So even though I wrote 4969, only 4550 remain. That stung.

I should be happy that I'm up to almost 5k a week. In the beginning that seemed like something I would never reach, but I still feel like it's not enough. Right now a lot of my weekly count is happening on the Tuesdays and Thursdays I have free. That's going to end, and then what? Back to the 1500-2000 words a week? Can't happen; I need to meet my goals. I'm impatient! The end of the road looks so far away, and then there's editing, and cover design, and marketing, and business stuff, and mailing lists, and figuring out how to stay anonymous.

I read somewhere that whenever you tackle a long task that you should visualize yourself a year from now, and looking back would you have wanted to start in on it earlier, even if it was just a little bit every day? And of course the answer would be yes. Even if I only have half a book the answer will be yes. But once I've got my mind into something I just want to dive right into it and burn through it until it's done. The fact that I can't because of my job is killing me.

I used to love my current job; I even proclaimed that it was the best job in the world, and I really did feel that way. Now every tiny little thing is getting to me, even if 90% of the time things are good, the 10% eats at my brain. And it comes down to the fact that I still work for someone else.

That's never really fit with me.

I started a dog walking business when I was 9. I did desktop publishing layouts in high school and early university but I felt more like a contractor. In my current part-time teaching job I feel like I'm in my own game, me and the students. I have a Department Head, but s/he doesn't tell me what to do; I just give him/her the grades. There's a freedom there. But in my bread-and-butter job I have a clear boss who I report to every week (and my new boss manages very differently than the old one. I used to feel like a team member whose ideas were appreciated; now I feel like a cog in the wheel who should just shut up and do the work.) While I enjoy the work and feel like I'm making a difference, the fact that it's employment won't change, and the environment is so very dependent on the personality of the person I report to. It's the fatal flaw that's gnawing at me, and making me quite unhappy with what most people would fall head over heels for.

I was reading on KBoards that there's no need to try to advance in two careers at the same time, and it hit me that that's really what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to get a promotion at work (largely so I only need to work one job to make ends meet instead of a full-time job plus a part-time job), and I'm trying to make this writing thing viable. I need to not give so much of myself to my day-job. I put in many hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime a year (I'm salaried, so it's expected), but I need to start delegating and protecting my time. Something has to give, and I can't expect my little boys to be the ones who have to go without their mommy. Sadly, that has been the case during peak periods at work, when they'd be heading to bed when I came home. That lasts 4-6 months. Brutal.

As an aside: I've never really blogged before I started this one, but man, writing all that stuff out is therapeutic. Reminds me of a study I read that showed that people who journal tend to have a better outlook, almost as much as those who go to therapy. I can see that.

Week of March 1, 2015: I think this schedule is the best so far

Week	Week start date	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH
Week 6	Mar 2, 2015	6	4501	11:16	399

My husband was right; I just had to stick it out for more than a few days. During the weekdays there was only one day I didn't get up at 4:30am, and that was earlier in the week. When I tracked my alertness the first few days were "groggy", the next "ok" and near the end I said I was "in the zone", so I think I'm adapting. I've hit my weekly word count goal for the first time since I started, so yay! 
That said, there's still room for improvement. I realized that things will inevitably keep me from going to bed at 8:30 pm; most days it was more like 9 or 9:30 pm before I got in bed, so by the end of the week I had accumulated quite the sleep debt. I paid the price with a migraine Saturday evening, which screwed up Sunday. Can't afford screw ups like that.
So the new plan is to allow some "sleeping in" until 6:30 am on Saturday, to catch up, because I can't carry a sleep debt forever. That said, when I did that this week I felt on edge all day because I was used to starting my day writing. I put some time in later in the morning, but my WPH is higher first thing when I wake up (400-500, instead of ~300). 
Last week I projected the book would only be 80k, but now I'm thinking it will be 100k again. I'm at 18,352 and I still have 2 chapters before I break into Act 2a, which will bring me to about 25k per Act (Acts 1, 2a, 2b, and 3).

Week of Feb 23, 2015: New schedule... again.

Week of	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH
Feb 23, 2015	5	3070	10:25	295

My numbers this week aren't too bad considering I used a lot of time for mundane things. Managed to hire a new therapist for my son and got an eye exam (looks like I need my third pair of glasses in 9 months; hopefully things stabilize before I go blind or broke, oi!). I'm actually surprised that I got so much time in. I was off from my main job on Thursday but used the whole day preparing lectures and meeting with students for my second job, and I thought that would hit my word count hard. I did put in two insanely late nights, so that probably made up for it. I've noticed that the 10:30pm-12:30am window has the worst WPH, but the 12:30am-2:30am window is pretty good. Unfortunately the plan I implemented last week to stay up late a few days a week made me feel like a complete zombie.  My husband, bless his dear and patient soul, never laughs at me as I bounce my new scheduling plans off him each week (we have had this routine for many years; I have no idea how he keeps a straight face when I tell him that this week I'll figure out a schedule that catapults my productivity, heh). This time he had some advice: whatever plan I choose, stick to it for a whole month, not just a few days or a week. I figured that if I stay up late my brain is so dead that I have to put in more time to hit the same word count (yay data collection!), so mornings it is. So *drum roll* SJ's plan for the next MONTH is:
WEEKDAYS 4:30 am - 5:15 am: Wake up, shower, snack 5:15 am - 7:15 am: WRITE WRITE WRITE 7:15 am - 8:00 am: Breakfast with the kiddos, make lunches, get everyone out the door 8:00 am - 5:30 pm: MWF: Get to work, work, go home from work; TR: Write and/or do lecture prep 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm: Play with kids, have supper 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm: Kids bedtime routine 8:00 pm - 8:30 pm: Chores 8:30 pm: BED Estimated writing time: MWF: 2 hrs per day; TR: 3-4 hrs per day.  Total for weekdays: 12 - 14 hours per week.
WEEKENDS 4:30 am - 5:15 am: Wake up, shower, snack 5:15 am - 7:00 am: WRITE WRITE WRITE 7:00 am - 9:00 am: Hot breakfast with the kiddos, make lunches, get everyone out the door 9:00 am - 12:00 pm: WRITE while kids are at morning activities or with hubby (may or may not be possible depending on domestic chores) 12:00 pm - 7:00 pm: Family time, chores, exercise, etc. 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm: Kids bedtime routine 8:00 pm - 8:30 pm: Chores 8:30 pm: BED Estimated writing time: 4h45 per day. Total for weekends: 4.75 - 9.5 hrs per week. Total weekly time for writing: 16.75 -  23.5 hrs. At my dismal average of ~300 words/hr, I should get in ~5000 - 7000  words per week. That seems mind blowing to me. We'll see how it goes.
One notable impact is that this will essentially destroy my personal life, since staying up even until midnight will now through my schedule way off. But my social life is basically only seeing my friends once a month, so it should work. Also lacking is any exercise during weekdays. I really want to run for at least 30 minutes every day, but it never happens. If I could get by on 7 hours a night at get up at 3:30 I'd be set, ha! My husband says that I might be able to not feel like a zombie if I get a consistent amount each night (right now I'm on a binge sleep cycle, fluctuating between 4 hours and then several nights of 9 or more). We'll see. When I went without setting clocks I needed 8.5 consistently. Sigh.
One note for this week: I've got 5 chapters in to my book and my spreadsheet calculates that, based on my average chapter length and a plan for 24 chapters, my book will likely be 80,000 words instead of 100,000, so I've changed my ticker on the side to 80,000.

Week of Feb 16, 2015: Aiming for stamina + scheduling

Week of	Days I wrote	Words written	Time used	WPH
Feb 16, 2015	3	3514	9:22	375

Best week yet in terms of numbers, but still not where I want to be. I've been taking Tuesdays and Thursdays off to write and teach (I don't really get "weekends" with two young kids, I just do the mommy job really). Yet despite having all the day available I seem to only log 3.5 to 4 hours of writing. I have to increase my stamina to be more productive on those days, which should really be my powerhouse days. I'd also love to write every day.
I took some time to come up with yet another schedule to try to fit in my day job, part-time job, and writing, and of course family and exercise (although I have yet to get to that last one; I hope I don't die young). They say regular sleep is more important than the number of hours, but my normal cycle is to stay up until crazy-o'clock (as in 2am when I have to get up at 6:30am) and then go to bed early the next few nights to catch up. The potential new schedule looked more reasonable because it had a solid 8:15 of sleep each night, but I don't know how realistic it is. I think I'd do better with longer chunks of time less often, but if Tuesday and Thursday are any indication, maybe not.
I also got thrown a curve ball this week. My son's therapist is moving on to a higher level position so we have to find someone else within two weeks, which will be challenging if not impossible. Taxes are due and I have a very sizeable bill. And I've run out of lectures for my course and have to make more. Fun times.
I got most of the taxes squared away this weekend (earned myself a guilt trip from the kiddos who must think, "don't disturb mommy, she's working" is the natural state of things). I thought I'd just do a course prep marathon in the week coming up and take care of that and a bunch of other domestic stuff (hire a therapist for my son, get my eyes checked and new lenses, order a car seat replacement buckle, refute parking tickets, pay life insurance... the List of Boring goes on). At some point I have to replace my 10-year-old hot water boiler before it explodes, but knowing how life is it will probably get ignored until it explodes and we have even bigger problems. 
I'm thinking I should just give into my natural patterns and schedule marathon sessions. Stay up until 2am on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, and take a nap in the middle of the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays (plus in bed early Saturday and Sunday). Hmmm. Gonna go work that out and see how it shapes up. =) Maybe at some point I'll figure out how to get more hours into the day.

Weekly progress chart -- OLD VERSION

I am a new writer, still trying to work out how to be productive and how to write faster. I also love data, and track my output in a spreadsheet. Here I just wanted a place where I could post the weekly totals that I discuss in my Sunday updates, so I could see everything at a glance. I'll be updating this every week.

Note: I have changed this to display 2 WPH: one is the overall average, which includes when I'm editing (a lot slower WPH) or when I'm typing new things (the one that matters).

Week	Week start date	Days	Words written	Time used	WPH (avg)	WPH (writing)
W-1	Jan 26, 2015	4	1707	6:15	273	n/a
W-2	Feb 2, 2015	4	2404	10:10	236	n/a
W-3	Feb 9, 2015	3	2945	8:05	364	n/a
W-4	Feb 16, 2015	3	3514	9:22	375	n/a
W-5	Feb 23, 2015	5	3070	10:25	295	n/a
W-6	Mar 2, 2015	6	4501	11:16	399	469
W-7	Mar 9, 2015	6	4969	12:31	397	449

I have changed the way I track things. See my new post.

Week of Feb 9, 2015: Going to try getting up early

Well, I got in more words this week than last (2945 vs. 2404) and in less time (8:05 vs. 10:10) but my WPH is still only 364. I have to get that up. Sadly last week I only wrote on 3/7 days, largely due to being tired in the evenings. So I'm biting the bullet and getting up early, cold-turkey and no setting the clock back by so much every day business, and getting BIC (butt-in-chair). We'll see how that works out!

Week of Feb 2, 2015: Week 2 of data collection

Now entering week 2 of data collection. Last week I spent 6:15 writing and wrote 1707 words. This week I'm up to 10:10 writing, and wrote 2404 words. My WPH is going down, but at least I'm getting more on the page overall. It's a far cry from my 4403 words per week goal, but I'm getting there.

I have the day off of my full-time job on Tuesday and rather than going on a date with my husband I'm going to spend half the day working on lectures, and the other half on writing. I'm 3388 words behind and have to catch up! The red numbers on my spreadsheet really scream how far I'm getting behind, and it's certainly driving me to write and get back in the green. Maybe I'll reward myself with a movie date once I'm back on track, heh.

Finding time to write: Blocking internet access at certain times of day in linux (and making it a recurring task)

Yet another productivity post. My switch to 3 days/week at the full-time job happened this week, but I had to use Tues/Thurs to do lecture prep as I was hired as a last-minute emergency replacement (teaching is my part-time job). My writing time will be less than optimal for the next 2 weeks until I finish all the lectures (or at least catch up a bit), but I did find myself with some spare time tonight around 9pm when the kids were in bed. I figured I'd get in a good 1.5 hours or so, but I wasted the time. Sigh. Warning: the rest of this post might be boring for Windows/Mac users, but if you run Linux, it may be helpful:

I run Linux Mint on my desktop and laptop, and for the last few months I used a modified hosts file to prevent myself from accessing distracting sites on my desktop computer. This is fairly simple. Just type:

sudo gedit /etc/hosts

Then add the following to the end of the file:

0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com

0.0.0.0 www.upworthy.com

Etc. When you try to access the site, it won't be able to connect. This worked fine for awhile, but then I would do google searches and just get lost on other sites (like I did tonight). Sure, I'm reading and learning, but I really didn't need to learn tonight; I needed to write. 

Ideally I wanted a script to turn off all internet traffic at certain times of day (like between 7:30pm and 11:30pm, after the kids are in bed but before I am!), but only on my computer. I found a script by zengargoyle that can do this. First you'll need to install the "at" command (it's not installed by default on Mint):

sudo apt-get install at

Then make a file:

sudo gedit /usr/bin/SelControl

Copy the following into the file:

#!/bin/bash

#from http://ask.metafilter.com/160649/Block-internet-on-ubuntu

PORTS="80" # OR enter PORTS="80 443" for https as well

UNDO=""

for p in $PORTS

do

  iptables -I OUTPUT -p tcp --dport $p -j DROP

  UNDO="$UNDO iptables -D OUTPUT -p tcp --dport $p -j DROP;"

done

echo $UNDO | at now + 1 min # <-- change to time you want internet off for

I chose not to block port 443, because I still wanted Google Drive to sync my files in the background. This means that secure websites (those starting with https) still work, so I can still go a simple google search to get a quick definition, but the results are duds :) Once you save the file, you have to make it executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/SelfControl

And then you just run it whenever you want to block internet access:

sudo ./SelfControl

Now this was all well and good in principle, but what often gets me is that I'll "just check one little thing" before writing... and that ends up being quite a lot of things; a whole writing block of time of things. I needed something I could set and forget. For that, I had to set up a cron job (as root, so I could change IPTABLES).

sudo gedit /etc/crontab

Then at the end of the file add:

# added by [your name] to shut off internet at certain times

30 19 * * * root iptables -I OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j DROP

30 23 * * * root iptables -D OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j DROP

The first number refers to minutes, the second to hours on a 24 hour clock, and the last 3 *s refer to day, month, and day of the week, so * for all three means every day (learn more here). The above turns off access to port 80 (http internet sites) from 7:30 pm to 11:30 pm daily. If you're between your start time and end time on the first day you set this up, just type in:

sudo iptables -I OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j DROP

to turn off access, and the cron job will turn it back on again at the time you set. If there's an emergency and you ABSOLUTELY NEED to access a website (that isn't https), you can type:

sudo iptables -D OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j DROP

So my hope is that this will force some productivity on me by the sheer lack of anything else to do. That said, blogger is https, so I can still post during writing time, haha. If you'd rather turn off everything (at the risk of not syncing files in the background) just add port 443 to the above. I'm not quite there yet!

Week of Jan 26, 2015: Productivity and optimizing writing speed

I follow quite a few author blogs. One of those is Dean Wesley Smith's. Everyday he outlines his writing achievements of the day, which I found interesting to read in the beginning, but they've become somewhat monotonous. That said, I think blogging about progress is an excellent way to hold yourself accountable, a topic that author-entrepreneur Joanna Penn wrote about this week (someday I'll write a post with all the excellent blogs I follow). In the interests of holding myself accountable but not becoming too monotonous, I thought I might write weekly progress updates.

This is the first week that I actually feel I may be able to do this. It's my final crazy week at work, but my don't-break-the-chain's are keeping me on track regardless, and I feel like I'm getting back into "the zone." I think having achievable baby-step goals really helps it feel less daunting. I've printed out my "production calendar" and will put it up with the rest of my goals in my dining room. (Production goals are another thing Dean is big on.)

My little productivity worksheet is now tracking how many words I write a day. Unfortunately I'm finding that if I write 500 and delete 200 old ones from yesterday, my count is still only 300. I both like and dislike this. It's good because realistically I'm only 300 words closer to my goal; it's bad because I don't really have a good grasp on how fast I can write, and that hurts my scheduling. After reading Rachel Aaron's post on how she used data collection to improve her writing efficiency (check out Step 2), I started keeping a spreadsheet to track how much I write at certain times of day and how I'm feeling. I'll do some rough analysis once I have some data. (I'm a real fan of data; if you are too, you may want to check out the quarterly Author Earning Reports run by Data Guy and Hugh Howey.)

Every Sunday I will (try to) update my word counter on the sidebar, an idea I gleamed from Hugh Howey, a very successful indie author. I'm up to 11,000 if I count early half outline/half draft versions of Act I, which I won't. So looks like 2800.

And we're back: On balance, resistance, and motivation

Clearly I'm becoming one of those blog people who announce to the internet that they're going to accomplish something great, only to peter out after the first few weeks of newness wears off. Or I could say that life got in the way, that my son was diagnosed with a condition that needed daily therapy and really wore us down, and it was just impossible to squeeze everything in, but it still feels like a huge excuse. Sigh.

I can't believe I started this blog almost a year ago now. It's funny that I should post around this time of year; it's a time of revival for me, a time for coming back to normalcy. Basically from mid-July to around early-Feb my full-time job takes 150%; I'm talking evenings and weekends of overtime and some serious burn-out. Thankfully I'm able to balance this with some down time during the rest of the year, and plan to use my saved up time to only work 3 days a week for the next few months (told you it was a lot of overtime). I had cleared my slate to focus on the novel; no teaching, no more students to train, just freedom! Unfortunately things won't work out perfectly though, as a colleague of mine took quite seriously ill and I have to make up her classes. So my free time is essentially going down the drain. Again. At least I can afford dry wall for the basement by picking up the extra work, heh. It just always seems that there's more and more work to do, and my own goals keep getting pushed back.

Resistance is my #1 enemy. It's hilarious that as part of my day job I help people plan out how to complete their own large writing projects. So I took one of the spreadsheets I make for them and made it work for me instead. There will be a mass restructuring at my day job in 5-years time, and I'm hoping to be well set up with my indie side income by then (HAH! But let's pretend that's a possibility for the sake of argument). Anyway, I worked out a spreadsheet that automatically generates a calendar to get 8 books out in 5 years. Each book is planned to be 100k and I'll use 5% of my time for plotting, 70% for writing, and 25% for editing/proofing. The spreadsheet automatically calculates multiple deadlines for each book: for the start/end of each stage, and then at the 25/50/75% points in between, for each of the 3 stages. Basically I always have a deadline looming so it's supposed to keep me on track. Even though I only use 70% of my time for writing, I still only need to write ~630 words/day on those writing days to get the whole thing done. Seems more manageable that way.

Another thing I'm doing is "Don't Break the Chain", which essentially involves printing out the whole year on one page and giving yourself an "X" when you accomplish your goal. So I bought a huge magnetic white board to put my "chains" on and stuck it on my dining room wall. Classy, no; motivating, yes. I've got the old standbys (exercise, eat better, get enough sleep), but also some personal goals (no more "dead mommy" syndrome / be in the moment). And of course, writing. But there I ran into a bit of a problem.

How do you track how much progress you've made with plotting? Counting words seems irrelevant, as there's no end-point word count when you know you'll be "done." Counting scenes seemed silly. I wanted to have SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based), but in the end had to be satisfied with "progress" for that component. I'll use my word count goal for the writing phase, but for the rest I'll just use my deadlines to keep me on track. I hope.

And now I have to go to bed so I can get my "get enough sleep" check. Which I have set at 7 hours to be Realistic, even though I've already determined I really need 8.5 and so even achieving the goal is something of a failure. Baby steps!

Just keep swimming

I always dislike those blogs that start off with good posts and then randomly go quiet, followed by an apologetic post saying the author has to get back to writing. And yet here I find myself.

The good news is that I no longer have two jobs; my teaching commitments ended last week as I passed in over 200+ graded exams, so that was a great relief. I now only have one student to mentor through the summer, so my workload has drastically reduced -- just one full-time job for the next 4 months!

Unfortunately my "life load" has increased... my oldest son was recently diagnosed with a medical condition which requires a significant amount of time and effort to help remedy, and this will persist for the foreseeable future. We weren't surprised by the diagnosis (and are grateful to have it, as we can now obtain the therapy he needs), but it's difficult to squeeze the extra appointments and sessions into our schedule. But we do it!

Awhile back, I wrote a post on how I'm trying to squeeze my writing into the early morning or late evening, but I found that if I stay up at night I just take care of random chores that need to be done; bring stuff like dealing with finances, trying to sell off the stuff in our basement, etc. If I went to bed early and tried to get up at 4am, I was still so tired that I'd just hit snooze even if I'd had 7 or 8 hours sleep by that point. I find this tragically ironic, because I always get up for work no matter how little sleep I've gotten, so deep down I feel like I just mustn't be motivated enough to write.

Writing a novel while working full time (and having a family)

I did a lot of googling when I was trying to figure out how to squeeze writing a novel into my already full day. I work full time, teach part-time, and have two young boys who want me all to themselves when I get home. Most sites seem to advocate writing while the rest of the family sleeps (either getting up quite early, or staying up late), but they seem to be written by people with only one job. How could I squeeze in a full-time job, a family, and another part-time job? My schedule looked something like this:

• 6:30 am - 7:30 am: Wake up and get ready for work
• 7:30 am - 5:30 pm: Go to work; work; come home from work
• 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm: Play with kids, have supper, do bedtime routine
• 8:30 pm - 10:30 pm: Exhaustion sets in, but day is not done; do laundry; make lunches for next day; piddle around on the internet in an effort to wake up
• 10:30 pm - 1:30 am or later: Do teaching prep after getting second wind
• 1:30 am: Collapse in bed

The first thing I had to do was find more time... I had applied for and been offered a second part-time job which would have been great for our family financially (I'm the only breadwinner), but I really wanted to take a chance on my dream of writing a novel. Declining that position meant more time to focus on my book, and while we would have had a better life if I had taken the position, I keep telling myself that I'll have a happier, more balanced life without three jobs...

Next, for my part-time job I decided to only teach courses that I had taught before, even if that meant not getting a teaching position. This drastically reduced the amount of prep work I had to do in the evenings. I also negotiated some flex time at my full-time job so I could do some teaching prep while still at the office.

With my work schedule as tight as I could make it, I had to figure out how little sleep I could get by on. On my old schedule I was a zombie. After I got to work I was semi-normal until about 1pm, and the rest of the day was a struggle. My kids often got the "I'm too tired" line when I got home. My evening work was inefficient and probably took twice as long as it should have. Creativity did not exist. Clearly, 5 hours of sleep a night was not enough!

After a semi-serious look into polyphasic sleep (not recommended by the way), I decided to just figure out how much sleep I actually needed. Adults typically need 6 - 10 hours of sleep, with 8 - 9 being the average (apparently those who only need 6 hours of sleep are genetically rare; see this cool article on Scientific American). I had been depriving myself of sleep all of my adult life, so I had no idea where I was on the spectrum. The solution? I started going to bed when my kids did (8:30 pm!) to see when I would naturally wake up. The first night I slept until my alarm went off -- 10 hours. Not good. No problem, I told myself, Probably working off some sleep debt. But how long would it take to work off 15+ years of it?!

After a week or so of going to bed at 8:30 pm, I started to naturally wake up between 4:30 am and 5:00 am. The more I had used my brain during the day, the closer to 5:00 am I woke up, which was pretty interesting. While I was saddened to learn that I needed 8 - 8.5 hours a night, it was better than the 9 or 10 hours I was estimating based on "catch up" nights following my crazy schedule.

The benefit to getting all this sleep was that I seemed to grow 30% more brain. My thoughts weren't in a fog anymore, and I didn't lose time to being inefficient. So even though I was getting more sleep, I got the same amount done. Win-win!

Knowing how much sleep I needed, I had to figure out if I should be an "early to bed, early to rise" kind of person or not. This had less to do with me and more to do with the little sleepless people in my house. My oldest son (5) regularly has nightmares, so he usually comes to our bed sometime between 1 am and 4 am and stays for the remainder of the night. When I tried to get up at 4:30 am, he wanted to get up... I had to tell creative white lies to get him to stay in bed (queue guilt...). On the plus side, my most aware hours were used on the book, which was awesome. Unfortunately I couldn't guarantee that I would get an uninterrupted 2 hours though, because my youngest son (almost 3) starts stirring around 4:30 am and needs to be settled regularly between then and 6:30 am when he gets up. My partner would normally settle him, but since I'm awake I feel I should do it (more of that guilt stuff...).

With mornings being less-than-ideal, I moved onto evenings, but encountered the same problems as when I was on my crazy schedule: my circadian rhythm has me at my sleepiest around 8:30 pm. I stare at the screen and re-read what I already have to kick my brain into gear, but I never really boot up before I have to head to bed at 10:30 pm. On the plus side, I get a guaranteed uninterrupted block of time... unless my partner wants to chat because I've been away all day... great for our relationship, but not so great for my book!

I'm still working out the early/late business, and flip-flop daily on which is better. Right now early is in the lead, because this evening I was exhausted and wrote this blog post instead of my book =P In the end I'll probably end up smooshing and squishing the novel into life's nooks and crannies, but it's nice to think that one day I may settle into a schedule!