Productivity 102

 In my last few posts I've been reviewing my daily work habits, and I've pulled my socks up a bit in response to that. But organising one's time through the working day or week isn't all there is to productivity; at least not for a writer, anyway. 

For anyone who hasn't been in touch with my life, I spent several years not doing much work after a bereavement, and last year was the first year that I really got back to taking work at all seriously. I could have done more, but I did write one book and finish the one I'd just started in 2021, when everything went to the devil. I finished that in October, and I've not written anything new since. 

Traditionally, I've always started the new year by starting a new book. I think I've done this almost every year since I went full time. But this year, I didn't. This year, I was still in the throes of releasing Operation Trash Bandit, because of Bloody Amazon taking three months to send a proof copy, and so I got out the one I finished in October, which had been in rotdown, and started on the edits. And when I finished the first edit and looked about for something else to do while I had that in edit rotdown before starting on first revisions, I decided to release Twice Seventeen, which is only out in paperback, in ebook and audio. So I've been working on that for the last week.

Now available HERE for your Kindle!

Being me, of course all this got scoped and loaded into Microsoft Project. I like to see the challenges of my year all in a glance. It's a hangover from my time in I.T. And it lets me see, realistically, how long things are likely to take, which is an amazingly long time when you figure in all the times one spends waiting for other people to do things. Beta readers, test listeners for audiobooks, getting proof copies, waiting for the State Library and National Library to catalogue things, etc. And then there are all the chunks of time for rotdown at various stages of the process. These things are why I can never be working on just one thing, except when I am actually drafting a new book. I always have several things on the go at different stages.

This works well for me in general; I finish writing something, and while it's in rotdown I do edits on something else, or wade through all the crap that's needed before I can actually release it. And this year is no exception, except that this morning, I looked at my project plan, which already fills the year up to mid-October, and realised that there is NO actual writing in it. And I've not written a word, except for this blog, since last October.

This is not good. A writer's job is to write. Everything else we do in our working day is to support that, to present the fruits of it to the public, and so on, but au fond, writing is what we do and without that, the rest of it is as nothing. So my mix of tasks in this year's project really, really sucks. I need to choose a new writing project, and pronto! 

So that concludes my New Year Productivity Review. Next week, I'll be writing about something very different - dog training!

Once More With Feeling!

I said in my last post that I was going to do another iteration of my time management. As I mentioned, my efficiency has been somewhat impaired by having a broken toe, but after the first few days it wasn't as bad as I had feared. So, I did in fact record another sample day. It isn't as typical a day as it ought to have been, because it was actually the second of January, and I was still recovering from my extremely late night on NYE. Anyway, as I'd been trying for days to remember to record my day, I couldn't bear to waste the one time I actually did remember, so I'm going to analyse that (just like Robert DeNiro, only without the being so handsome and talented).

0600: Shout at the alarm and try to go back to sleep. I usually wake up feeling great, but this morning I have a headache. I am still jet lagged from New Year, after staying up to stupid o'clock and then sleeping in until another stupid o'clock. Don't judge me unless you went to bed early and sober on NYE.

0615: Drag myself out of bed, make coffee and let Chips out.

Chips.

0645: Check on Chips. He is lying down in the little enclosed area we made to protect my mother's grave, eating the leg of a calf. Heaven knows where he got it; he must have been off property without permission. I check on the leg and note with great relief that it had been dead for some time. Have shower and get dressed. More coffee.

 

0730: Put last night's washing in the dryer and put on another load. Clean up the laundry.

0745 Take Chips into town to do training.

0815: Breakfast (fruit salad). Wash up.

0830: Check the dryer but alas, it is all still damp. Do some German on Duolingo.

0900: do physiotherapy exercises. Take a break to read some of a really fun book that I have for advance review.

0930: Do more physio and take pills. Mess about with the tracking device I have for Chips, which I have just found after he took off his collar in the middle of the back paddock almost a year ago. The control unit is not charged. Leave it on the charger; it had been on all night and is at 4%. Stronly suspect this whole system is a useless POS, but as Chips doesn't go walkabout any more, it's not a big problem. My own instinct is to throw the lot in the trash, but it was a birthday gift from my husband, so I feel I have to do my best to get it working.

0945: Water flowers and fill up the bird bath and dog water. Fold and put away the washing from the tumble dryer.

1000: Start work. This is the first edit of a book I finished last October. I already have a great stack of notes for revision. Set it all up, pause to make the bed while I nerve myself to the task, and start reading my printed ms.

This is the mockup of the cover design for the book I'm working on. It's about a dragon. I still need a really catchy title, so if you think of one, message me immediately! I will give you a free book.

1100: Take a break for some more housework. Clean husband's study and the chapel, and continue with the mending, which like the poor is always with us.

1200 The sewing is too hard on my hands to do for more than half an hour. Waste an hour on socical media waiting for lunch.

1300 Lunch. Tuna Mornay.

1330 Back to work.

1400 Take a break to wash up the lunch things, and resume work. I have made revision notes up to the end of chapter 5. That's 5 of 35, so the whole thing should take a week. Curse bitterly, because I had planned 4 days for it. Feel discouraged and take a break to do some more German on Duolingo.

1510 Go to Furpile. It is a sad little furpile with only me and the dogs; I miss our cats, who both died last year. But I have the comfort of dogs around me. And it's a very good comfort, and soothed by it, I fall asleep.

1630 Wake up parched and get a cool drink. Think about going on with the mending, but I know that abusing my damaged tendons will not lead anywhere good, so return to work.

1700 Take a few minutes to wash my coffee things. Return to work.

1800 With eight chapters done I feel better about the day. Call it quits for now and pick up my book. I'm reading Spectres and Stockings by Kevin Hess. For those who haven't encountered these books, The Trials of Bardly Whitsend series, they are a real hoot. They are much in the style of the late great Sir Terry, and they're really a lot of fun. If you enjoyed the Discworld series (and let's face it, if you don't like those, your soul is dead), then you really should check this series out. You can find it here: 

The Trials of Bardly Whitsend

1815 Realise with horror that it is Drinkies Time, and prise my husband away from the television to make my Rum and Dare. A drink just doesn't taste the same if I make it myself. We sit out on the verandah to enjoy the last of the day while the kids rush about in the orchard.

Our children at play.

2000 Go over to the kitchen to feed the dogs and then ourselves.

2045 back to my desk for a quick check of emails and messages.

2100 go to bed to read, but despite really enoying the book, I am getting back into my normal routine, and I can't stay awake for more than 10 minutes.

Analysis

 When I look back over the day, I can see with pleasure that I got a lot of work done. However, I was still working, on and off, three hours after I was supposed to have finished for the day. This was to make up for the fact that I used a lot of my morning session for doing household tasks instead of actually working. That's really something to watch, and with a four hour working day, those four hours need to be strictly kept for work. That will be my next effort. 

That said, however, I finished the book edit yesterday, having taken only six days for it. The four days I'd planned was optimistic anyway, as the state of my first draft is extremely rough, due I think to the number of times I have picked it up and dropped it since starting it in a blaze of enthusiasm early in 2021, I'm pretty happy with six days for the first edit. 

NOT THERE YET - Time management in progress

 In my last post I analysed my sample day and determined that a change of working hours was required. I then evaluated my new day layout over a weekend and a working day. 

I am delighted to report that my new system worked extremely well. I got everything done in the mornings that I needed to get done, and had days that were at once productive, calm and enjoyable. This worked fantastically well over the weekend, and also on Monday when I returned to work.

Tuesday was Christmas Eve, and although it ought to have started well just like the other days, I broke my toe before I was even dressed. Not one of those vestigial little toes on the outside that don't really do anything, but one of the long middle ones. This really put a crimp in everything, as my movements are now slow and constrained, and further, the lack of physical activities such as vigorous housework and walking and playing wtih my dog means that I am not sleeping as well as before, and also that I have less energy through the day and particularly when I wake up in the morning, which has always been my best time. 

Further, the mere fact of Christmas, with all of its entertaining, and drinking, and fancy food, further both took up what energy I did have, and diverted my use of it, so that if I weren't lucky enough to have the Perfect Husband, we would now be pretty well drowning in squalor. Therefore, I've managed little other than being nice to my guests and a bit of washing up. I did get a little work done on Boxing Day in the morning, before our guest arrived, and finished a couple of things, which was pleasing. 

So now, with Christmas behind us, in my newly impaired state, it's time to take another look. What else has changed? How can I refine the system? Or is it better to hold off on further messing with it until my foot is repaired?

One thing my life has taught me is that making things consequent on other things is rarely, if ever, a good idea. We've all been there. Oh you'll take that trip/lose weight/quit smoking when work settles down and your life is less stressful, will you? Good luck with that. Therefore, I'm not inclined to postpone my lifestyle review just because of this injury. A good daily structure should be able to cope with these things, even if it's disrupted for a few days just at first.

So the new hours are working for me, or they were, anyway, and further, I'm happy to say that I'm once again waking up at a sensible time in the morning, 4:30, 5 a.m., so that's very nice to have. But the fact is that the morning list was based on the assumption that I'd be bustling briskly about, fully mobile and all bushy-tailed with morning energy. And I'm just not; not physically anyway, although I feel bright enough now I've sat down at my keyboard. 

So, I review the morning list. The only really physical things on it are the housework, and walking my dog. My husband can take my dog for a walk for me, and the housework...well, perhaps I just need to lower my expectations a bit. Once the first few days are past, it ought to be possible to do everything, just not as fast, so perhaps there will be a little more dust, perhaps the linens won't be changed quite so often, but whatever.

This dodgy character needs plenty of exercise.

So, another evaluation day is called for, I think, once I've had a few more days to shake down. 

MAKING IT BETTER - TROUBLESHOOTING THE DAY

 If you read my last post you'll have seen my itemised account of exactly how I spent my time through the day. Now, today, I'll be analysing that. This was the whole point of the exercise - to examine how I'm using my time and check whether it's working well (I knew it wasn't) and how it can be improved.

The first thing to note about yesterday is that from the point of view of productivity, it was utterly pathetic. When I think of what a workhorse I used to be, I feel quite ashamed. Obviously, my time management needs some work. That's what we're doing here. So what I will be doing is working through the day, identifying what I see as the main problems, and devising ways to address them for a better result.

The first thing I notice is how the day begins. As the day starts, so the day will go - I've always believed that. So, starting it in such a lazy way, slopping around in my dressing gown and playing computer games, is far from ideal. Further, just for background, my working hours are supposed to be from 6 a.m. to 12. This may seem odd, but those hours had been working extremely well for me as they took advantage of my energy level which is highest in the early mornings. It's usual for me to wake at 4 or 5 in the morning, so historically, I could be all dressed and ready for the day before 6. My alarm goes off at 6 (6:15 on the weekend) but that is only a sort of failsafe; I expect to be up long before then.

I'll stress here that this was working really, really well for me until recently. Until Ferret died. When my poor boy was alive, I used to be up several times through the night for him, and often having to stay up for some time. This had gone on for years; sleeping through the night was just not a thing for me. Now, however, since he's been gone, I find myself sleeping right through the night more or less, and when the alarm goes I am still sleeping, and I'm slow to drag myself out and even hit snooze sometimes. So starting actual work at 6 is obviously not a thing. There's the first problem identified - my working hours no longer fit my lifestyle. I don't know whether, once I've caught up the massive sleep debt I probably incurred over the last three years, I might return to my established patterns, waking at four. I hope so, for there's nothing I like more than being up then, alone in a sleeping world. For now, though, I have to accept that it's not happening, and therefore I think the sensible thing is to change my hours.

My beautiful Ferret, in happier times.

I have decided to try new hours in two sessions - 10 to 12 and 1 to 3. Yes, it's shorter than before, but four hours that I actually work is a hell of a lot better than six hours where I dick around. 

This means I'll have roughly four hours in the morning before I start work, and I think it is not unreasonable to expect that during that time I accomplish the following:

Shower and get dressed
Walk the dog and do training
Do the day's housework
Have breakfast and wash up
Take my pills
Make the bed
Review my plan for the day.

So that's the solution to the first problem. Just this one change ought to make a big, big difference, and I'm tempted to stop here and re-evaluate. In fact, that's what I'll do. It's Friday today, so I'll have the weekend to shake down and see if I can fit all of those things into the four hours from six to ten. There will be something wrong, I think, if I can't, but then that would need to be addressed. There's never any point in trying to build on a foundation that's wobbly.

A Day In The Life

This is my life in the lead-up to Christmas. I'll be giving a detailed account of how I spend my day. This is done for what I consider a good reason, which I will explain in my following post./

0600 Alarm goes off. Turn it off and go back to sleep.

0730 Struggle out of bed and make first coffee. Mess about on the computer, mostly playing Torn. Make second cup ot coffee.

0830: Chastise self for wasting time on a working day.  Cook breakfast: bacon, beans, mushrooms.

0905: Resume watching Brandon Sanderson lecture. Q&A about character. Although this course has not provided the very specific help I was looking for this time, it would be a waste not to finish it, and it's as good a way as any to spend my time while I wait for various events on other projects .  Brandon Sanderson's lectures are never a waste, and I hear some interesting points and add a note to my list for revisions of The Dragon and the Dairymaid, which I finished drafting in Octoner.

1000: Take a break to have a shower and get dressed. Yes, people, I've been working in my dressing gown. Hey, it was good enough for Hawkeye Pearce. Once I am all dressed and respectable, I go to make coffee number 4. Mittens, my feral friend, comes in for a late breakfast, so I spend some time with her and by the time I get back to my desk it is ten forty.

Mittens. 

10:40: resume Mr Sanderson's excellent lecture.

1045: lecture finishes. Take a reading break. I am reading Traitor's Harbour by Patrick O'Brian; it's really good. REALLY good.

1100: Go on Facebook to see if any of the people I'm waiting for to do things have responded. They haven't. Get sidetracked scrolling and give some good advice to a man who is grieving the loss of his cat - a sad little benefit from all the times my own heart has been broken, being able to do this.

1123: resume the Sanderson lectures. This next lecture is about publishing.

1200: call it a day. Waste a little time online and go to lunch. As my husband is away, I can't be arsed cooking, and eat random crap that I find in the refrigerator.

1230: Furpile. This too is a sad little occasion since both of our cats died this year. Once upon a time it had the spiritual punch of a cathedral. That was when there were five of us in the pile. Now only two of the original members survive. I used to connect to them all, feeling our energy surge back and forth and enrich us all. Now I just have a short, miserable sleep.

This is how it used to be. Now, only Aggie (centre) is still with us.

1415: I drag myself out and wash up the lunch things. There aren't many, because I was too lazy to cook.

14:30 Now it is time for my daily stint at Duolingo. I got the habit so strongly during my year and 9 months learning Italian that I found I didn't want to give it up, and now that I've finished the Italian course I'm going on with German, and refreshing my French on the side.

14:50 Twenty minutes is enough to accomplish a respectable amount of German, and it's not too hot today, so I can take Chips for a walk and needn't wait for the cool of the evening. That's good, because the longer the day wears on, the less energy I have. Already I'd rather lie about and sleep some more. But duty calls, and a dog must have his walk.

1518: By the time we get back, I am energised enough to attack Mount Ironmore. I've been nibbling away at this for days; the totality of it is far too much to contemplate at one time. Assisted by another really really good book on Audlble (To Visit The Queen, by Diane Duane), I give it my best yet again, and by four o'clock I've managed quite a respectable amount, although there is still plenty left.

1600: I have now reached the point where I can allow myself to relax with my book. The Aubrey and Maturin series is a good one, and I've enjoyed every one of the books up to this point, but this one is particularly fine; there seems more humour in it than is usual for O'Brian; perhaps room has been made for it by the welcome absence of rubbish about ships and naval battles.  I pause to clear up the accumulated glasses, coffee things etc, in the small kitchen, but quickly return to the sofa. I need to water the flowers on Emily's grave, but at five it is still too hot and I must wait for dusk, lest the plants be burnt.

1900: Three enjoyable hours later, it is now time to go to the kitchen for our dinner. I try to eat early these days, as I have read so many times that one sleeps better that way. Chips has minced pork and chicken wings. I have cold chicken and salad, and afterwards we sit on the front verandah for a while to enjoy the cool of the evening. I have a glass of my husband's port; Chips has water out of the stone bird bath, which he appears to consider a greater delicacy than the water from his beautiful ceramic bowl.

2000: After washing up and a few minutes to check my emails and messages, Chips takes himself for his evening constitutional, while I repair to the sitting room with my book.

2100: Once I've received my nightly phone call from Himself, I can repair to bed, to spend as much time as I can stay awake reading.

In my next post, I'll be sharing why I did this detailed log of my day, and what I've learned from it.

K is for the Killer Season - THE DOLDRUMS OF DECEMBER

 'Tis the season, hoot the carols, and indeed it is. I've a great pile of really super presents for my family and friends, waiting only for gift wrapping. All of my Christmas cards have been sent out and I have even received two! I've invited people for the celebration, including two extras, and all in all I should be feeling very, very smug. And I am pleased, of course. It took me many years, but I've finally overcome my hatred of Christmas, and I look forward to a relaxed, happy couple of days with my family.

That all lasts until I sit down at my desk. Everything is stalled. I had, of course, a list of things I wanted to achieve this year, and I've got most of it done, truly. It has been the first year I've really got back to work properly, since Emily died. So I wrote one book and finished another, and I've published the next in the Operation Tomcat series and two of them also as audiobooks. The final month of the year was to have been spent finishing anything that wasn't finished, and generally tidying away loose ends.

But the new book part of the project can't be finalised until I get the proof copy of the paperback. I've ordered it, and also the proof copy of another book that has the paperback edition outstanding, but wonderful Amazon say they can't be delivered until 5 FEBRUARY. So that's those two things doomed to remain undone this year.

The audiobook project has similarly stalled. I was too cheap to pay for the big fat no-holds-barred subscription to the AI voice service, so I am stopped half way through converting Book 4 in the series, as I have run out of characters until mid-month when my next month's payment kicks in. I do have the third book in the series ready to go, bnt it's out with beta listeners, and my small team of those, although they started off really keen, have apparently got bored with it and I am still waiting, six weeks or so later, for them to finish that approximately two hour listen. Not cool, people. When it's a beta anything, you're holding up my work if you suddenly goof off.

The new novel I finished is in rotdown, having a good long rest so that I can have some distance from it before starting on revisions, so that can't proceed either.  In desperation I have been trying to resume work on the other half finished novel I have, although it's a huge job and certainly cannot be done in the paltry time remaining in the year. And even there I'm stalled, because I need a team of very minor characters for a space mission, and somehow my creativity has deserted me. In desperation, I turned to Brandon Sanderson's writing course, which he has updated again since I last audited it. There are two weeks of it all about character creation, so I'm hoping that will get me started. Being me, though, I was unable to watch just those without watching the whole course from the beginning. Because, you know, I might MISS something. So I am finding it very, very hard to motivate myself in the mornings. If I didn't have set working hours, I probably wouldn't manage to sit down at my desk at all.

But I DO have set working hours, and a tidy desk, and so here I am, writing my blog as a kind of warm-up. Because no one wants to hear my excuses for not working, not even me. After I post this, I'll be going on with Mr Sanderson's lectures. And hopefully, something, somewhere in there will help me to get started on writing the next section of my still untitled work in progress.

And soon, soon, it will be New Year.

SAVED BY THE SANDERSON

 It's happened to me again. I'm stuck in my new book. I've been wambling around, finding excuses not to sit at my desk, not to get on with it.

The problem is more or less mechanical; I need a First Contact Team for an alien planet, probably up to a dozen characters, only two of whom will be important to the story, but the others have to be there. And I just don't have them.

There is lots of material out there about creating characters. You can see it in every second-rate writing course, often it even starts with a character sheet, like the ones we used to use for Dungeons and Dragons. Most of these people advise you even to start your whole writing project with this. Define your main character. Then they witter on about a lot of rubbish like height, weight, colour of eyes, colour of hair etc. None of which is the slightest use if you do not have a story.

For me, the story is always the thing, and usually my characters emerge from that. They will be what the story needs them to be, and this generally works really well for me; in fact I can't really think of an instance where it hasn't. But then I don't usually have this big cast of background characters. I've already written a lot of supporting characters among my alien race of people, but those were easier, somehow; their context was a whole society, whereas here I am limited to the members of a First Contact Team of a spacegoing people. And I've been really stuck on it.

And then I remembered Brandon Sanderson. Wonderful Brandon Sanderson, who saved Bloodsucking Bogans, probably my favourite of all my books. I had almost completed the first draft of it, but when I read over it, it was absolute shite. It was so bad that I was facing just ditching the whole project, yet I couldn't bear to, because it was my pet idea that I'd had for years and been so looking forward to writing. 

But help was at hand, for I was taking Sanderson's course at the time. In case you don't know, Brandon Sanderson teaches a graduate course in fiction writing at some university, and because the man is a truly good and generous human being and an absolute mensch, he has the entire course videoed and makes it available, free, on Youtube. And it's amazing what one can learn from it. My big takeaway this time (I was taking the course for the second time, because he updates it every few years) was a big section about how to figure out what is wrong with your draft, and how to fix it. This advice worked so well for me that I was able to finish the book, and publish it without shame, and it remains one of my favourite things that I've done, and in fact has taken a place among my own feel-good reads. Yes, people, sometimes I read my own books.

Anyway, I had a bit of a look, and the wonderful Mr Sanderson has indeed updated the course again since then, and this time, there is apparently a big section about creating characters. So I'm entirely confident that my problem will be solved.

I was tempted to go straight to that section, but having benefited so greatly from this course before, I'm going to take the disciplined route and watch the whole thing from the beginning. One never knows what other gems one will find.