Productivity Revisited - my problem solved; followup from 31 March

On 31 March this year, I posted a cautionary tale of productivity gone wrong. In that post, which you can see HERE, I described how last year, despite meeting my daily wordcount goals and writing well over 200,000 words, I finished almost nothing. 

My approach this year has been to limit, very severely, the things I allow myself to work on. At the New Year, when I make resolutions, I made a list of goals for 2017:

1. New edition of Grammar Without Tears

1. Companion volume to Grammar Without Tears

1. Two long stories or perhaps novellas

1. Two short stories (which had already been written and only needed revisions etc.)

The plan called for everything to be finished and in a ready state for publication or submission, and for the companion volume to Grammar Without Tears to be published.

This seems like a very small amount of achievement for a whole year, and I think that's one of the big hidden dangers in planning. If I'd written this list cold, I'd have been going, 'of course I can do WAY more than that.' However, the clarity afforded by Microsoft Project, used properly, in conjunction with data I've accumulated about how long things have taken in the past, told me that this little lot, based on a five-day working week and not going at it like a maniac, could be expected to take me to the end of November, and December is pretty well a write-off anyway, what with all the bites that get taken out of one's work time.

So how has it gone, so far? Well, as we approach the 2/3 point of the year, only one long story and the two books remain uncompleted. They are all substantially finished, though; only revisions and formatting, etc, remain. In addition, I've published one novella, one long story and one short story that were drafted last year.

The way I did this was that I now forbid myself to touch anything not on the project plan, and I allow myself to add anything to the plan only when a) it is inside my stated working hours and b) I am genuinely unable to work on anything that was on it. 

It hasn't been as much fun as last year when I wrote up a storm. By the end of April I'd finished all the actual writing part of the project, and since then it's been all revisions, and formatting, and proofreading. But things are getting finished, and there is a quiet joy to meeting a goal, especially when that involves publication, that is for me worth the short-term sacrifice. It's like graduation ceremonies - that moment when you stand up on the stage and receive your testamur makes you very, very glad of all the pub nights and days at the beach that were foregone in the preceding years.

Is there a lesson in this? Well, I don't know about you, but for me there certainly is, and it is that when you have spent twenty years developing a particular skill, you shouldn't stop using that skill when you take up a new line of work.

None of these would have got published if I'd kept to my frivolous ways.
Operation Badger
The Real Winner
Uncle Zan's Dog