Back into the groove

You know when the schedule’s starting to work again when you get an extra 10 – 20 minutes in which to do whatever you want. Some people may re-jig their schedule as they can probably squeeze something extra into that extra time. But I prefer to reward myself for being busy because, otherwise, I just may burn out.

Today, I’m writing an extra blog post! πŸ™‚ (Lucky you lot!)

The diary has had a bit of a re-jig today and the item HOUSEWORK no longer features. This doesn’t mean I’m not doing any housework any more. I’m just doing it in bursts of 10 minutes when I can, either before the working day starts, while I’m making a drink or having a break, or after work ends. After all, if I had a “proppa job” I wouldn’t be here to do the housework.

The poet started his new job yesterday and his hours are quite different to his last job. Now he starts at 8am and finishes at 4:30pm. This means he’s out of the house by 7:15am and probably back by 5 – 5:15pm, and it adds another half-an-hour onto my own working day – especially if I omit that pesky housework thing. And that meansΒ I have 8 working sessions per day instead of 7, in 1-hour blocks, but I also get 2 x 15-minute breaks and 1 x 30-minute lunch break.

Mornings will be mostly admin things, surveys, emails, catching up on social media, etc. But 3 times a week there’s a blog post – Mon (Baggins Bottom), Wed (Words Worth Writing), Fri (either/or). On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the extra hour is currently pro-bono work and gig list/band admin respectively.

Dinner’s at 1:15pm, and I also get to catch up on friends’ blogs, social media, etc, now. So watch out for that extra visitor to your site.

Four afternoon sessions mean at least one writing hour per day and 2 editing hours (either my own or a client’s). Then I get a study hour on Mondays (which is also writing, really), a job-search hour on Tuesdays, another study hour on Wednesdays, an extra admin hour on Thursdays (diary work), and an invoices/admin/PC mtce hour on Fridays.

The diary, as ever, is completed in pencil, with appointments and date-specific work going in first, as it comes in, and then everything else going in around that on a weekly basis. And because it’s in pencil, it’s also still very flexible for anything that comes in unexpected, such as some extra pro-bono work I needed to do this morning, because the press dictated it.

So, there’s my extra 20 minutes done with. Back to work and … “writing work”. Wahey!

 

4 thoughts on “Back into the groove

  1. You are so organised. You put me to shame! Hope all goes well with the new job and the new routine for both of you. Its so much better when we have the longer days to play with also.

    1. If I didn’t at least try to organise my time, I’d never get anything done and end up reading or playing games or faffing on Facebook all day. At least now the FB thing is a bit of a reward.

      Yes, we’re going to use those extra hours of daylight over the coming weeks.

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