Oops, skipped a day …
From this week, my 10-project writing planner has a new project attached. It’s a proofreading job, and I want it finished by the end of Friday. Next week, I add a different project to my planner.
This week’s proofreading job means I’ll have 2 projects on the go at the same time for the first time since I started to properly use the planner. Next week’s proofreading job means the same, as this week’s should be finished by then.
Next week’s proofreading job is projected to take 2 weeks. Then I’ll consider adding TWO new jobs to the planner rather than just one.
I already have Catch the Rainbow on there as a writing job, and that one should be finished by the end of August. I know it’s my Camp NaNo project, which ends this week, but I split the rewrite over 2 months in the hope I might actually complete it.
This week, Twee Tales Too is the first proofreading job. Then next week’s proofreading job is The Life of Richard Cadbury. These are both proper proofreads rather than revisions as they’re both about ready to go.
By the third week of August, I’d like 1 rewriting job (Catch the Rainbow), and 2 writing jobs to finish (possibly Diary of a Pussycat – meaning I need to finish writing the last few exercises – and 52 Books in 52 Weeks – meaning I need to finish reading the last few books too), as I won’t have anything ready for revision yet.
My new start time, aka “at the desk”, is, therefore, 9am instead of 10am, which means that breakfast and the first phase of household chores (i.e. washing machine started, dishwasher emptied, or something) needs to be done by 9am. The chores will be continued during my 10-minute Pomodoro breaks.
A 9am start time means I get 3 hours to do my own work before doing client work in the afternoons, starting with a client hour before dinner at 12 noon. Dinner is currently 1pm, but if I regularly get hungry earlier, then dinner will be at 12 noon and clients will get from 1pm onwards between them.
If there’s no content editing work in, the afternoon client gets an extra hour – or I’ll take it. Otherwise, the afternoon client gets 3 hours every day too – plus extra if I have to do overtime.
I’ve shifted the blog back to writing and posting it on the same day. So it will be appearing towards the middle of the afternoon rather than at 8am the following morning.
Friday’s editing job took considerably longer than I thought it would. The author had mixed up her commas and full stops, and that’s not easily changed using Find & Replace. The upshot of that is … I didn’t do Day 16 of Camp NaNo. And I finished working at about 7pm on Friday. So my work schedule is still quite flexible when required.
On Saturday, we had to go into town to do some shopping. When we got back, Mister I-hate-Gardening harvested his first crop of petit pois, and we sat in the garden shelling the peas together.
Then we had an early socially-distanced post-lockdown belated birthday party barbecue to go to. (Did you get all of that? You can read it again, I’ll wait …)
On Sunday, we got up late, as the early start didn’t necessarily translate to an early finish, although we were only the second to leave the party. Mister I-hate-Gardening did some more garden stuff, and I caught up on a bit of washing.
I didn’t get around to catching up on any work. But we had a nice weekend and we enjoyed the party.
This morning, Monday, I was “at my desk” at … (drumroll …) 9am! Ta-da!
I checked the content-editing workroom to see if there was any work for me this morning. There wasn’t. I did a quick 5-minute daily email declutter and a quick daily job search (nothing I fancied). And I checked the workroom again, just to make sure. (There still wasn’t any work for me.)
Then I made a cup of coffee, for a change, started the timers, and began to write.
I did just over an hour of writing and just under an hour of proofreading. I wrote 2,001 words against this morning’s daily target of 2,033 words. (The target changes daily, depending on how many words I’ve written so far – it’s 2,035 for tomorrow.) Not great, but not bad, and there’s still time to catch up. Plus, I made it through the 30,000-word mark.
The early start did, in fact, mean I was hungry earlier, so I had an early dinner before doing the proofreading. Then I proof-read 26 pages against a daily target of 14 pages. It will need some tweaking before finalising for publication, but it’s clean otherwise.
By 2pm, my own work and my dinner was done, as I awarded myself today’s extra hour, and I went to collect the new job from my afternoon client.