… but then, Mondays are always a good start. I just struggle for the rest of the week after that.
I should have been having a holiday yesterday and today, as the poet is using up his annual leave before he loses it at the end of the year. I had too much work to do, though. And so I worked yesterday and I’ll work today. However, I’m not going mad.
Walking to work works at 9am much better than it did at 8:45am, so that’s a keeper, I think. Yesterday, the poet came with us before heading off to do some fishing. The social hour has been changed to just ‘social’ in the diary, and it’s 45 minutes instead of 60 minutes.
Social time on a Monday is also when I go and do a bit of admin on Diane’s Gig List. We have a new post scheduled every Monday, so I go in and close off commenting on the previous Thursday’s gig list post and I remove last week’s post asking for the coming week’s gigs. Then I make the new Monday post an announcement.
This week I also did a little bit of Monkey Dust work… I went in and added their gig for the coming Saturday. If I don’t add it, the poet sometimes forgets to add it to the Thursday post – his own band! Plus, it also means he doesn’t have to think about his own band too much when he already has a lot of gigs to upload.
I’ve set up alarms on the phone for breaks and things, and that’s working too. My phone pinged at two minutes before 10 o’clock to remind me to stop doing ‘social’ and start doing ‘my work’. So I grabbed a cuppa and did as I was told.
It’s times like these that I wish (a) I liked ‘proper’ coffee, and (b) I had a coffee machine, because then I could just go and grab a coffee, add milk and sweeteners, and it wouldn’t take time waiting for the kettle to boil. In break times, though, it’s the waiting time I utilise to do household chores.
First of my own jobs was the diary for the week. This is a Friday job. I can’t remember why I didn’t do it on Friday. Next, I did some project management work on Asana and Excel. This included adding the project for NaNoWriMo as there’s prep work for the rest of this month on that.
Working out NaNo, I miscalculated and had to claw back two of the holidays I was going to take with the poet. I think I mis-counted, because December starts on a Wednesday. But I updated the NaNoWriMo project to the end of November and updated it on Asana.
I hadn’t kept the 10-project ghostwriting planner updated, probably due to us being in a Covid house, so I started that again from at least the beginning of October. I can’t really justify the time at the moment to go in and update September too.
I duplicated an older 10-project planner for my own longer writing work and added the current projects to that. (The Fool and Project Management for Writers.)
My phone pinged, and I put some washing through while I boiled a kettle for my morning break. I also topped up the bird feeders.
On Asana, I’ve moved ghostwriting (2) client to mostly Tuesdays and Thursdays, apart from this current week when she’s Monday (revisions), Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
I created a new short story-writing project for The Ace of Cups and added the dates for each of the steps for that.
I worked out how to make a template project file within each project parent. e.g. The Ace of Cups comes under the ‘short stories’ parent project. And I added an upcoming short story writing competition to the short stories parent too and deleted the parent project I’d started for writing competitions.
And then I did some prep work for NaNoWriMo. The Ace of Cups overlaps into some of that prep work as it’s a main recurring character’s back story.
The phone pinged to remind me to break for dinner.
The gas went off on the kitchen hob twice while I was trying to boil my eggs for the week. The boiler went out too. But when the boiler came back on, the hob starting working again, but it was very noisy. That could have been a bit tricky, had I not noticed everything had gone suddenly quiet. I’ve never known the gas go off before.
At the end of my dinner break, my phone pinged and I was on with client work. Only two clients yesterday, both ghostwriting. But I ended up doing a bit of overtime.