We had a hot and busy weekend. With another heatwave on the go, it was starting to get quite unbearable. We kept as cool and hydrated as we could, but it wasn’t fun. By Monday this week, it was expected to be up in the 90s (31ºC min), and we’re just not geared up for that kind of heat in the UK.
Extreme heat. Extreme snow. Extreme rain. Extreme weather of any kind. The UK just isn’t trained for it.
Friday
I wrote a few more words for End of the Rainbow, for the great novella challenge. I did some more draft work for the 50 murder mystery prompts workshop. I did some more draft work for the 50 crime mystery prompts workshop. And I had a hair appointment.
Saturday
On Saturday, I carried on working on both of the workshop assignments, but I made an executive decision to only finish the third and final assignment for the murder mystery prompts workshop. Time was running out on me, and I still had to finish the 8th book in the great novella challenge too.
We did the shopping, but only went to the butcher’s and the supermarket. I had a look at my daily schedule and tried to work out where I could fit more in, or what could quite happily go in order to fit something else in. I asked the poet to have a look and he came up with the same conclusion that I had.
I was trying to fit too many different jobs into the space of just one day.
And every time I switch from one job to the other, even though I try to work in 50-minute Pomodoros at a time, I’d still be losing quality productive time getting warmed up again for each different job. Food for thought, and I set it to percolate at the back of my brain.
And then we had to go out for a Monkey Dust gig.
Sunday
We didn’t get to bed until 2:30am on Sunday morning, which meant a lie-in on Sunday. If we didn’t have a family birthday meal to go to, we probably would have stayed in bed much longer than we did. I wrote about 1,700 words of the assignment before we went out.
There were 8 of us for dinner, and we had quite a long, leisurely meal, When we got back I worked all evening until I had just under 4,000 half-decent words. I sent it straight off, which is what he prefers us to do, by which time it was almost 11pm. We’d been up just about 12 hours.
Monday
The first job I did on Monday morning was look at that schedule again and put timings on the daily chores to match the time slots in my hard copy diary.
Between 8am and 7pm, I have 10 hour-long time slots available to me. Three of those are allocated to meal or refreshment breaks, starting with the ‘dirty cuppa’ first thing. I could have included our evening meal as well, but that would have given me 11 time slots and straight away the extra one was already taken up.
If I’m brainstorming or planning or doing something quick like sharing the gig list or doing Monkey Dust admin, I only need a 30-minute slot at most. The extra 30 minutes should have given me wiggle room. But instead of using those extra 30 minutes for wiggle room, I was falling back on them. Brain already knew there’s time already allocated to things that run over, so things automatically ran over.
Very bad discipline.
So the only thing for it was to allocate accurate 30-minute slots to short, 30-minute jobs. There should still be wiggle room in there. I mean, how long does it take to hit a share button on FB? But there will also still be some jobs for which I do need that bit of wiggle room. And keeping to 30-minute slots as a minimum should cover those.
I gave myself 2 hours to do this initial work. If it works for the next couple of weeks, then I only have to duplicate things and carry them over to the next month. As with most things, the initial time layout saves extra time in the long run. And that’s what I started with on Monday.
I followed that with Monday’s blog post, which I hadn’t done on Friday due to catching up after the power cut on Thursday and not having any time to look at it over the weekend either. We nipped out to take Son #1 his birthday card and present, and when we got back it was Monkey Dust admin.
I’d only allocated 30 minutes for this, but I forgot to time it. Instead I just went full steam ahead, creating the poster, sharing the poster to FB, creating a poster for IG, logging in and sharing that IG poster, creating an event on FB, sharing the event on FB, and logging in and adding the gig to Diane’s Gig List.
When the poet retires from the band, they’ll have to find someone else to do all of that, or else not bother. To ease them in gently, I added 2 of the other band members to the FB page as admins…only one of them picked up the invitation…
I transferred back June’s leftover money from one bank account to the other, then transferred in July’s spending money to the spending bank account. Another task that takes only moments but one I have to remember to do all the same.
I wrote and scheduled yesterday’s blog post. I had to go and create the images first, one for ‘hello July’ and the other for ‘July wrapup’. Fortunately, both the hello and the wrapup are quite quick and easy. I just have to do a lot of planning work to get everything to fit in nicely.
In between his own work, the poet put through, hung out and brought in washing. Just like I usually do when I’m not up against the clock.
I still had 2 jobs to do: finish and submit Book 8 for the great novella challenge; and write a short story. I’d done a lot and it was very warm. So first I went to have a 5-minute lie down on the bed. I’d twisted my knee some time over the weekend, and sitting in one position all the time wasn’t really helping it.
I was very good and got up again, and returned to work.
Book 8 was already just under 15,000 words, which is the minimum number of words for the challenge. Before tea I brought that up to just over 17,000 words and came to a suitable ending for Part 3 of the book if it’s published as just one. I still have to come up with the epilogue, but that’s for the whole series and not just for Book 3.
After tea, I set about merging scenes into chapters until I had 15 chapters. I sent it off, created the bragging graphic, and shared the graphic everywhere. As this is Book 8 of 12, I also shared the graphic of all 8 books to date.
The short story fell by the wayside, as I didn’t want to be working until 11pm again. I had one spare ‘breathing’ time 60-minute slot in yesterday’s planner, so I reduced a 2-hour job to just 1 hour and moved the short story to there.
When I’m writing Draft 1, I like to allocate around 2 hours so I can get my teeth into it. The longer stories I’m writing for assignments are taking longer than 2 hours, so that will be revisited if I make a habit of writing longer stories.
We’ll do a Tuesday catchup tomorrow.
The older I get, the less tight a schedule I want. I always do better with large swaths of uninterrupted time than small chunks of it. I start resenting a tight schedule, and then I sabotage myself.
Perhaps mine is age-related too.