Wednesday 8 April 2026: Catching up…

In my bid to catch up and reset, the plan yesterday was to touch everything at least once and then move on until I was up to date.

Of course some things are not negotiable, such as walking the dog. He has to have a walk and the exercise is good for me. I have to get into the habit for when we don’t have a big enough garden that he doesn’t get enough exercise either. I have to eat, so meals have to stay too.

Other things, such as household chores, reading half-hours, recorded workshops (not live!), client segments and writing slots, those aren’t set in stone, and I have to get into the mindset that if it doesn’t get done in its designated time slot it will still be there tomorrow and I must let it go for today.

But yesterday, I just wanted to touch everything once so it all had an equal chance to get done, and a new start.

This means I merged my dirty cuppa with my reading half hour, not something I’m willing to do every day as that full hour gives me a good start to the day. But if I’m behind and it’s my own darned fault, well then…

I didn’t feed the birds and I didn’t do any laundry, but I did empty the dishwasher. Household chores touched.

The dog had his full half-hour walk (not negotiable), I caught up on blogging (mine and friends’), but instead of allocating 15 minutes to daily words, they got just 10 minutes yesterday. Daily words touched.

I collected a new workshop on dialogue, that was a Kickstarter reward for something I backed. I already had the other pop-up workshop in the reward, on what to do when you’re stuck, but I can pass that code along to another writer if I know anyone who’d like it…?

Then I caught up with the writing into the dark workshop. I thought I had Weeks 5 and 6 to catch up on, but I only had Week 6 outstanding, so that was a bonus. But once I’d completed it, I felt a bit study-weary and removed all the due dates on the remaining workshops in the depth writing bundle. I felt as though any more just wouldn’t sink in and that would be a waste. Instead, I filled the time with the client work in the hope of getting all of that cleared a bit sooner.

But, study work touched.

I should have been having my afternoon meal by now, but the poet was already on his way home so I decided to wait for him. Instead, I revived my old 36-project wordcount tracking spreadsheet because the 48-page one is just overkill and over-complicated. I’m doing 24 fewer projects a year now I’m not doing 12 Stories in 12 Months or the Great Novella Challenge and I don’t need space for 48 projects. The 36-project spreadsheet is also big, but not as big as the 48-project one. I spent some time updating that with the year’s counts so far.

I carried on doing that while we ate, to save time. But I hit a problem as I was transferring the March blog post word counts over to the new-old spreadsheet. The footer bar on the main editor screen was so tiny I was having to press my nose against the screen to read the number of words. I had a look on the Literature and Latte help forum but couldn’t see anything on there, so I posted a query, not expecting to get a reply until I’d closed down for the day as they’re mostly in the States, and the States is a few hours behind us.

Within about 20 minutes, though, I got my reply, along with the suggestion and the instruction for changing my main display via Apple system settings. That worked, so I thanked the responder for helping with a bonus Apple issue when I thought it was a Scrivener issue, and I finished transferring the figures over up to the end of March.

That took me away from the work I wanted to catch up on, including the client edit and the dates work. I did ‘touch’ the client edit, just to get the page counts per day (I always date the front page now with the number of pages edited or proof-read, it’s soooo helpful), but I think I’m stretching it if I try to claim that as a ‘touched’…However, I didn’t even open the dates binder on my desk, so the Patreon/Medium work didn’t get a proper touch either.

My eyes were very tired by this point. I’m getting used to the new glasses but I can tell I’ve been wearing them. Thankfully, it’s not as bad now as it was when I started and I hope it can only get even better. But I’d touched most things, revived a wordcount tracking spreadsheet that isn’t broken or too complicated, and even written most of today’s blog post. I also rejigged the TickTick schedule a little by removing the workshops and replacing them with client work.

So I called everything I didn’t do a reset and I’ll start afresh with those amid today’s jobs and chores. It was 6pm by now, the end of my working day, and I didn’t even have the energy to schedule the blog post or choose a picture. I’ll start with that today, just as soon as I’ve done my daily words.

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.