Thursday 23 July 2026: Distractions…

After my dirty cuppa, my reading hour and my housework hour, the first work hour of the day is supposed to be my writing hour. Yet for the past week or so, that writing hour has been spent writing a blog post, a blog post that has an hour all to itself at the end of every day. It’s in this blog post hour that I should be writing up the blog post. But I’m usually doing something else for that last hour of the day, like finalising the job that already had the previous four hours allocated to it. This needs to change.

Of course, writing the blog post is still writing, and the blog is a marketing tool for which the words count towards my daily consumable wordcount. But it’s not writing something new I can sell or publish outside of the blog. And I do like writing stories.

Yesterday, it was exactly the same. I put some washing through, I read a few chapters of the current NetGalley book, and I wrote yesterday’s blog post. By the time I was eating my midday brunch, another hour had gone and I still hadn’t written the folk horror short story. I did respond to a BBC request regarding our new prime minister’s announcement that he was capping bus fares from January, and I had to dig out a photograph. And then, of course, I had to keep checking to see if they’d used it. (I responded to a feedback request and received an email from the BBC asking if they could use my comments and did I have a picture.)

By the time I was supposed to be back at work, the washload had finished and I went to hang that out instead. And then I started today’s blog post. The plan for the rest of the day was to touch base with both scheduled jobs: write the short story; and continue proofreading the client edit. And, of course, finalise the blog post, choose the picture and schedule it to post in the last working hour of the day…

I was 50 minutes in to the first work hour of the afternoon by the time I started today’s post. That’s a whole Pomodoro for me. (I set them at 50 minutes with a 10-minute break rather than 25 minutes with a 5-minute break.)

I decided to have an hour with the proofreading and if I managed that then my reward would be an hour on the short story. There would still be time for another hour on the proofreading if I just got on with it, and I thought that was fair while I try to get back into a good working rhythm again. And then I remembered that I had one day left in which to transfer everything out of my old rocketmail email account and into my current account.

So I switched to that instead and spent quite a long time having to forward every single email I wanted to keep individually, as there’s no bulk way of doing it unless you have something like the old Outlook or Firefox email client. I’ve had both of those before, but I didn’t have any of them now. So off I pootled to grab the latest Thunder-thing, which used to be completely free. It’s still free, but there are hard-sell pop-ups asking for ‘donations’. I managed to bypass those but could only get it to connect to a single email account, the current one. So that was useless.

I spent so long on this that when I saw there were almost a thousand emails that had to be forwarded one by one, I gave up and just deleted the lot, figuring I’d not looked at any of it in 11 years so why would I want to now. But gosh, what a lot of time I wasted on it.

I took a break from the computer, as I’d been sat in the same hunched position for hours and helped the poet do some house admin. He sorted things like the house insurance and he managed to bring our internet installation forward by two days; I made a long phone call to change our address on the TV licence, as there wasn’t one registered at our new address.

And that was that, the day completely written off, and I STILL hadn’t managed to get today’s blog post finished and scheduled. I need to do a lot of work today on avoiding distractions and just getting stuff done. Let’s see how that goes…

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