After a semi-disastrous September start to my new working year, October will now be the time of great resetting. I had a few days away from the computer, away from work, while I decided what’s a priority for me, what’s less toxic for me, and what I can do away from all the tech noise that’s beyond my control. And that’s why today’s post is a little later than usual.
After reading in several sources that the 16:8 diet isn’t the best thing for ‘women of a certain age’, I’ve taken a step back to a 14:10 method instead. Not eating until midday usually meant I was starving hungry anyway and that made me eat more. Hopefully, eating breakfast at 10am will keep me on track. I’ll still have my dinner at 3pm, with the poet if he’s here, and I’ll still have my tea by 8pm. But breakfast is moving from midday to 10am.
I’m ending the housework hour and the full reading hour, instead moving my reading to alongside my first cuppa of the day between 8am and 9am, and of an evening. The housework is going back to the 10-minute Pomodoro breaks.
Between 9am and 10am, what was my reading hour, or first Pomodoro (50 minutes), is now my activity hour. I’ll start with core-strengthening exercises and maybe 10 minutes of yoga.
Ultimately, I’d like to incorporate additional 30-minute sessions into every day of the working week, such as more yoga on a Monday, dance aerobics on a Tuesday, tai chi on a Wednesday, floor exercises on a Thursday, and Pilates on a Friday. Plus the dog gets a 30-minute/1-mile walk every weekday, longer at the weekend. But this is one of those things I’ll be getting into one step at a time. I’m not an exercise fan so it’s something I need to build up to and into a regular routine so I just do it.
If I have any client work, that’s the next thing to be scheduled, and I’ll do that first before any of my own new writing. If I have any books to republish I’ll do those at a rate of 2 books per week. But if I don’t have either, I’ll write my own new material, fiction and non-fiction, and try to make it fun again.
Finally, I’m aiming at a bit of an analogue reset. I’ll kickstart my daily writing and do that alongside my first cuppa of the day and before any reading, in a notebook, and I’ll do it before I check emails and/or social media, which really ought to be done at my desk anyway. I will read on an e-reader, but I want to do that on an ink reader rather than the tablet or my phone.
The desk diary is also coming out of hibernation. After my calendar fell over on Thursday, the poet’s fell over on Friday, and I discovered the Google calendar had fallen over on Thursday as well, I’ve decided to go back to relying on the diary and just have the TickTick so the tasks look pretty and so I can see it on my phone when we’re out and about, such as at the hairdresser or dentist making the next appointments.
So, with all of that in mind, here we go…
Hello, October!
This is what October looks like at the moment. It’s a much shorter list because the bulk of the month will be spent on a client edit.
- create graphic for Hello, October
- create graphic for October wrap-up
- start posting premium stories to Patreon and Medium
- make new covers for the next 10 book republications, 2 books at a time
- republish 7 short stories, 2 books at a time
- publish collection of 25 short stories
- 1x client editing job
- write 1 brand-new short story
- daily dog walk
- daily exercises
- daily blog post
- weekly backup
- weekly finance work
- update word-count tracker spreadsheet (week) daily
- monthly schedule planning for November
- advance finances for November
How’s your October looking?
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
Sounds like a good plan. Keep adjusting things as you need to, especially the food. Food is fuel.
and you know how much I love my paper calendars. Electronic calendars always fail me when I need them most. Well done!
I could have kicked myself for not maintaining the desk diary when TickTick went a bit strange. It’s working again now, but I really don’t like to rely on it.