Hi all,
This may come as a minor surprise, but – it’s been a little while. I’ll explain.
For you, esteemed reader, the TOA process is a simple daily ritual. You wake up, you see the new post, you may or may not read it, and life goes on. It’s not quite so simple for me over here behind the curtain. For me, TOA is ideally a daily event, but it’s not like I wake up at 4 AM to write that day's post. The miracle of modern technology allows me to set posts so far in advance that I regularly go days (and sometimes even weeks) without even logging on to the host website.
The last six weeks or so have been unusual even by my standards. I checked my writing log and found that as of the day of writing, my average writing time over the past thirty days is exactly thirty-five minutes a day. For context, here are my thirty-day averages from the last day of the first six months in 2019: 62, 96, 81, 85, 72, 72. Needless to say, with my goal at ninety minutes a day we are (and have been) a long way off the mark.
What went wrong? Longtime readers will know I could write a ten thousand word post on the topic but I will try to save some syllables. The short version is that my routine was thrown way off due to a number of one off tasks and events from the summer. The extra time I required to meet these various commitments and obligations came straight out of the writing budget. It wasn’t just that these required my time, either – their effect pushed my sleep schedule backward by an hour or two. This resulted in an exchange of one morning hour (which I often use for writing) for one evening hour (which I generally use for reading). This trade did no favors for my writing (but at least I finished a few more books than usual in the past month).
The only writing I managed in the past six weeks or so was the very necessary kind – newsletters, proper admin, tales of two cities (well, ‘necessary’ is in the TOA context, but you know what I mean). I’ve generally valued these regular or routine posts for how they’ve organized my thoughts on certain recurring topics but it wasn’t until today that I recognized their value for establishing a consistent rhythm in my monthly calendar. It’s an underrated element for any writing routine but I suspect it’s perhaps among the most important – what’s in place to get the work back on track? It might be a journal, a weekly class, a regular proofreading session – it might even be your own version of proper admin (but let’s hope not). Whatever the specifics, I think it’s an important question to have an answer for – when I get bogged down, how do I get back on track?
See you tomorrow for another pointless proper admin.
