Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 1
Total Queries: 20
Rejections: 3
Scenes Mapped: 5
Total Scenes: 274
Yeah, my daily scene count is dropping. Friday was insane. And now it’s Mother’s Day weekend. I do not expect to send another query or map another scene for the remainder of the weekend. We’ll get back to it when I’ve properly celebrated my wife’s status and honored her efforts and sacrifices over the years.
Filling the Well
1984: 59%
Bloodwitch: 5%
Yeah, still behind on things. It’ll come around.
Polishing the Well
We’re rewatching this now? Okay…
My kids get on kicks sometimes and now this is the kick. It’s all good. Great show. Really interesting watching it evolve from the beginning.
Other than that, as I said above, it’s Mother’s Day weekend so it is all hands on deck to honor my wife. I can’t wait to celebrate her in full tomorrow.
Well Chat
Working Against Time Poverty
A couple months back, I wrote a blog about time poverty. I wanted to revisit this topic today as I’ve been exceedingly busy this week.
You might wonder why there was an uptick this week. Well, I can now say that I got a promotion at work. It’s a huge deal and I’m thrilled at the opportunity. It’s an enormous shift in how my day goes, though. I’ve had FAR less time to work on projects than ever before in my career. It’s kind of crazy. I’m officially in the management role and it feels like everyone knows it. And that’s great.
What it is making me evaluate is how I measure success. I’ve always measured success by completed reports and projects. That just isn’t going to cut it now. If I stay in that lane, I will feel like an utter failure every single day because I’m going to have so little time to work on much of anything. My job now is to direct operations within my department and work on more macro items like department guidance.
How does this relate to writing?
I know. Here’s the point: you only have so much time each day and if you’re anything like me, you have very little unscheduled time each day. Each of us are pulled in several directions by competing desires. How do you manage all that in order to feel successful?
#1 Priorities: Determine the order of your priorities so that you can ascribe the most time to the most important things.
#2 Delegation: If you can get someone else to do something for you so you can focus on things that NO ONE can do for you, that is time well spent (this feeds back into my February discussion of paying people to take care of more-menial tasks to free you up to do unique, bespoke work).
#3 Proper Goal Setting: If you’re pinning the ethereal feeling of success to inappropriate goals, you’ll feel a failure. Set things that are attainable each day and then work toward them, work really hard. Don’t lose focus and put the time in.
#4 Don’t Despair: We all make mistakes and we all have setbacks. It’s not debilitating, it’s just demoralizing. So get back in there and show your goals what for.
#5 Perspective: Remember that at the end of the day, if you’re kids are safe and (mostly) happy and if your spouse is content and your house is secure and you’re not hungry, you’re doing better than most of the world. If you didn’t hit your writing goal by 50 words, it is literally not the end of the world. You’ll get back on the horse tomorrow.
Follow these steps and master your time. You can do this.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG