This post is incredibly tardy, but I’m still going to make it happen!
Old Goals
I started October with a few writing-related goals:
- re-work planner page, and focus on keeping To Do list priorities
- keep ~three writing work nights (12AM), and two work days a week
- write through the next point on the story outline OR complete 4 scenes
Want to know the nitty gritty – read on; want to know what my new goals are for November – scroll to the November 2020 Goals header.
Month Recap
October was pretty slow and had potential to be a complete failure. If I hadn’t altered my writing goals to account for all those sneaky scenes that magically worm their way in, I wouldn’t have been able to check anything off my goals list.
I got hardly any work days in at home, so many chores didn’t get done. This means that for the few work nights I had, the time usually didn’t go to writing. Meaning that the work nights and work days goal didn’t even remotely get reached.
I was able to re-work my planner page to help it line up with my work process. This definitely helped me stick to my To Do list priorities a bit … not so much day-to-day, but more week-to-week. Using the planner is definitely helping me get more done with writing, other chores, and To Do items. I have a few more changes that I want to make to continue getting closer to where I want the planner to be. But I wasn’t able to complete them because Microsoft Office stopped working on the laptop I am using.
Short background: we do not have internet at our house, we also have a free word processing program on our computer instead of Microsoft Office. Early in quarantine, these two things were looking like they were going to be big issues, but our library made some laptops available (with Microsoft Office and wifi). I cannot stress enough how enabling this was for me, if I wasn’t able to take advantage of that, this blog simply wouldn’t be here. I use the laptop to access the Library’s wifi to work on the blog. Since the free word processing program that we have doesn’t always play nice with other programs, I also use the laptop for the Microsoft Word to type blog posts, and to create and format my planner pages.
All that to say, when Microsoft Office stopped working, I wasn’t able to alter my planner pages, so I got that goal only partway done.
Losing Word access also put a bit of a hitch in my blog planning because I was thinking I’d just wait for Office to start up again – which it still hasn’t as I write this. I can definitely use the program that we have on our home computer, it would just take a bit more work to check that everything translated over properly to the blog.
Similar to the blog falling off, my Instagram posts slipped too. Mainly because I use a program on our home computer to edit them, and again, we don’t have internet at our house, so it’s a little tricky to get things posted. I was doing posts straight from my phone for a bit, but then that fell off too. It had become a daily task to take, edit, and post.
I just stopped focusing on the Blog and Instagram entirely so I could put what little time I did have in October strictly towards writing. I was able to get 4 scenes written, which brought me up to the next story point, and I was able to achieve that goal.
Realizing at how much time writing for the blog takes up, I’m planning on just intentionally focusing on posting monthly recaps, and as I finish book reviews I’ll post them too, but I’m not going to make myself get unique blog content out for a while. I’m hoping to get back into Instagram in December, that will give me time to schedule for it; I know that if I do bulk shooting and editing, I’ll be able to stick with the daily posting more easily.
All that said, October was pretty good, I was able to make some changes to help prioritize my time and work towards all my goals even if I didn’t quite achieve them all.
New Goals
Looking forward to November, I’m going to be aiming for:
- finish editing planner pages
- keep ~three work nights (12AM) strictly for writing, and two work days a week
- write to the next point on the story outline OR complete 4 scenes
I’m feeling a little discouraged with how long it’s taking me to get just the first draft of my story done. I’m really thinking about trying to somehow get a few full days allocated to writing and put a good dent into it, but I’m also not sure how to do that yet.
If you write, how do you feel that you get the most work done – a little bit every day, or in big chunks here and there?