Monday, September 10th

The Daily Report

Okay. So. There are definitely advantages to being self-employed, but there are also drawbacks like having to rely on myself for motivation. It's not that I didn't have my ups-and-downs when I worked for other people, but I could rely on direct external pressure to keep me focused and motivated even when I couldn't do it for myself.

I have a solution I'm working on for part of that, but one thing was just... the eight hour work day. Now, I did my absolute best... my most productive non-writing work... when I worked at a place that gave me flexible hours, and I think that's important to keep in mind. I need flexibility. I need some give. But I also need some structure, some firmness.

I've been thinking about how things worked at that job, and one thing I've realized is that... okay, anybody who reads this blog knows that sometimes it takes me hours to wake myself up and stumble out of the fog. I'll be awake at eight or nine or ten in the morning but it'll be one or two before I'm fit to do anything. And I've been thinking, this isn't new. If anything, it was worse back then because I had fewer coping tools.

So how did I manage?

Well, the answer is that I mostly managed the way I do now... I spent my mornings in a fog and then came alive in the afternoon. I did as much work as any three of my coworkers, but most of it was in the last three or four hours of the afternoon. I wasn't just sitting there staring at a screen all morning, but it was a slog. I took longer to do a record and more time between records. I'd spend more time doing things like making hot chocolate in the break room.

The main two things are that I did keep myself busy during the morning but I also didn't wear myself out trying to beat my way through the concrete fog. I didn't beat myself up or stress myself out. And one of the reasons that I didn't is because I was surrounded by coworkers and I could see quite clearly that I wasn't exactly standing out like a sore thumb. If we'd done stats hour by hour I might not have led the whole day, but I wouldn't have been in the bottom at my lowest ebb.

Constantly comparing yourself to others can be a trap... but when you can see that you're doing as well as or better than the people around you, it's hard not to get a boost.

Anyway, to bring this out of the dusty domain of the past and bring it to the present, I have two resolutions for this week. One is to be definitely "clocked in" at some point of the morning... eight, nine, ten, ten-thirty, depending on when I physically wake up. But the other is to give myself time to wake up even while I'm still on the clock. My morning work so far has consisted of working on this blog post, working on a newsletter, meditating on the MU chapter, listening to my re-braining tracks and practicing my breathing. So I'm coming into the afternoon feeling squared away and rested and alert.

The State of the Me

Pretty good. I have been sleeping well at night and catching up on missed sleep a couple of hours at a time during the day over the weekend.

Plans For Today

Today's kind of experimental, I'll have an actual task list tomorrow based on how today goes.

Personal Blog For September 10th: Make Mine Music

Okay, so, for a long time this journal has basically been the place where I post things about work and productivity. I don't really have a personal blog at the moment. Personal stuff goes in random places, or more often, it just doesn't go anywhere.

But it wasn't a conscious decision to divorce this blog from anything having to do with my life in ways that don't obviously and directly touch on my writing, and I've made some attempts in the past to rectify that. This one is going to be fairly straightforward. I'm just going to make an effort to make a personal blog post every time I make a daily report.

So, I realized over this weekend that I have almost no music on my netbook, the new one I got earlier this year. I had downloaded what I considered to be my essential work/relaxation tracks to it and that's it. And I have quite a lot of music that's scattered among my computers, including some that's probably only on my old, ailing netbook that this one replaced.

To fix this, I'm taking advantage of Dropbox's superior syncing capabilities to create a master directory that has all of my music, hopefully with as little duplication as possible... I mean, if I copy the music library on this computer and the music library on my downstairs desktop computer into the same folder in Dropbox, it should recognize the duplicates and be like, "Oh, this file is already there, no need to download it.", right? That's my theory and so far, so good.

When I'm finished, I'm going to be setting the music library on each computer to only include the Dropbox music folder and make it the default location for downloading music from Amazon and ripping music from CDs. I won't actually delete the original source folders unless I run out of harddrive space (which is something that has never happened to me since my first 1 GB drive).

Right now my main desktop is uploading its music directory to Dropbox and this little netbook is downloading them as they're added. It's going to take a couple of days because I don't really want more than one computer uploading to Dropbox at a time, just to stop things from getting confused, but it doesn't take any attention from me once I've got things started... I already changed the notification area settings on this computer so I'd stop getting little balloons popping up telling me n files have been added to my Dropbox folder while I'm trying to do stuff. I am the original boiling-pot-watcher so until I took that step I kept checking to see what files have been added, try to look for any unwanted duplication, etc. Now it's all happening in the background and I can happily ignore it.

While I said this is for stuff that doesn't directly impact my writing... now that I have a lot more music to choose from (and am more aware of what music I actually have in my library than I have been for years), I can't help thinking... well, I can listen to the same track over and over again and not feel bored or get sick of it.

But not being bored is not the same thing as being stimulated. When I was writing Star Harbor Nights on the regular, most of the characters had favorite bands/musical influences and I could listen to them to get in touch with them. I could also use music to hack my mood or adjust my energy level.

In my report for today I looked back at my work life when I was doing data entry... my creative life was also affected by the way I listened to music then on my MP3 player while I worked. I could browse music and create playlists on the fly, but because it was kludgier than doing it on the computer and because I couldn't spend ten or fifteen minutes fiddling with an electronic device no matter how productive I was I relied on large playlists and shuffle more than I otherwise do.

It's still better for me to have a repetitive/non-distracting soundtrack for when I'm actually writing, I think, but it's good to have more varied influences for the rest of my day.

Today's wrap-up.

So, I wrote ~2,000 words of fiction and I made a little headway in my e-book stuff, plus a bit of newsletter writing. A lot of my progress today was mental. I'm working on a project that's a little hard to describe and will probably sound more than a little loopy, but I'm hopeful about its prospects... basically, I'm working on constructing an office in my head, complete with an assistant and a supervisor. If this works it will be brilliant.

Half of what I wrote today... I have this character in my head that won't go away and I've tried writing her as a superhero and I've tried writing her as a modern supernatural romance/erotica heroine and I'm trying her in all these different angles with her and nothing's really taking, but she's persistent so I think something's going to happen with her, but I'm not sure what.