Hello and Happy New Year! I do not have any New Year’s Resolutions to report. I am, however, very glad that we are out of this cold snap. I am continuing on in my writing journey in much the same fashion as last year in that I and evaluating what is and isn’t working every week or so and changing things up as needed.
And this week is no exception. A few weeks ago I saw a friend post about a time tracking program she was using to see how productive she is. I decided it might behoove me to check and see how productive I actually am, since I often don’t feel productive just because I don’t spend every waking moment on my writing.
So for the past two weeks I’ve been just (trying) to record my time I spent on what. Part of the problem was remembering to write down my start and end times. This was the time between (roughly) 2 and 5 pm Mon – Thurs and /shrug on weekends. My plan was to do my best to not change my habits and to just record what I was doing.
First week:
19.5 hours
33% of my time was spent on “writing” activities. Either writing, revision, or smoothing. Anything that is actual work on one of my stories.
44% of my time was spent on “Professional development” things, this includes my social media presence, stuff dealing with agents, and any books that I read.
23% was “other” which is cleaning my house, taking breaks, and playing video games.
Yeah, I was rather disappointed with myself, even though this was supposed to be a fact finding mission. So this past week I tried to focus a little more on doing more writing/professional development, even though I still didn’t give myself any hard-set goals.
Second week:
18.5 hours
62% Writing
27% ProDev
10% Other
Which I am much happier with. And now that I’ve seen the general shape of my working habits, now I’m ready to start setting some goals for myself.
I would like to have is 20 hours a week (a part time jobs’ worth) of time spent on Writing, Reading, and ProDev. Not that I won’t take breaks in my day, but overall time spent should be 20 hours a week. That should boil down to 3 hours a day Mon – Thurs and 3.5 each Sat and Sun. At least approximately. It’s also possible for me to make up time on the weekends, most of the time, but any travel or events will throw a wrench in that. I’ll just have to see how it goes.
Goals:
1) I’ll be done with my last polish of The Law of the Prince Charming before Sunday. It will then be sent to my hubby for his read-through. Once I incorporate anything he finds, it will sit around waiting for some lucky agent to request it.
2) I am doing a smoothing pass of the Huntsman with the new changed beginning. I want to have that done by the end of the month in order to send to alpha reader(s). The goal for this week is just to get through a chapter a day., which could either be easy or hard based on how much I have to rewrite.
