I didn’t do so well on the word-count yesterday. My morning was pretty much wasted due to me waiting on something Really Important in an online game I play. I’m trying to curb my time on social media anyway, but this game is turning into a real time-sucker.
Recently, I’ve been looking at it over breakfast and setting it off for 8 hours, or 4 hours if I think I might have a go at dinnertime or if I’m working on a time-sensitive quest. Then at teatime, I’m setting it off for 4 hours again, and then 8 hours overnight.
Some of the quests require, say, so many 1-hour productions or so many 5-minute productions. If I think I can do that at dinnertime or of an evening, then I’m leaving it. But the 8-hour and 4-hour quests have to be done when the previous time runs out.
This Very Important Thing, though, was a negotiation with another player, and generally that kind of thing is difficult when you’re in different time-zones or if one or the other of you is simply away from a computer (or a phone, or a tablet). Fortunately, those don’t happen very often.
True, if I had a “proper job” I probably wouldn’t have time to do it anyway. But I gave up the rat race a long time ago so that I can do precisely what I want, when I want. Among other things.
On Monday, I enrolled on this 14 Days to a Solid Writing Habit course from Writers’ HQ. One of the exercises was to log how much time I spend on social media, but I added my game-play to this as well. My social media activity is coming down. A lot. And I only check Twitter once a day now, really, because the newsfeed scrolls by far too quickly with so many retweets.
Yesterday, the course also reiterated that if you replace “I’m too busy” with “it isn’t important to me”, then it has more impact. For example, “I didn’t do any writing today because … it isn’t important to me.” And if it really isn’t important to you, then fine. Stop whingeing about not having enough time to write.
However, I’m not “too busy” to write, per se. I’m just “too busy playing this stupid game”. My writing *is* important to me, and so is my editing work. I get paid for the editing work a lot quicker than I get paid for the writing work, but I also enjoy editing and I learn from it too. It helps me to spot things I’ve missed in my own writing.
But this … time-vampire does need work.
I didn’t do too badly though. During my morning session I did the 14 Days … exercises and posted to the forum, I wrote up the writers’ group report and posted it, and I added a few more recurring tasks to my calendar.
I started the afternoon with a quick proofreading job for the Hong Kong client. It only took me an hour or so. I wrote yesterday’s blog post. And I faffed a bit more on the game. Then I went onto the 14 Days … forum and replied to some replies.
Not a hugely productive day, but at least I can see where my time-suckers are and today will, hopefully, be better. I don’t have any client work in so far … although I may do, but Yahoo mail has been down all morning, apparently. I haven’t even seen today’s 14 Days … exercise, so I may hop onto the forum and see if there’s a link to the web version.
Otherwise, a writing day ahead for me!
