Ohmygosh, I forgot to post my June wrap-up on Friday! That’s what happens when the first and/or last days of the month fall at the weekend! Here’s a quick run-through of how Friday went, and then it’s the monthly wrap-up.
Much of Friday was spent staring at my diary and wondering how to still fit everything in. I got my calendar down off the wall, I had my TickTick open, and I had my diary on my desk. And I started this week’s diary.
I’m starting the day this week at 9am instead of 10am, and I’m finishing at 6pm instead of 5pm. If this works, I’ll change the signature on my emails to suit. But for now, I’ll leave it at 10am until 5pm.
With an hour for dinner every day (I still have household chores to do and errands to run), that gives me 4 x 2-hour slots. I’m going to start every day with 2 hours on the writing workshops followed by 2 hours of PROJECT MANAGEMENT FOR WRITERS: GATE 3 followed by HORVALE MYSTERIES #1 (the Halloween cosy mystery novella: STEVIE BECK AND THE HAUNTED HOUSE HOTEL).
I can do that every day this week other than Tuesday, when I have to fit it in around taking the poet to the dentist. He’s having 2 fillings but they’re re-building his teeth around them and sitting there with his mouth open for so long and all that work going on shakes him up a bit. He’s always opted for extraction in the past over fillings, as they’re quicker and less traumatic. I’m the other way around.
My last double session of the day will usually be client work, but when I couldn’t fit it in every day I ummed and ahhed for hours before realising I could just do one hour or no hours of client work if necessary. That made it a lot better.
Today, for example, my last 2-hour session is 1 hour Monkey Dust admin and 1 hour client editing. The blog should be written throughout the day and it’s something I can do in Pomodoro breaks if I have to. It used to get its own 1-hour slot during the working day, now I’m tagging it on at the bottom to simply tick off when it’s finished.
Tomorrow, due to the run to the dentist, I’m not doing any client work. Then Wednesday the last 2-hour session is all client work, and Thursday it’s split between Diane’s Gig List, which never, ever takes more than a minute or two, and client work, so really the client work will be getting the bulk of the 2 hours.
Another day I had trouble with was Friday, as I do a lot of admin on a Friday, and that’s going in the last 2 hours every Friday. Who says I have to do client work every day? And I’m banking on some jobs not needing quite 2 hours per day.
I’ll try it out for this week, and I’ll probably be worn out after a week of 9-hour days. But if I don’t try it, I’ll never know if it works. And I don’t know what else I can cut out of my daily workload, other than I probably won’t have client work all the time.
Grand-doggy #1 was due at ‘midday’, and I was ready and waiting. Then I saw a message saying he’d be here at 2:15pm. I had a bit of a chat with Son #2 and partner before they headed off on their afternoon and night out, then I tried to work out how to keep grand=doggy #1 entertained. I played with him for a bit, but I still had work to do.
He was fairly patient until the poet got home. Then it was the poet’s turn to entertain him for a while before I finished work and we took him out for the evening.
June wrap-up
Here, then, is how June went in the end:
- monthly schedule planning for June (as I didn’t do this in May) ✔️
- new month wordcount & progress spreadsheets for June ✔️
- accompany the poet to Durham ✔️
- attend cosy mystery anthology workshop ✔️
- write & submit short story for cosy mystery anthology workshop ✔️
- accompany the poet to Poland ✔️
- Halloween cosy mystery novella ✔️
- KILLER QUEEN ✔️
- 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS ✔️
- A GUY FOR PENNY ❌
- FIREWORKS AT KILLIECRANKIE ❌
- mid-month workload review ✔️
- newsletter ❌
- client edit: Taliban book ✔️
- (week) daily blog post ✔️
- weekly tech scan ✔️
- weekly backup ✔️
- weekly diary work ✔️
- Monkey Dust admin ✔️
- Diane’s gig list admin every Thursday ✔️
- hospital appointment (dermatology) ✔️
- dental appointment ✔️
- Monkey Dust gig ✔️
- monthly schedule planning for July ✔️
- start work on annual tax return ❌
- advance finances for July ✔️
How was your June?
June was pretty good; there will be a wrap-up on tomorrow’s blog. You might want to keep your signature 10-5 so you have that extra hour on either end to do uninterrupted work. And the 1-hour break will help ease the day, too, provided you’re good about taking it.
Do you think a week will be enough to get a sense of it? Or do you need two or three weeks? It sounds like a good plan.
And you had a very productive June!
That’s a good suggestion, thank you. I’ll be trying different things out over the coming weeks, but as I only do the diary a week ahead at a time, I’ve only done this week’s for now. Already, though, I’ve changed from time-measured tasks to task-measured tasks, and that’s only on Day 1. I’ve still allocated time slots to them for now, though, while I’m still trying things out and working out how long they’ll realistically take.