Themeattics

When he began writing it was often like this – a dry and sterile exercise. No, it was worse than that. Starting off always felt a little obscene to him. Like French kissing a corpse.

Stephen King, The Dark Half

The muse has not been kind of late.

Yes, I know, I don’t believe in the muse to begin with. Obviously. It conveys the point, though. My time at they keys has been pretty much the antithesis of productive, and as much as I want to prod around for some secret as to why, we all know the answer. Distractions.

YouTube. Twitter. Steam. The PS5. Netflix. Hell, just sitting there staring and thinking about things that aren’t what I’m supposed to be working on. The list is pretty much endless, isn’t it? If we want to find something to pull our attention we can. And I am. Oh, I am.

In the end, like all things, this comes down to a matter of discipline. It comes down to wanting it more than wanting to simply pass the time. I know, I know, I’m beating a dead horse here, but it has to be said once again. I have to enforce this in myself and take steps to make it happen. Or it won’t. Simple as.

Another thing I know about myself is that vague generalities like this are pretty useless. I need things concrete. And, it seems, I need a little group accountability to go along with it. As much as I understand the importance of discipline, I’m not so great at actually, you know… being disciplined about it. So, firing things off the top of my head, here’s my plan:

• No looking at my phone when the alarm goes off in the morning. I end up laying around scrolling for a while, wasting prime minutes. Mornings are the only time I can guarantee uninterrupted time, so I can’t be interrupting things on my own.
• Instead, I’m going to set up a morning prayer routine. I’ve got some daily excerpts from church founders and the like that I can bring into my repertoire. That way I’m allowing myself a little time to shake the sleep from my brain while using it to focus on something worthwhile. Plus, it’s something that has a hard out – a clear end that marks when I need to get to writing.
• Write until I need to get the kids up for school. If I play my cards right, this gives me at least 45m. Time that I am not allowed to do anything but have open one of my Scrivener docs. I’m not enforcing word targets or anything, but I have to be thinking about and focusing on my writing. Nothing else.
• Help the kids get ready for their day as necessary and then go exercise. Right now, the routine I’m doing is pretty quick so this gives me time afterward that’s open. I should probably use this time to write as well, but it’s better that I just leave that designated as “generally productive time.” So long as I’m doing something on my to-do list, I’m in the clear. The big thing here, though, is no videos or other kinds of distractions. Only productivity.
• Then it’s off to work and then back home, where my time is pretty hit-or-miss. I’ll have built out a daily to-do list earlier in the day that I’ll need to finish then before I’m allowed to do anything on my personal leisure list. I say that specifically because if the family wants to do something, I’m not going to be like – sorry dudes, I’ve got this list here to handle.
• And, last but not least for the schedule, I need to get to bed at a reasonable time. 5am comes early. As much as I enjoy my time after work, I need to be sure I’m rested up or everything will fall apart from the gate the next morning.

To help me with the schedule and monitoring all of this, I’m doing two things:

• I’m going to create a new Beeminder that ONLY follows my minutes spent writing stories. I’ve experimented with a few different tracking setups in the past, but anything other than minutes has had its fair share of problems, mostly around editing. It’ll start at 40m/day to give me a little wiggle room and increase by 5m every other week until I land at roughly 90m a day, which puts me at around 10 hours a week. I can’t decide if that’s a reasonable number or not. I guess we’ll see when we get there.
• My daily to-do list is moving from a “here’s all the stuff I’d like to manage to complete if I can” list to an actual, honest-to-God, to DO list. I’m required to do everything on it before I can do any form of personal leisure. No more “oh, just one game of Dota,” or whatever. It’s never just one, and it always leads to wasting the time I needed to get things done. Do the thing first. That’s the new rule.

And, of course, the real cap on this – I’m leaning on the family to make it happen. They’re putting me on the hook. show them the Beeminder entry and review the to-do list with them every day. If they catch me slipping, they have my full permission (and expectation) to rag me for it like no one’s business and demand I stop doing whatever else I’m doing and go get things done. Group shaming is back on the menu, boys.

The next time we speak, there will be progress. Will.

Onward.