Getting Stuff Done

As most of you know or have gathered, I work a full time day job (yay!) and then write, design books, garden, do light physical training, create cover art, and teach myself various business-related skills like web page design, tax accounting, graphic design, typography, and how to maintain my delicate facade of calm and competence when in fact I'm constantly overwhelmed by work and dreaming crazy dreams.

Lately I've been more overwhelmed than usual (!) with stuff that needs to get done by various deadlines. This is what I do when I have so much crap to accomplish that I don't want to do anything at all. It might work for you too.

I separate daylight and after dark activities. It really doesn't work to garden after dark, though I've done it. Ditto for trimming goat hooves, mowing, taking the dogs for a walk, staining the deck, carpentry, etc. So if I plan to make headway on one of those sorts of things, I prioritize my time accordingly.

I separate heat-of-day activities from cool temperature activities. I might get away with staining the deck, washing a car, giving the dogs baths, or even pulling tansy during the heat of the day, but mowing during the heat of the day, or rototilling, or digging up a huge plant and moving it to the opposite end of the garden might be best for before noon or after 6pm.

I give myself an hour or so playing dithering games. Those vary from the obvious, like playing endless rounds of Bejeweled, to weird, like deciding to reorganize my underwear drawer. I could try to not do those sorts of things at all, but I find that if I don't give in at least for a little while, I can't seem to focus and I end up puttering and not getting much done ... basically I dither by default. Once that hour (or so) is up, I have to stop and work on one of my real goals. Something about the time restriction, and allowing myself to waste time on my own terms, helps put me in a good working headspace.

Then I get to work, dividing my time between two or three things over the course of the day so that I don't get mush brain and start to make mistakes. I listed this last, but I seem to do much, much better if I decide in advance which two or three things on my long to-do list I'm going to work on on a given day.

When I start to hesitate, or realize that I don't have all the stuff I need to finish, or my eyes start to cross and I lose track of what goes where and whose eyes are green, I stop, dither a while, tank up on food and water, and do something different, whatever is next on the day's list.

This system has been working really, really well for me. And the more I practice it, the more I seem to accomplish.  Pretty soon I hope to announce the completion of a big project I've been working on for years. I'm very, very close to getting there. Because I'm a typical, self-sabotaging creative type I of course didn't want to put the finishing touches on this project as soon as I got home from the day job, and instead watered my garden, played Bejeweled, weeded around some of my roses, trimmed oregano back from a garden path, and made snide comments about a really, really bad movie playing in the background while I played Bejeweled. Well, I've had my fun now. According to my rule, I need to put some time into real work now, so it's off to copyedit a few more chapters in my book, and then bedtime. Who knows? Maybe if I get on a roll, I might even finish tonight. That would be awesome.

Quick Before Bed

I finally made it to a Fireside writing session.  Fab!  Very productive.  I worked on editing Masks in the hopes that I'll be able to start working on the sequel again that much sooner.  I've got several thousand words pecked out on Signet, but I've set aside making more progress until I've finished (finished really ought to be in quotes) Masks (again.)  Editing in a different location than my office (and on a different computer to boot) resulted in about the same quality of notice that I get from printing the darned thing out and reading over hard copy.  This is a good, and less expensive, option even when I factor in the hot cider, oatmeal cookie and banana.  I'm not counting the birthday dinner afterward (not for my birthday, btw.)  I had to go, because of the rule.

You know, the rule?  All work and no play?  I really can't afford to be dull.  I'm a typer.

I had enough fun that it hardly seemed like work.  Hopefully I'll be able to go to a Fireside session again soon.

Lots Ahead

I've done a lot of critiquing over the past few days.  First pages, Lucky Lab manuscripts, cowriting.  I've also done some polishing on Masks, but not nearly as much as I'd like to.  It's wild, but the dreary kind of wild like when you've been camping for ages with no one else around and all you really want is a home-cooked meal, a hot shower and your own bed.  I'm slowly crawling out from under my backlog, keeping up on the new stuff coming in, and I hope by the time Wednesday rolls around (my guesstimate for when I'll be done with all this) I can sit down and write uninterrupted.

I missed a critique meeting on Saturday.  It started to snow, and snow, and snow.  It was one of those snow storms that dumps several inches in a few hours.  If it had snowed steadily all day and night at that rate we might have seen accumulation that could be measured in feet rather than inches.  As it stood it was very off and on and had mostly stopped by 8pm.  Just a few minutes ago it started raining, which will take our three inches of slush and melt it all away in short order.  I'm surprised that we still have snow--it's about 40 degrees F out there.  The ground is really cold, though.  

Anyway, I'd already missed one Lucky Labs meeting because of work and I was really looking forward to making a meeting for once.  I find critiques so valuable, not just for the feedback but the inspiration.  I try to change locations when I write periodically.  When I write in my office I tend to write writing-in-my-office prose.  The prose freshens immensely when I hand write at work, or tap away on a laptop somewhere, etc.  I haven't had a chance to jostle myself out of this physical comfort zone for quite a while, so it makes critique groups even more valuable.  When I come back from one I feel as if I've been run through a wash and dry cycle.  My mind has had all the dingy grime washed away and the tangles have been brushed out.

Coming up, Radcon.  I've had a chance to pitch informally to coworkers (though I doubt they knew that was what I was doing) and although I'm still not very good at it, I'm starting to find my feet.  I don't think I'll be pitching Masks at Radcon, but you never know.  If an opportunity presents itself I think I'll go for it.  Chances are high that Masks will come back with a 'thanks for your sub but this doesn't fit our needs' note.  It's out of the slush pile, which is really fabulous, but now it's competing with nothing but promising novel concepts.  It feels wonderful to have gotten this far.  I have to be careful, though, not to let my subconscious settle me into a 'far enough' mode.  I'm outside my comfort zone and I'm sure all kinds of little status-quo demons will be busy at work trying to either stuff the worms back into the can or at least building a new, bigger can to keep the worms in.  Heh.  Out of the can and into the compost bin?  

There's lots ahead of me right now.  My life has turned into a page-turner.  I can't wait to see what's going to happen in the next chapter.

Gah!  Weather update.  It looks like this right now (4:36pm):

I was just getting ready to head out to the Olive Garden for a birthday party, too.  Denied!!  The temp was 40 degrees only a half hour ago, and it was raining, like I mentioned earlier in this post.  Now it's at 36 degrees and dropping.  I shouldn't have said anything about the snow melting away.  I have only myself to blame.

Must ... finish ... projects ... Plus, Andrea gets shoes

I'm typing with my new, wonderful, deep purple fingerless gloves that a friend knitted for me. It's cold in the office, where yesterday's weather likes to linger, and they're perfectly warming especially across my wrists where I often suffer pain from carpal tunnel syndrome.

Rory reminded me that I'm neglecting my poor office. I've tiled the minimum space and then I abandoned the finishing work for "later." You all know about later, that mythical future time when there will be peace on Earth and no one will have to earn a living, when houses will paint themselves and my favorite peony will be worshipped as a goddess in certain circles.

Or maybe your later is different.

Anyway, it's past time to finish this puppy, er, office, off. I have to finish tiling first, tiling which I enjoy once I've got all my duckies in a row and put on some music. It takes about an hour to lay five tiles, not counting cutting time, and I've gotten to a stage where just about every tile will need to be cut. I think I've got six, maybe seven uncut tiles to go.

But this is all blathering, thinking about work that needs to be done. At the root of all this is a desire to finish. I want to finish Masks. I want to finish the office, and the porch project, and the vegetable garden (although finishing anything in a gardening sense is even more mythical than later.) There's too much juggling and it's time to set some of the pieces down.

This is probably all brought on by the work schedule. The day after tomorrow, I'm off. I'm free I'm free I'm free! Yee! Just for a day, but that's enough compared to, well, no day. I'd like to finish something that day.

In other news, my daughter Andrea and I went shoe shopping today. I got a pair of shoes for work that are, ahem, somewhat un-work like but I don't think anyone will look close enough to notice. They enclose the toe and the heel, a requirement. They are not sneakers. Voila! Perfect. (Don't mind the skull and crossbones print all over them--it just looks like a geometric design from a distance and who looks at my feet anyway? So there!) Andrea picked up her first set of heels for her 8th grade end of year celebration. I can get all teary-eyed at how my little girl is growing up and choosing (she actually planned on borrowing my heels--which I needed for work and that's how we decided we both needed at least one pair of 'other' shoes) to wear nice shoes and nice clothes to a ceremonial event. Instead of being teary-eyed, though, I'm just so very proud of her it makes me grin. I think she's realized that her jeans and t-shirt lifestyle is a safe place to be and that being safe all the time won't get her to where she wants to go. So she's trying something different, and it's very awesome. You go, Andrea! Mom won't cry. You're not going away. You're becoming (in more ways than one) and that makes me happy.

Misty, aka Mistah Fluff, our long-haired gray mackerel kitty, has leapt on my lap and declared "meh-eh." And now she's purring like crazy.

You said it Mistah. Meh eh!