Motivated Sunshine
In a much better mood today than I was yesterday.
Have been rocking my pomodoros this morning which I find helpful on days like today when I’m not super stressed by deadlines but still have a list of things to get done.
It’s a technique that I’ve been on-and-off with using for years now. Putting 20 minutes on a timer during which time you do focused work. When the timer goes off, you put a little tick down in your notebook and set a 5 minute timer. This is the time to get up, attend to distractions. Hit the loo, fill up your water, pet the dog, put the rubbish out – things you might do as minor distractions during unstructured work time. When you have four ticks, you give yourself a larger break, 20 minutes say, to refresh before another period of focused work.
As someone who struggles to maintain focus over a long period of time – I suspect this very common and we actually pretend that we’re meant to work for hours on end without distraction and not doing so is a personal failure – the pomodoro technique is a good way of keeping me on rails for a short period. Then, as I said, I can get up and attend to those minor things that it helps me to deal with while I’m working from home. Less useful when in the office because there’s not as much other busy work. No laundry to fold, for example, or dishes to clean.
Anyway, I’m glad to be back on this for the time being. We’ll see how long it lasts but I’m feeling productive again.
Yesterday wasn’t good.
https://vontonks.github.io/blog/2022/05/05/thursday.html
I don’t know exactly what it was but I felt pretty much unmotivated, tired, and irritable for the whole day. I’d like to work out what causes contribute to those days and try to mitigate against them. As far as work goes, Thursday is generally a high-stress day as we send the newsletter, but I kind of nailed my stories early and then didn’t have the ‘energy’, whatever that means, to get anything else done. Was slumped in my chair for the rest of the day passively waiting.
Maybe there’s a hint there, around passivity, as to what the problem is. Need to be more active in fixing things, in directing myself, in moving projects forward. I do, unfortunately, get caught up in wishing things weren’t as they are and feeling down about the small things I need to do to change them. And I can be a bit put-off when things don’t go my way. I don’t necessarily respond to failure well.
Anyway, the important thing is I feel better today. Timer’s just gone off. Let’s go take Daisy for a 20 minute walk!
Current Projects
‘Kaylene’ a short story about a digital artist: 411 words today (1973 total)
‘Narcissus’ a novel: planning, character development
2022 fiction word count: 13,753