Do you ever try dividing up your days into manageable pieces of time? Where you feel you can actually achieve something worthwhile in each one of those smaller time slots? I’ve done it plenty of times when things seem overwhelming but never bothered within my writing day. But that’s what I realise I need to do right now if I’m going to get any real writing done before the end of October. While over the last couple of months my time has been filled with some very important domestic/family things I’ve also done a lot of fluffing around where I’ve achieved absolutely nothing. Wasting even a minute of the time God gives us is so defeating and then very demoralising when we look back on our accomplishments for the day. One of my critique partners mentioned a Margie Lawson course she’d done where Margie suggests “chunking” your time. Without knowing anything much about Margie’s theories I’m planning to do exactly that. From tomorrow, my writing day is going to be divided between my WIP, and two stories I am currently self-editing. Because editing is easier to stop and start, I’ll allow myself a one hour block for each story – I figure high schools suggest an hour as an acceptable length of time before student’s attention begins to wander – then I’ll attack my WIP with two hour chunks. If the muse should strike during this period, then I’ll forgive myself for ignoring my chunking ideal and keep writing. If it doesn’t, I would have still done some new writing for two hours. At least this way something new is being committed to ‘paper’
You don’t need to be a writer to think about doing this – it could make any part of your life more manageable. Why don’t you think of giving it a try if you find the days slipping away from you.