The Art Of Muddling Along – The Climb #572

Wednesday 16^th September 2020

This cold is starting to annoy me now.

To be fair, the actual cold is largely over; I’m just left with a bit of a cough and nasal congestion. A combination of this, lack of fitness currently and pandemic means I’m feeling a bit run down.

But I don’t feel quite up to starting any projects just yet. I keep telling myself, just get better first, there’s no rush. Better I give myself time off to get over the last bits of this cold and start afresh on Monday.

I’ve had this feeling during most of the pandemic – that I’m not actually being productive. Yet, if I have to give myself credit, things are getting done. In the last 6 months I’ve improved my craft massively with the research I did on theme, got a rewrite done in a month (without trying to rush it), got a number of outlines done, and I rejigged another novel to give it some administrative structure so I can work on it easier within Scrivener. Yet there’s also been a lot of false starts, projects that got back on the shelf before too much work was done on them.

I feel like I’ve been muddling through the last 6 months. Without doubt all the important stuff has got done, and the bits I’ve done on the other projects have moved them along so that when I do finally come back to them they’ll be easy top pick back up again, but it’s chaotic.

Maybe it’s always like this and the uncertainty of the world these days has me wishing for my writing organisation to be neater and cleaner. But I feel all over the place and inefficient.

I guess that’s important though. It’s a lot harder to get things complete when there’s chaos all around you. So I should look at the fact I’ve got so much done over the last 6 months – even if I feel I’ve been muddling through – as a real positive.

I still long for some order and neatness though. I dream of having nice progress bars across a bunch of projects, with neat timescales that have people questioning how I can get so much done, whilst all the time congratulating myself that by working smart, I’m smashing out work without it impacting quality or burning me out. Not very realistic, but I can dream.

For now, I need to just be content at muddling through. And if that means taking a few more days to fully get over illness before diving into a rewrite, no-one is even asking for yet, I guess I can cut myself some slack.