Clearing The Backlog – The Climb #657

Thursday 10^th December 2020

After several days, and a lot of work, I finally cleared my backlog of The Climbs. It comes at the same time that I went and bought a couple of gear pieces in Warcraft to get my raider up to the required 170 ilevel needed for the raid on Sunday.

Whilst there’s still a lot to do, I feel like I’ve cleared my own backlog, both of Warcraft urgent tasks as well as some of my writing admin.

The trick now is to capitalise on this and move forwards. There’s a feeling that the hard work is over, a temptation to relax. But in reality I have a lot I need to do: from getting ready for Xmas, to progressing some writing projects.

The plan now is to alternate. I’ve found, in writing up all those editions of The Climb, that I’m very productive in short bursts. I’ve been tracking my wordcount and in 15-20 minute bursts, I can punch out a good 500 to 700 words. That’s around 2000 words an hour.

So I’m going to experiment with a bit of a pomodoro technique.

For those who don’t know, this technique works on the principle that people can only concentrate for around 20 minutes (my natural seems to be about 40 minutes, although it does trail off in the latter half). So you set yourself a timer, and then do an activity for that time. When the timer goes off, you stop.

In the past I’ve always used my Mobius loop of productivity, which is based on tricking my internal procrastination. I take two tasks that – in the moment – I don’t want to do. These are typically tasks with long term pay off such as grinding in Warcraft or writing a particularly tough bit of a novel. I do one, and let my procrastination kick in. It’ll want me to do the other, so I let it.

After a period of time my brain will realise that procrastinating from writing the novel by grinding out a profession or level in Warcraft isn’t fun, and will start wanting to procrastinate by wanting to write. So I go do that, until I get bored. And so the cycle goes.

Obviously to do this I need to be at a stage with Warcraft where I’m a little burnt out, which it just so happens I am. So the plan for tomorrow (after watching The Mandalorian) is to do a quest, write some. Do a dungeon, write some more, and so on.

I probably won’t stream tomorrow as a result. I’ll need to keep starting and stopping every twenty minutes or so which won’t make for a decent stream.

But we’ll see how I get on. I’d like to get this draft done before the end of the year but I suspect it’s going to drag on into January. I’ve also got to start planning out my 2021. 2020 was the year I first really tried working to a plan, and largely it’s worked. I think the Pandemic didn’t help but without the plan I don’t feel I would have got anything done.

But for now, I want to focus on maintaining my wordcount and diverting the effort I put into clearing my backlog into progressing this draft.