Productivity Systems – The Climb #802

Tuesday 4^th May 2021

I have this super annoying habit that when I start getting focused and productive that I start neglecting all my productivity tools.

I don’t beat myself up about it too much as it normally happens when I need to focus on a single thing and get so consumed by it that everything else goes onto the backburner.

After editing, outlines and now detailed outlines, I’ve got about 5 weeks where I’ve not been tracking my work or planning my week ahead. I was just focused on getting one thing done so I could then focus on the next.

But with the detailed outline starting to firm up after having made good progress on it today, I suspect that come next week, things won’t be so laser focused.

So in my breaks today, I started trying to catch up.

I tend to track a whole bunch of stats each week from amount of writing done to social media followers. Most of that doesn’t matter, but I do want to make sure I track what projects I’ve been working on, if only so I can get to the end of the year and be able to get a good overview of the work I’ve done.

I basically have a template I use each week. To vary it up, and as a little incentive, I have a different local landscape photo I take as a header image, and it’s kinda fun to see the seasons change as I progress work.

The weekly template is many things. It’s a place to keep ongoing records to track trend over a year. It’s a tracker to see where my focus should be. It’s a checklist of tasks I need to do each week to set me up for the next seven days. It’s a link into my goals for the years.

The main interest for me was to track the projects I’d been working on. Luckily, most of my work over the last month or so has been focused into week long blocks. So it was fairly easy to know which fiction projects I linked to each week.

Except a bunch of my fiction projects had no entries and so couldn’t be linked to. It’s crazy to think that something like The Accursed is so recent. 6 weeks ago, it was still a rough idea for an online serial, and now it’s an outline with sample chapters. And when I get this detailed outline off (which again wasn’t a project that existed 6 weeks ago), it’ll be something I’ll return to.

So I had to create a bunch of new fiction projects which is both exciting and new.

And whilst I’ve not posted The Climb in a number of weeks, I’ve been writing it each day and still capturing images to turn into thumbnails. Admittedly, I’ve been a bit lazy of late but I’ve had such a backlog that I’m still ahead of myself. I created a few more and added them into the mix.

Now things have settled down, I might look to posting the back issues of The Climb. That’s going to be a couple of solid days work, so I’ll probably give it a while yet.

But as I find myself getting towards the end of a bunch of tasks, so I find all my productivity tools slowly coming back to me. That’s what I love about my systems. They’re not a crutch, but something to aid me. And if I drop them in order to focus on the task at hand, it’s not too difficult to pick them back up when that hectic spell is over.