Disrupted Flow – The Climb #812

Friday 14^th May 2021

I had one of those days where I had to be somewhere early and it disrupted my flow. As a result I spent the rest of the day feeling thoroughly unproductive.

After a few weeks of big projects with soft deadlines, I’m back to working on a few things at once. The trick, as I’ve written, is to do a bit on them each day. Yes, it’s more difficult to see progress but it all adds up.

I’m reminded by The Climb. I stop posting for a while after the novel sale fell through at the last moment and I had to mentally deal with all that. But I’ve continued to write it and the Word file is now some 38,000 words long. That’s 38,000 from just 15-20 minutes a day.

Obviously I want The Accursed to go a little quicker than that, but it’s a reminder that even if I do 500 words it’ll add up over time.

So my plan currently is to mix things up. A bit of writing, followed by a bit of something else. So today I wrote The Climb and then dipped into World of Warcraft to do a quest on one of the alts to unlock the weekly quests. Then I went and did a bunch of pictures for The Climb and then I did a bit of The Accursed.

The problem is that, I had a long list of things I wanted to do, including other writing sessions, but I ran out of day. I needed to be somewhere early which meant everything had to be curtailed, just as I was getting into a bit of a rhythm, and it left me annoyed for the rest of the day.

Creative work is hard, and I do a lot of work to ensure I have a productive environment. When external forces come into play that stop my flow, as much as the rational human being in me says that these things happen, there’s a creative part of me that gets so annoyed.

I’m starting to think that next week I’m going to rely on ToDoist a lot more. I’ve been also thinking about a day tracker. That’s not only so I can see when I’ve been unproductive, but also to give me some clarity when disruptions happen mid-flow and I need to take stock of the fact that I’ve actually done a lot.

It’s the weekend tomorrow and with it, Pokemon Community Day. Another disruption I find annoying. I have no space, it’s a shit pokemon and I’ve run out of balls. Still, I hope to bang out some words in the morning before the event starts.

At the same time I’m tidying up and updating my ToDoist so that next week I can at least try to be a little more focused and cram things in. I feel I’m behind but I’m not exactly sure on what.