Saturday 26th June 2021

Today was another productive day.  I’ve got a great little set up here now since my upgrades in Notion.

I have a daily log, with my working day broken down into hours.  I fill that in as I go with what I’ve been working on.  The idea isn’t so much to police myself as to see where my focus has been.  Too much in one direction or other and I can pivot quickly the next day.

It also links into my weekly database.  That’s split into two areas… planning the week and then reviewing the week.  With the link in from my daily database, it’s a simple case of clicking through the 7 entries, to be able to quickly review what’s been achieved over the course of the week.  As stupid as it sounds, the pandemic has screwed my sense of time and I sit here on Saturday feeling like my jab might have been last week instead of this.

This will, in turn, cascade up to my monthly, quarterly and yearly databases, allowing me to review, adjust and plan the period ahead.  It feels really effective.

I’ve built something on my front page that shows only the current daily entry and the current week.  It’s nothing fancy, just a simple filter of “where day / week equals today”  but it allows me to get quick access right from my front page.

I also have two further entries there.

I’ve linked in my writing metrics.  Maybe this should have been merged with my daily log, but I like having a separate calendar to keep this clean.  It’s a little clunky but I do need to link any entry with the date in the daily log.  It’s a 2 second job, but it’s not automatic.

Earlier this week, I built something into this database so that depending on the condition of a drop down denoting whether it was editing or writing, it fills a total – words written, or words edited.

Because this database is now linked through to the daily log, I can now add all my sessions together to get me a total for the day of both writing and editing.  And, because of how the daily links into the weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly databases, I’ve managed to get it to automatically sum everything up.  I just need to enter my writing metrics (remembering the date and whether it was writing or editing), and I know how much I’ve done for any given period without any more work.

I’ve also linked this into my database of writing projects.  This is just a list of current and past works.  The idea is to flesh it out over time so I can track all stages of a book or short stories development.  But already, I have got it so that it automatically works out how many words I’ve written on any project and more interestingly, how many minutes it has taken me.

The last section that’s been added to my home page is my social media calendar.  Again I’ve linked it through to the daily log, although that benefit has yet to yield anything.  I’ve made some changes to the social media database so that I can plan posts ahead of time, and have them appear on my home page as a reminder that they need doing.

This is still in its infancy but the idea is that I can use this to plan ahead, and then each day see a list of copy I need to post along with which platform it needs to go on.  Whilst it’s not a priority at the moment, the idea is that by building this I can scale it up ready for when I do need to.  It also gives me chance to play and learn.

I do have a guilty habit of getting something going wrong on one platform and then stopping all the others.  I’m hoping this will go some way to stopping that.

My system is always about improvements, and I love how I have my own little bespoke system now that works for me.  Because I’ve taken the time to build it slowly as and when needed, it’s been easy to adopt because there’s never a big seismic shift in what I need to do.

It allowed me to get a ton of work done today, mostly on some video projects that have just been sitting around at the bottom of my todo list.  There’s still plenty to do, but I came away feeling as if I had accomplished a lot today.

I even managed to find time for 2000 words on The Accursed amongst it all.

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Past Years: 2020 – The Year of Being Fearsome | 2019 – The Year of Soldiering Through | 2018 – The Year of Priorities | 2017 – The Year Of The Offensive