So, how did Operation Morning Person go? I just had my best writing week in I don’t remember how long — and that’s even with my lunch hour getting pre–empted more days than not, a development that would have had me climbing the walls had I not already gotten nearly two hours of good stuff done.
And, contrary to my expectations, I did indeed see 5 a.m. — six out of the past seven mornings. Full immersion turned out to be the way to go.
I might as well mention another experiment I tried recently and have been really happy with — the Saturday Digital Sabbath. It’s not as extreme as it may sound — I don’t shun my MP3 player or my cell phone, but I do stay off the computer. (OK, except yesterday, when I needed a recipe for crockpot pasta sauce, instructions for replacing bicycle brake cables, and an instant download — Groundhog Day — to watch during an impromptu family movie night.)
But I do avoid e-mail, my feed reader, and other favorite online distractions (such as filling in empty “Year” fields for tracks in iTunes — just 300 to go!), and as a result I’m more present for my family, better rested, more productive (see sauce, pasta; and brakes, bicycle), and, as it turns out, not critically out of the loop. I recommend it.
Finally, in a successful effort to make sure I spend more of my “writing” time actually writing, I’ve also begun relegating all of what I call “marketing stuff” — Publishers Lunch and Publishers Weekly, Facebookery, kidlit blogs, posts to my own, etc. — to a two-hour window on Sundays. And seeing as how this week’s window began at 5 a.m., and it’s 7 now, I do believe it’s time to sign off.
Bartography readers, here’s to a great long weekend, spent having fun and doing whatever works for you.
I’ve been on an unscheduled blogging holiday because of everything going on in the family this month. Also I’ve had to share my laptop with other family members due to the death of our monitor on the family desktop. (Phew, new one arrived today.) As a result, I have been knitting and reading and doing things in the evening that I used to do BEFORE I got the laptop and computer-ed all evening.
It has been lovely. I am going to impose a computer curfew on myself so I can continue in this vein.
I’ve been on an unscheduled blogging holiday because of everything going on in the family this month. Also I’ve had to share my laptop with other family members due to the death of our monitor on the family desktop. (Phew, new one arrived today.) As a result, I have been knitting and reading and doing things in the evening that I used to do BEFORE I got the laptop and computer-ed all evening.
It has been lovely. I am going to impose a computer curfew on myself so I can continue in this vein.