Man, oh man
August 20, 2008 7 Comments
That’s it, I’ve cut down massively on the amount of blogs I read, places I visit, and things I do online. As much as I love social networking, it has seriously sliced into my writing time. So, anything not strictly writing related, gone. And any writer websites that are 90% not writing related, gone. Suck. But I need to free up more time.
I am going to keep blogging frequently here, though. Since it actually makes me more creative, and only sucks up about 5-10 minutes of my time, compared to the 3-4 hours of blog reading that I usually go through in a given day.
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3-4 hours per day? Holy crapamoly! Do what you have to do to get some time back. Unlike some resources, time is not renewable.
Agreed with Michelle. This has been the Week from Hell for me, work-wise, but at the start I said I’d (more or less) take a LiveJournal break. What do you know? More productive already, even working long hours at the day job.
About a year ago I bought an egg timer as an aid to writing. I got it for those absolutely stuck moments when I couldn’t imagine writing — I would set the timer for fifteen minutes and promise myself one sentence at the end of it. Usually that got me going, and I haven’t had to use it for a while. But now? I think I’m going to put a timer on my internet usage in the morning. It’s nice to blog and all that, but it’s so easy to wrapped up in reading and thinking about writing instead of writing itself.
I got in the habit of skimming blogs. Unless it is a short post or one I know I “should” read, I skip it. At start of summer I was up to 2 hours, but now I’m down to 30 minutes, 1 hour on bad days. You know what my time suck is- on the plus side, that’s almost done on my behalf.
This is even including skimming, and using Google Reader, so I only have to go to one webpage. I don’t think it would be that bad if I didn’t keep checking them three or four times a day….heh.
For hardcore productivity… John Klima linked to this yesterday: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476
But, yeah, it’s amazing how much shit I’m getting done this week.
Since I’m gearing up to begin a new short story foray this weekend, I’m staying offline next week as much as possible. I might post a few excerpts from my last rough draft of the shoggoth story next week, but that’s it. My goal word count-wise is 4k–quite doable so long as I stay unplugged from this Matrixy-intarweebs thing.
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