A quick recap: In order to boost the quantity and quality of my writing I have been following and adapting a series of recommendations culled from Cal Newport’s book Deep Work.
I finished an on-spec article for the SFWA Bulletin (The Science Fiction Writers professional association) on my experiences to date working with Cal’s ideas, adding my own spin to them by dragging in KKR and DWS and their Race idea as a metric to use in a scoreboard which I keep in front of me all the time.
Because people who keep score play differently from those that don’t.
Being an SF writer, I had to discuss science fiction’s relationship to network culture, and the technophile’s enhanced vulnerability to the bleeding edge. I’ll let you know if the piece sells.
One of the rules I’ve created for my new regime is called:
NO BLOG BEFORE FROG
Which is to say, I can’t write blog posts (or do any social media beyond an every other hour message check) before my 1800 new words of the day are written.
The word frog here refers to the motivational trope about ‘eating the frog,’ which means basically that if you have something you need to do, that you don’t do enough, you prioritize that thing, do it first.
This is related to the idea that humans have limited willpower. A lot of life is prioritizing your to-do list, because, simply, you never get to most of your to-do list, do you?
In and around the demands of my client work, this has meant no blogging for a bit. Since I haven’t actually been hitting my word count, either.
Finally, I made my word count, and can post this update… and… well. I find the urge to blog reduced. Life is also about habits. Good ones and bad ones.
In general, I find myself more contemplative, more lonely, feeling slightly cast-adrift, without social media. Not sure what I’ll do when my month is up. A few weeks in I still can’t tell exactly what my abstention is doing to my word count because I had a flurry of client work on deadline eating up the time I was freeing up.
I will keep you posted.
Good luck with your work.
Eat that frog.
