So, I have been a little disappointed in myself this week for the lack of progress I made during this self-quarantine. Aside from the day job, I had zero distractions besides what I imposed on myself, and yet I barely managed to move the needle on my overall progress.
Well, heading into my last day – I cannot tell you how excited I am to be going home to my family tomorrow! – I decided that was not going to fly anymore. I want to see some progress. So in my morning journal I set out that I was going to finish my outline for the Book 1 Project and write a full chapter in the non-fiction book.
Done and done. And it’s not even lunch time yet.
It took about 2000 words to finish visualizing and recording the scenes for my fiction project. Then, I put in about 5000 words on the non-fiction book to write a chapter form start to finish. (Each chapter is dedicated to a single step in the how-to process, so they’re quite long). Some of that 5000 words was copy/pasting previous content, about 1000 words, but still, this is my single best progress day in a long time.
I have earned myself a nice extended lunch break, I think.
The key to my productivity today was committing to specific goals in my morning journal. I haven’t done that for a long time, since when I’m home I usually just write until I run out of my allotted time before the next commitment. But I really need to keep up this habit when I’m on my own. I do have the self-discipline to do this when I apply myself.
I also wrote my entire session today listening to Theta Wave Binaural Beats on Spotify. It’s a sudden new-agey twist for a traditional guy like me, but I discovered binaural beats when my new phone suggested them for playing at bed time. I don’t sleep with headphones on (you need headphones), so that was useless, but I did a little digging into what they were and decided they were worth a try. I’m not certain if it was the beats or the sense of commitment that resulted in today’s success, but either way, I’m pretty darned happy with it and I am going to continue using these.