Recently, I heard in an interview comment that the reason why you should avoid checking your cell phone first thing in the morning is not just the time lost, but also because it starts putting external information into your thoughts before you get to writing.
Up until that point, I had been checking the news and a few other things on my phone or my computer each morning before I started writing. Sometimes even playing games on the phone. I reasoned that if I was doing that while waiting for the water to boil for my coffee, or while walking on my stepper, that I wasn’t losing time, so it didn’t matter. But over the last two days, I have cut that out. I haven’t read any news or sports or opened a game before I start my writing. And so far, I have been a lot more efficient.
Yesterday, I ground through the rest of my edits and this morning, I got over 1000 words written in my fiction. I am going through the same morning routine of exercise and making coffee before I start writing, and it theoretically should be taking about the same amount of time, but by cutting out the extraneous information to my consciousness and thinking instead about what I’m going to do when I start writing, I seem to be able to approach it with much more focus and get moving faster.
I’ll see if this continues, but for now it is a most welcome development.
Today, I nearly got to the end of Scene 7 – I am perhaps two paragraphs away – and my character is about to experience a minor revelation that will crush away the last bit of hope that everything can go back to normal. But I ran out of time at the end. I’ll have to finish it next time and then move into the next scene, which is where I get to introduce my last main “good guy” character.