Searching for a routine

Just a quick update post. My parents came over to visit last week, and we’ve all come down with a mild cold, so our family routine has been more or less up-ended. That’s just the nature of routines, though: they work until they’re inevitably disrupted, at which point you need to reassess and adapt to the new circumstances.

In our case, the big thing we need to adapt to is our two year-old daughter. Currently, I watch her in the morning and my wife watches her in the evening (we both work from home). Which works out pretty nice, especially since she’s just started taking one long nap (usually in the morning) instead of two shorter ones.

I’ll have to talk with Mrs. Vasicek about how we want to adjust our schedules because of that. But before we do that, I suppose I should break down the elements of what I need to accomplish, and figure out how best to do those:

Writing

My daily writing goal is to hit at least 1k new words, and 2.5k words on what I call the daily index. Basically, new words count 1x and words revised or other words (such as what I’m writing now for this blog) count .5x. So I could hit the daily index by writing 2.5k new words in my WIP, or 1k new words and 3k words revised.

It’s a fairly modest goal, but I’ve found it quite challenging to hit it consistently. For that reason, I allow myself one admin day (for doing all the mindless work and/or refilling the creative well) per week, but I really do need to hit those daily writing goals more regularly. And I’ve found through sad experience that the longer I put off doing the writing, the harder it gets to actually do.

So what I really need is to start writing first thing in the morning. If I can get 500 words in before breakfast, that would be fantastic. But the trouble with that is that I’m the one watching the baby while Mrs. Vasicek makes breakfast, and the baby is always—always—super hangry when she wakes up. I know we’re supposed to minimize screen time, but I usually put on something for her to watch to keep her happy. But that’s usually either piano music or Tabernacle Choir, so I suppose I could write on my other monitor while the video plays on the other one. And sometimes I get lucky and the baby wanders off to the kitchen to get a piece of whatever Mommy is cooking. So I could probably fit in some writing that way.

The other obvious time to fit in some writing time is during her nap. I usually need at least a little time to decompress first (putting the baby down can be an ordeal) but if I set a timer, that would probably help keep the down-time from taking up all of naptime. Also, it would probably help if I read a book instead of browsing the internet. Reading is much better for decompressing than vegging out on the latest clickbait trash.

If I can hit 500 words before breakfast and another 500 words during naptime, it should be much easier to hit word count later. The first couple hundred words are always the hardest. After hitting 1k words, it’s surprisingly easy to write another thousand. So getting those words in early is the key.

Publishing

In my experience, there are four kinds of publishing tasks, forming a 2×2 grid:

Tasks that require a lot of brainspace are things like writing a blog post, or writing a book description, or responding to fan mail. Tasks that take very little brainspace are things like crunching numbers, typesetting a print book, or submitting books for promotions.

The procrastination angle is a bit more personal. I imagine the kinds of things I tend to procrastinate are very different from the things that other people procrastinate. But the big danger here is that the tasks I actually enjoy will become the excuse for procrastinating something else—like writing. For that reason, I try to limit myself to only 1 hour of publishing tasks per day.

But when is the best time to fit in that hour? If I do it first thing to get it out of the way, there’s a very good chance I’ll just keep working through the timer and end up having an admin day. On the other hand, if I put it off to the end of the day, then writing tends to fill up that space instead—which isn’t terrible, but these publishing tasks do need to get done sometime.

What I probably need to do is set a time in the middle of the day, maybe around 3pm when we start intermittent fasting. That should be late enough not to turn the day into an admin day, but early enough that I still have time and energy. Besides, for me writing isn’t usually a continuous thing: instead, it tends to happen in creative bursts with a little bit of necessary downtime in between. So setting 3pm as the publishing tasks time shouldn’t interrupt my writing time too badly—and if I happen to be in the flow, I’ll just push on to the next stopping point and do publishing tasks then.

I have a pretty good accountability system in place to maximize the productivity of that hour, so I’m not concerned about needing more time or dropping the ball on the important-but-not-urgent tasks. However, I will procrastinate some of those important-but-not-urgent tasks if I’m not mindful enough. So this is probably the best way to handle all that:

Of course, this will change depending on how urgent/important the task is. The mindless enjoyable tasks tend to be neither urgent nor important, but that isn’t always the case. And by “start first, then listen to podcasts,” what I mean is to start it off with a good amount of focus, then switch on a podcast in the background after I’ve hit my stride.

Reading

Reading is something that I enjoy, but it isn’t a mindless activity, so if I’m not careful I’ll end up filling my free time with useless things like playing a phone game. So reading time needs to be scheduled.

My wife and I have found that reading before bed tends to work really well, so long as we don’t put off going to bed. The key to that is to turn off the computer before getting the baby down, which means accomplishing all of my work (including personal stuff) before about 7pm. Also, on the nights when it’s my turn to do the dishes, it helps to do those sometime during the afternoon, to keep the rest of the evening free.

We also do a fair amount of reading in the early morning (theoretically, we wake up at 5am, though we haven’t been as good about that lately), but when the baby gets up, it’s usually time to start the morning routine, so it isn’t good to rely on that time.

I could probably also fit in some reading time while watching the baby. The key here is to cut back on podcasts, which probably would be a lot healthier, considering how many political podcasts I listen to. Also, as I mentioned above, reading would be a great way to decompress after putting the baby down for a nap.

So that’s pretty much what I have in mind: start off each day with writing time, carefully schedule and limit publishing time, and be more deliberate about reading time. Hopefully that works.