These tulips were all focused on the sun until I turned them around to take a picture.
My routine gets upset at least twice a year: the start of school and the end of school. It seems I just get the routine down of balancing all my mothering, teaching, soccer-momming, and writing, then school is over and we’ve got extra time. A few weeks of getting the kids to stop saying, “Mom I’m bored,” and then the summer is over and we’re transitioning back into the school schedule.
These transition times can drive me a little crazy. If I’ve learned anything, it is this:
Focus on the one thing.
I recently had the revelation that since my LIFE is all about multi-tasking right now, my writing needs to be focused. I need to do just one thing at a time or I’ll end up with a bunch of half-finished manuscripts.
Take this blog, for example. It was my summer project. Kitty and Stephanie are already online with their own personal blogs, so I volunteered to work on the technical side to register the domain name, get the hosting, choose the blogging software, etc. It was something I needed to learn and it took up my writing time. I temporarily put my novel on hold so that I could work on skills I need for marketing my book one day. Now that the blog is up, my focus can swing back to my novel.
Hmm. As I’m typing this I’m remembering reading about a software program that helps you maintain your focus. It was on Randy Ingermanson’s blog…Let me go find it for you….Okay, here’s the deal. Almost a YEAR ago on the Advanced Fiction Writing blog they were discussing time management. Randy Ingermanson was talking about this idea of focusing on one thing. So, I guess it has been in my subconscious for about a year and I finally got it! Thanks, Randy! Click here if you want to learn more about the software (I’m more of a paper and pen planner so I can’t help you there) and you can read the part of the discussion I liked best.
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Shonna, you are sooo on the money. While I like to have several projects going at once, there has to be consistent focus! I can’t write on them all every day. That is the main reason why I made M-W-F my fiction writing days and Tu-Th my non-fiction writing days. And it worked so well until this past week when I decided I need to mix it up a little. While I got writing done, I did not accomplish nearly what I wanted and constantly had to battle the “something’s not right” feeling. I hate that I’m such a negative illustration for a truth we trying to propagate, that Routines with Focus Achieve our Dreams, but there it is.
This reminds me of why I LOVE using the program “Scrivener” (for Mac; a similar program called ywriter is what Stephanie uses on Windows). I used to have so many different Word documents with all kinds of research, character charts, notes, etc., and I never could find what I was looking for. With Scrivener my focus is not scattered because every single document is in one master file. I can find what I’m looking for in the column on the left, click on it, and I’m there. Voila! My focus stays in the one file, where everything should always be.
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