days

Know your limits by setting them

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Today I started around 7am, I’m going to write until about 4pm, then I’ve various errands I need to do and I’ll cook at maybe 6:30pm. That’s nice.

But.

This is new. It’s new for me or at least it’s fairly new since I lost my biggest single client as a freelance writer. Wait – I’ve just looked that up: it was three years ago next month. Unbelievable. Is that really right? Only three? Feels like a decade. It seemed like such a bad day at the time but, wow, I wish it had happened sooner.

Anyway, having a big regular client gives you structure in two ways, doesn’t it? There is the time you have agreed or are contracted to work with them. That stops you doing anything else, gloriously it also removes the churning as you think constantly about what is the best thing you could be doing right now. What can you do this minute that will help you? Nothing. You’re committed, you’re contracted. Stop churning, get working.

This type of contract also defines the rest of your time: it is the bits when you’re not working for them and so therefore must get all your other work done. What is the best thing to do at this minute? Work.

When that contract goes and you’re suddenly doing much more irregular and many, many, many more jobs all at once, the structure of your working life changes. I’d say for the better: I have come to adore jumping from one job to another, switching tasks a dozen times a day. Do note that I say switching: I will always and forever do one thing and then do the other, I will not attempt multitasking. I’ve learnt that much at least.

However, switching and jumping plus irregular and many, many, many more jobs does rather mean that you can be always working. I like this. I like this a lot.

But I have felt overwhelmed this year and when I’m being close to nasty about how good or bad my work is, I can’t help but note that longer days do not get better results.

So yesterday I tried laying out one hour on this, one hour on that, plus not checking emails until the top of the hour. This is all stuff I advocated in my book The Blank Screen and it is all stuff that I have learnt to do, that I have regularly done. But somehow doing it again in the midst of feeling under water, it helped even more.

I’m trying it again today. It means I know what I’m doing for the next several hours and I know when I’m stopping. Which means that for once I can tell you I will be having a very good time tonight relaxing with a copy of Pride and Prejudice.

I’m actually looking forward to that. The evening is now a thing to look forward to instead of just a different set of numbers on the clock.

Happy for me, isn’t it? But I hope you can do this too. Right up to re-reading P&P, though get your own copy. Obviously.

Open the doors

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It worked. Previously…

I’m closing the doors for one day.

For Wednesday 14 January 2015 I am working on only one project. Nothing else allowed, not even emails, not even phone calls. We’ll see how I get on but even now, writing to you late the night before, I’m feeling a bit liberated. I was looking at a project plan just now, the very barest skeleton project management jobs and realised I was sighing as I went to add in some detail. As I went to colour it all in. And that realisation, plus the clear fact that I can’t finish it tonight, led me to this relief. I will not look at it tomorrow. I cannot.

Close the doors – William Gallagher, The Blank Screen (14 January 2015)

It’s true that today I am in a flat-spin panic about everything I’m behind on but the main project from yesterday is far, far and three times far further along. Still not as far as I need it to be but so much further that it’s about the only thing I’m not panicking about right now.

So I’ll do this again.

When I can possibly fit it in.

Close the doors

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Right now I have ten major projects on and all need tending to. Now, I don’t expect you to be interested in this but I do want you to help me come to a realisation.

Ten is too many.

I know I should shed some. I can think of one that will go away in a month; another that will be done in three months. That’s down to eight already, come on.

A third needs about five more days work and it’s gone completely. Seven.

Still too many, especially as I can casually say that about the project that needs five more days, that doesn’t change that fact that it has needed five more days for about four months now.

But if I’m not ready to shed anything yet and actually I am very ready to add things if you’ve got an interesting idea, I am trying something new tomorrow. Or rather today, by the time this first appears on The Blank Screen website.

I’m closing the doors for one day.

For Wednesday 14 January 2015 I am working on only one project. Nothing else allowed, not even emails, not even phone calls. We’ll see how I get on but even now, writing to you late the night before, I’m feeling a bit liberated. I was looking at a project plan just now, the very barest skeleton project management jobs and realised I was sighing as I went to add in some detail. As I went to colour it all in. And that realisation, plus the clear fact that I can’t finish it tonight, led me to this relief. I will not look at it tomorrow. I cannot.

If this works out, I may do what US writer David E Kelley used to do: he’d spend half the week writing crime series The Practice and half writing Ally McBeal. Ask him a Practice question on a McBeal day and he could not answer you. That was just not in his head.

I like the idea of nine projects being out of my head.

I just hope I do spend the day on the tenth and don’t just eat toast and watch TV.