{"id":2152,"date":"2019-09-27T06:46:53","date_gmt":"2019-09-27T06:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=2152"},"modified":"2019-09-27T06:46:53","modified_gmt":"2019-09-27T06:46:53","slug":"count-on-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2019\/09\/27\/count-on-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Count on it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe this is just something male. It feels a bit male. But one way I can make myself feel like I&#8217;m getting somewhere, is to count.<\/p>\n<p>Actually, no, hang on, practically every novelist I know has their word count figure in their head. Maybe it&#8217;s not just me, not for everything.<\/p>\n<p>But I know my absolute limit of how many words I can write a day \u2013 it&#8217;s 10,000 words or 20 pages of script, and I can keep that up for ten days straight, after which I am dead for a month. And I know too many numbers.<\/p>\n<p>I know that since September 2012 when I was asked to speak at the PowWow LitFest, I&#8217;ve since done a further 667 public speaking engagements. It might only be ten minutes Skyped into a venue, or it might be a day-long residential thing, but I count them all. <\/p>\n<p>And I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s any surprise that as a freelance writer, I count my invoices. I don&#8217;t really, I don&#8217;t go over the totals and remember them, but the invoices are numbered so it&#8217;s a bit obvious what the count is.<\/p>\n<p>Whereas this isn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>I also count the jobs I do.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s harder to define, really, as some of it is quite clear such as &#8216;writing script X&#8217; is quite certainly a job. I just still do not know what do about counting draft 2. <\/p>\n<p>And then a feature article I write is clearly one job, but a site I write for has me do a particular repeating piece of research and, frankly, I count it if I think about counting it, and most of the time, I don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>So this is not really a statistically useful count, and whatever you&#8217;re doing today, if you counted each separate task as a new job, you&#8217;d get bored very easily.<\/p>\n<p>No, wait, that was a poor choice of words. I shouldn&#8217;t have said &#8216;task&#8217; because any one job can have dozens of tasks in it. Just a sec. Okay, a rough and ready export of my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.omnigroup.com\/omnifocus\">OmniFocus<\/a> database says I currently have 630 tasks across 55 projects to do. <\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s not 55 jobs, but it&#8217;s also far from 630. Somewhere in the middle is what I call a job. And whatever way I have conjured up of defining that, this is approximately how I count it.<\/p>\n<p>And although I see what we&#8217;re doing here as you and I getting to chat, it&#8217;s still something I set time aside for every week, so it&#8217;s a kind of job. It&#8217;s one I look forward to, but it&#8217;s a specific thing I do at a specific time of the week. We really, really should do this over a drink some time. You just never answer the phone.<\/p>\n<p>But the reason for wibbling on at you about counting is that this chat right here, this natter with you, is my 1,000th job of 2019.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/09\/Job-Count-2.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/09\/Job-Count-2-300x70.png\" alt=\"Counting the number of jobs I do\" width=\"300\" height=\"70\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-2153\" srcset=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/09\/Job-Count-2-300x70.png 300w, http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2019\/09\/Job-Count-2.png 655w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nI did have to cheat a little. I was writing a horrible news story that was going to be the 998th and I knew if I didn&#8217;t take care, the 1,000th would come up on me before I noticed and it&#8217;d be something dull. <\/p>\n<p>Oh. Or it could&#8217;ve been a script I&#8217;m writing that I have entirely forgotten to count. Bugger. This count is rubbish, isn&#8217;t it?<\/p>\n<p>So I added a new job I was going to be doing yesterday evening, called that 999, and then wrote the subject of this Self Distract so that I could call it 1,000. After that, I did another news story, wrote an article and talked on a podcast, so now I&#8217;m up to, what, 1,003.<\/p>\n<p>This can&#8217;t matter to anyone. But it&#8217;s still useful to me. I like that you&#8217;re the 1,000th, it makes me beam. And I also like that whatever cockeyed insane Dewey Decimal System I&#8217;m using to count all this, 2019 has hit a thousand jobs.<\/p>\n<p>I constantly fear that I&#8217;m not getting enough done, that I am letting deeply precious time roar by and achieving nothing, so being able to see a thousand of anything, helps.<\/p>\n<p>Plus, it turns out that in total, 2018 had 823 jobs. In total. Smug.<\/p>\n<p>Grief: 2017 had 326. Then 2016 was 792.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure I was counting before then, but since 2016 I&#8217;ve been using a FileMaker Pro database I call a Job Book, and finding out those figures for you was more clicking a button and less an extremely pointless, daft exercise.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s still a bit of an extremely pointless, daft exercise. But if a poorly-counted number in a database can make me feel happy, I&#8217;ll take that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe this is just something male. It feels a bit male. But one way I can make myself feel like &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2019\/09\/27\/count-on-it\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[1550,669,289,441,1551,180],"class_list":["post-2152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-selfdistract","tag-counting","tag-jobs","tag-omnifocus","tag-scriptwriting","tag-tasks","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-yI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2156,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions\/2156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}