"Sex without the mind is just friction."

Sunday 6 January 2013

Minimums and maximums

Weekends feel like they're vast spaces of unassigned time, yet I never seem to achieve as much as I want in them. Onw of my problems is procrastination - if I'm not working to a deadline, I can easily while away the time I should be working in on a vast range of other seemingly-important tasks and quests for shiny things instead of doing what I should be. And the internet is full of shiny things to capture my attention.

So, despite having what felt like loads of time to write yesterday, I still only managed just above 1000 words to leave me at a grand total of 5,383. I think one of my issues is that when I have an overall target I'm working to, I can sometimes treat reaching a milestone as a maximum for the day, rather than just passing an arbitrary point. Note how many of my days so far have been ones where I wrote just over 1000 words. I need to remind myself that the challenge is to write 100,000 in 100 days, and make sure I treat that 1000 as a minimum requirement, not as an excuse to go off and procrastinate some more.

As a corollary to that, I also need to ensure my motivation carries on beyond the end of the challenge. That's why 1000 a day does help - it's a reasonable amount to write, but not quite as likely to lead to that burnt-out feeling I've often had at the end of doing NaNoWriMo. Perhaps I should have the guts to set myself a bigger target - maybe 365,000 words of fiction in a year? - but something like that can seem so vast from early January that it's very unfeasibility puts me into a slump.

Anyway, it's Sunday, I'm awake, and it's quiet. Time to write.

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