Good Sunday morning and welcome to my front porch for Sunday Morning Tea!
For the uninitiated, Sunday Morning Tea is my virtual writing salon, where we talk about our writing goals and projects while sipping on a hot cuppa tea!
Today, it’s cool and rainy, and I’m wrapped in a blanket on the couch with a freshly brewed mug of chai, which translated into English simply means tea, though we in the Western world know it best as spiced tea made with milk.
You know, a few years ago, the thought of putting milk in tea absolutely disgusted me. I liked my tea black with sugar and maybe a squeeze of lemon, but that was it!
Then a “friend” showed me how they make it in his home country, and I’ve been in love ever since…in more ways than one…
Last week was really productive regarding my ongoing blog clean-up project. I edited a few posts, took down others that weren’t serving the blog anymore, fixed some broken links (I didn’t realize how many I had since I changed my blog URL, so that is a project all by itself), and scheduled a few posts ahead of time for BlaPoWriMo in February.
What I still haven’t been able to figure out is how to balance blogging with WIP work. I want to make sure I still have time to dedicate to finishing Love Poetry. I haven’t been able to write anything since that splurge of inspiration last month. And I know it’s only January, and there are so many things going on right now that have my attention (NFL playoffs, Australian Open, Bloganuary), but as the saying goes, “If you give a mouse a cookie…”
If you give a chronic procrastinator a deadline extension…
And then the day job just recently dropped a bombshell on us: return to the office starts in March. So all that extra time I’ve had in the mornings to do writing sprints, to exercise, to fix myself a filling and nutritious breakfast to wake up my brain is about to get wiped out. Unless I wake up earlier, which probably won’t happen, or go to work earlier so that I’ll have the afternoon for personal goals, which may actually work better for me, as when I get into my writing zone, it’s hard to stop, especially if I have to stop to make someone else money.
It sucks, really. Every time you think you’ve established a routine, despite how flawed it may be, corporate America is always there to step in and throw a monkey wrench into your plans. But I’m hoping that the visceral rejection by many of my fellow employees (the announcement went out around the same time as an employee satisfaction survey, so you know a lot of people changed their answers) will convince executive leadership to reconsider a forced return to office mandate.
All of this uncertainty only confirms for me that I really have to find a path toward being my own employer. But if I really want to be a full-time writer, there are a lot of habits I need to change. Top on that list is PROCRASTINATION!
My procrastination usually gets worse when I make too many commitments and I don’t have a clear vision or planned schedule of how I will accomplish those commitments. Blogging every day is a commitment I’ve realized I can’t keep if I want to accomplish my WIP goals. It takes too much time from a day that’s already getting shorter. For example, although I’m enjoying the Bloganuary challenge, I don’t like that the prompts are posted at 7AM my time. That doesn’t give me enough time to think of and then type up an answer before I have to log into work, especially if the question doesn’t immediately inspire me. That means that I end up posting later in the evening, and by then, my brain is too tired to do anything else. If I got the prompts the night before, I could at least sleep on it, and maybe an idea for a post will come in a dream.
Unfortunately, I can’t change what time zone I live in, and I’ve still managed to post for Bloganuary every day, despite the minor inconvenience. But moving forward, I’m going to adopt a 3-day posting schedule. Morning Inspiration will still be every day, because those posts are for me as well as for you, to inspire us all to write something (not necessarily a blog post) every day. And throwback Thursdays and flashback Fridays will continue because I hate the idea of old posts getting buried into oblivion after a few years because nobody’s clicking on them. But I won’t pressure myself to try to post newly inspired stories, poems, and musings every single day so that I don’t burn out my muse, so that I have more time to write/edit my WIP, so that I can continue my blog clean-up project, and so that I can pursue other personal goals for the year (like reading a book).
—Nortina
How are you doing on your 2023 goals? Are there some things you’re already looking to change?
Nortina's Writing Inspiration Well 
Even though you are conflicted, you are doing an awesome job! You’ll figure out a schedule. Years ago, I would look at the daily prompt and tackle it as I ate my lunch at my work desk. Then after work, i would clean up my draft and post. Wont work for me now though. And yeah, you could change your time zone…go into your Settings and temporarily change it to a time zone that is way ahead of you like Australia. I’ve done it. 😀
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Wait that actually works?? How does it help you get the email sooner though?
I guess I only get annoyed when it’s a prompt that I’m not immediately inspired by. Then I use up all of my writing window trying to think of what to write. But I guess that’s not that big of a deal since I still get it done, haha!
This may force me to actually use my lunch break though, rather than work while I eat.
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I changed my timezone in the WordPress settings a few times for other writing challenges so I could get the prompts early so I assume. I think I chose India or Australia. In addition to getting more time, I didn’t want to read what others had already posted from earlier timezones because it was influencing the ideas i had (like thinking my idea sucked compared to others) 🙂
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