Three Days Along
So far, this full-time writer thing has been … weird.
Several people warned me that it would take a while to catch up on sleep, and they weren’t wrong. I’ve been sleeping in a bit and feeling surprisingly tired in the evenings. I’ve even crashed for the occasional nap.
I’ve gotten a bit of writing done, roughly at the same pace I’d been doing before. (I’m up to 11K words on Project Bob.) I’ve also started chipping away at various chores and errands and home maintenance things. Part of my brain is grumbling that I haven’t made more progress on the new book, but I’m trying to cut myself some slack this first week. This is a recovery and transition time.
It’s also the last week before the kids go back to school. Starting next week, I’ll be alone from the time I wake up until mid-afternoon when I head out to pick up my daughter. I suspect that will make a big difference when it comes to being able to focus on writing, or whatever else I need to work on.
Without the structure of the day job, I’m working on putting together my own schedule. I’m hoping my days will look something like this:
- 8 a.m. – Wake up. Grab breakfast.
- 8:30 – 10:30 – 10 hour/week freelance opportunity. (I’m still waiting to see if this works out, but if it does, it would be a nice, small, steady paycheck to supplement the other writing income.)
- 10:30 – Noon – Writing! (Or grocery shopping and other errands, when needed.)
- Noon – 1:00 – Lunch.
- 1:00 – 3:00 – Writing!
- 3:00 – 3:30 – Pick up my daughter.
- 3:30 – 4:30 – Writing!
There could be evening writing work as needed, and weekends as well, but if this works out, it means I’m getting 3-4 hours of writing time every day before stopping to make dinner.
I’m also planning to start exercising again in the evenings. I started with 20 minutes on the exercise bike last night. If I can get back into the habit, it will help the depression, the diabetes, and just get me back into better shape overall.
Other things I need to figure out:
- Making time for socializing and getting out of the house.
- Making sure the housework and such doesn’t devour all of my writing time.
- How much to try to work in the evenings and weekends. (I know I want and need more time to relax with my family than I’d been getting before.)
It all feels a bit surreal right now, and it will be another week before I start to have anything approaching “normal” full-time writer days.
But I already feel more rested and less stressed than I did a week ago. So far, so good!
Andrew Betts
September 2, 2015 @ 1:20 pm
I’ve been working from home for about two years now (not that I really make enough to justify it, but we’ll say anxiety issues have developed over years).
I’ve actually found it easier to work while my son was home the past couple weeks. When I’m by myself I tend to get distracted easier for some reason.
I know what you mean about wanting to get on the exercise bus again. For much the same reasons as you: depression, diabetes, plus needing to lose weight (although unlike most, I tend to feel more depressed exercising, which is kinda weird).
The sleep thing does get better, especially if you’re allowed to control your sleep schedule. (My wife and I rent the upstairs from my parents and they don’t seem to be able to comprehend that I tend to work late due to people I work with being in California and not Michigan so their midnight is my 3AM … meaning I tend to sleep until 10:30-11AM. But if I’m working a “real job” I would be getting up at 6AM like my mother … but that’s neither here nor their).
Glad its working for you and hope it leads to many more hours of happy writing.
Michael J. Bode
September 2, 2015 @ 2:11 pm
Congrats on throwing off the shackles of the day job. Enjoy no lines at the grocery store, traffic free highways, and having your pick of timeslots at the doctors office.
I’ve been at it for … four months? It is weird. The stress for me lifted and it feels great but you get used to it. The big worry really boiled down to the lack of predictable money, for me anyway.
Hats off to you if you can stick to a regular schedule. I live alone so there’s nothing and no one to keep me on track. No two days are the same. It’s not such a bad thing either. It’s easy to look at all this suddenly freed up time and want to stuff it with everything an android version of me would do. But I personally like my loafing time… it’s sinfully unproductive but oh so satisfying.
I found that my daily productivity didn’t change that much although I could take advantage of those moments of inspiration and binge write thousands of words whereas before I might have been at work etc.
Socially I get about as much interaction as I did before. Sometimes more since I’m the guy whose around if anyone wants to hang out between 9-5. It’s important to reach out to people… I suck at doing that. There’s currently a dozen people I’d like to see but just haven’t gotten around to making plans.
I’m actually going back to work a couple days a week because someone asked me really nicely and made it worth my while. So instead of having a 2 day weekend, I have a 2 day work-end. That seems like a good balance to me.
J.T. Evans
September 2, 2015 @ 2:47 pm
Jim,
It sounds like you have a great plan of action for staying productive in your writing without the structure of a Day Job. Congrats on that!
I’ve taught a few time management classes (specifically for writers), and I’ve condensed my presentation down into a blog post. I hit the blog post from time-to-time to remind myself of how to stay on top of things and still continue writing in a productive manner.
If you head here http://jtevans.net/2013/11/time-management-for-writers/ and check out the post, I hope you find a nugget (or three) of value from the post.
I wish you all the best in turning the Writing Job into the Day Job. That’s a fantastic accomplishment!
Terri Ash
September 2, 2015 @ 3:13 pm
As far as housework, I would check out a website like flylady.com. The email reminders are chirpy and irritating, but the premise is that if your break things up into manageable chunks and assign a chunk to each day, then it doesn’t become overwhelming. You may sink a lot of time in getting things back to square one, but once you’ve gotten there you can figure out how to work housework into your existing schedule. As an example, I have a laundry schedule. Each individual plus the household laundry is given a day. I write down which laundry I’m supposed to do in my planner. This keeps things to a manageable 1-2 loads per day, with a couple of non laundry days.
Also, if you find that the housework is eating into your writing time, try to budget for cleaning help. Think of it as a business expense – you are paying for work to be done that is keeping you from writing.
LauraA
September 2, 2015 @ 5:09 pm
Hi, Jim. I keep meaning to tell you about a local writers group we have, Wordos. I attended a couple of the meetings when my son was doing his 8th grade mentorship project on becoming a novelist. If you have a local group like this, it could help both with keeping yourself on task and improving your social life. It sounds like you’re already handling the transition well!
Stephen W. Gee
September 2, 2015 @ 5:13 pm
Since you seem to lack for unsolicited advise, nyahaha, here’s a little more:
For me, the #1 most important thing is to do all my most important (and creative) work early in the day. Preferably the important, but NOT urgent work—which for us, is always working on the next book. Freelance articles, chores, errands, and exercise can all be done later in the day, and the panic of having to do them NOW helps ensure that they’ll get done. If I do the creative, difficult work early, the rest follows suit … and I get far more writing done than I would otherwise.
Personally, I also work a lot better in large, discrete chunks. 2+ hours at minimum. If I only have one hour, I’ll run out the clock by screwing around. Though maybe that’s just me, haha
Lyndon
September 2, 2015 @ 6:45 pm
Hmmm. Not writing during lunch? I mean, that has historically produced Good Stuff To Read.
mjkl
September 2, 2015 @ 7:31 pm
It’s important to give yourself a break between jobs. Any time I’ve switched jobs, I’ve tried to take at least 2 weeks off for much needed R&R. The last couple of weeks of a job are exhausting as you try to wrap up projects and leave things in good shape for your co-workers. So allow yourself to enjoy your last week before the kids go back to school with no guilt. It’s good for all of you.
As for socializing, pick a day to call your “have lunch with a friend” day. Schedule it into your calendar. You can meet your working friends near their offices. You could even have the lunch with your wife 1-2 times/month – that gives you together-without-kids time that doesn’t require a babysitter. 🙂
Mason T. Matchak
September 2, 2015 @ 9:11 pm
Glad to hear things are going well.
Though to be honest, I expected yet another “still in bed” pic. 😛
Morgan
September 2, 2015 @ 11:05 pm
It having been recommended by both you and my daughter, I’m using HabitRPG (now Habitica). It’s helped me schedule household chores across the week, which keeps them from being overwhelming and pushing my writing time off the table. I’ve also got various self-care items on there as Habits and as Dailies.
Just thought I’d mention it, in case it hadn’t crossed your mind. And now I’m thinking, “Really? It wouldn’t have?” Still, I’ll let the comment stand.
D. D. Webb
September 3, 2015 @ 7:26 am
This may seem a nosy question (apologies!) but does this new schedule result in you doing more writing than you did previously? I only bring it up because a few weeks back I expanded my own writing schedule so as to up my output, which worked for about three weeks before I finally overloaded my creative circuits and spun into burnout–which, given my brain chemistry, led to a serious depressive episode.
I crank about about 15K words in an average week, and after that experience I’ve come to realize that’s basically my ideal target. One hears stories of the likes of Nora Roberts, who writes eight hours a day, seven days a week, no exceptions, and one thinks “That’s awesome, I just need to develop that kind of work ethic and I too will be a great and prolific writer!” But it turns out different people just have different capacities, and downtime is a very real emotional need. Even now, knowing viscerally that I suffer if I over-push myself, I sometimes catch myself thinking “I just need to write MORE!”
Dunno if you’ve ever hit a burnout point yourself, but it seems like moving to a full-time writing schedule would be the place for that to rear up if it were going to. Above all else, don’t forget to take care of yourself!
Megpie71
September 3, 2015 @ 8:35 am
Ten Housework tips from a lazy so-and-so who hates housework (and yet remains a full time housewife).
1) You don’t have to do it all at once. It just has to get done.
2) Little bits done daily will reduce even the largest task. Mt Washingup (the pile of a week’s worth of dirty dishes caused by things like illness, depression or similar) can vanish quite satisfactorily at one sink-full or drying rack full per day. If you wash a load of laundry each day (dry it on a clothesline where possible) and fold and put away more clothes each day than you wear, you’ll gradually work your way through the largest pile of laundry.
3) Laundry can just as easily be sorted by colour as by fabric. My four key loads per week are white stuff, black stuff, blue/green stuff, and pink/red/purple stuff. (They’re sorted according to what colour the dye bleeds).
4) Ironing linen can largely be avoided if you remember that gravity works to press the folds into things, and put the newest stuff off the line at the bottom of the pile of [tea-towels/pillowcases/whatever] and take from the top of it.
5) Washable mats in high traffic areas are a godsend. Picking up a mat and throwing it into the laundry to clean while you put a new one down is a lot easier than spending hours on your hands and knees cleaning tiles, carpet, flooring or whatever.
6) You can never have too many floor cloths.
7) Household chores don’t really take that long individually, and they can be done in strategic ten minute bursts. So if you need to get up and stretch after a while spend working at the computer, use that stretching time to do one chore (sweep one floor, put on or hang out one load of laundry, fold up ten items of clean laundry, make one bed, pick up one room etc).
8) Like every other job, housework takes practice. The skills have to be learned. Once you know the basics, then you can start improvising around the edges.
9) Take comfort from the fact that the housework will never actually be finished. As one of my favourite icons goes, “Impossibility established early takes the sting out of the rest of the obstacles”. You don’t have to finish the housework, because you can never actually finish the housework.
10) A slow cooker is a lazy cook or lazy housekeeper’s dream kitchen gadget. Load everything up at about 10am, switch the slow cooker on to “slow”, and walk away. Eight hours later, you have dinner ready to serve at 6pm, and you haven’t had to do a darn thing to it since ten in the morning.
Special bonus hint number 11: If all else fails, compensate yourself for time spent doing housework by paying yourself for each chore completed. It’s your time, it’s valuable to you, so why not pay yourself for doing the housework? (My rate of completed household chores sky-rocketed at about the point where I started paying myself 10c per completed chore, as noted on Chorewars).
(Oh, and I use Habitica as a way of keeping track of the stuff that needs doing, while I use Chorewars as a way of keeping track of what I have done.)
Jim C. Hines
September 3, 2015 @ 9:41 am
I’ve been using the To Do list a lot more this week, yeah 🙂
Jim C. Hines
September 3, 2015 @ 9:41 am
If I’d planned this out better, I could have run pictures like that all week!
Jim C. Hines
September 3, 2015 @ 9:43 am
Not nosy, but it’s too early to say. This week has been weird for a number of reasons, and honestly, it hasn’t been overly productive. Give me a few weeks for the kids to get back to school and for me to settle into the new routine, and check back with me then?
Jim C. Hines
September 3, 2015 @ 9:45 am
No lines at the grocery store was pretty sweet 🙂
I’ve also been getting a fair amount of loafing time this week. I told myself this week was a write-off for recovery and transition and such. I’ve gotten a little writing done, but I think sleep and down time have been just as important.
Jim C. Hines
September 3, 2015 @ 9:46 am
I may try that, though my wife’s work schedule doesn’t lend itself to predictable lunch times…
SherryH
September 3, 2015 @ 10:04 am
> This is a recovery and transition time.
Yes! I think this is really important, and that it’s important to recognize and honor that.
I’m lucky enough to piggyback on my husband’s schedule. Up at 7 am, lunch around 1 or 2, end of the workday around 6 pm, and dinner shortly thereafter.
I get most of the heavy lifting done in the morning, interspersed with chores like dishes or laundry when I need a break to get up and think. If I’m not up to writing in the afternoon, I’ll listen to a book, surf the ‘net, do some research, or pick up a craft project.
I’ll second @Megpie71’s recommendation of the slow cooker, though I find eight hours is way too long in mine–I usually start dinner around 2:00 if I’m going to serve around 6:30 or so. Depends on the cooker, I think, and what you’re trying to cook. But yes! Do get one, or plan to use one if you’ve got it. There are tons of cookbooks and recipe sites out there, too.
Bill Blondeau
September 4, 2015 @ 7:21 pm
Based on a long slice of time in which working offsite at my day job was an option, I can boil my unsolicited advice down to three things:
1) Housework is the stealth vampire gateway that will really suck your energy away. It’s so obviously sensible to just throw a load of laundry in… and then spend a huge slice of your workday folding laundry, cleaning the bathroom, etc. Put strong constraints around that, no matter how much it hurts to leave the dishes undone. It’s a weird inverted sort of self-discipline, but it pays off.
2) When you find yourself trashtalking the cat (or firespider or whatever), it’s probably time to get out of the house for a bit. Example: Working at home. One of the cats was yipping for my attention, and I spontaneously spun round and said, “You THINK you know, but YOU DON’T KNOW.” …Aaaand nobody else was around, and I was suddenly aware that this was sort of pointless verbiage, and unusually irritable besides.
3) Whenever you do decide to leave the house for a bit: If you have public wifi (Library, coffee shop, etc) within biking distance, the bike is to be preferred. The exercise, fresh air, and change in kinesthetic context works as a wonderful mental reset.
Best of luck, satisfaction, and productivity with this, Jim. We will all be standing around looking at you with politely interested expressions. 😉
LeAnn Holcomb
September 6, 2015 @ 8:23 pm
It takes more than a week to recover from the job. It takes 3 weeks just to get used to rearranged furniture! But the sleep thing is one of the hardest parts to adjust. Feeling tired is not an accurate measure of what you need. And not getting the sunshine dose on the way to work will also screw you up. You r body got used to that sunshine. So more unsolicited advice. Plan a 10 min or more, walk every weekday before sitting down to write. Take your vitamin d. And if you have trouble falling asleep at the right time, try melatonin for 3 weeks, try it right at dusk instead of waiting for bedtime. Remember that brain work burns calories too, even if your leg muscles aren’t benefiting from the effort. Mentally tired is just as real as physical tiredness. Lastly, if you are at all compulsive about finishing things, there is no such thing a just one load of laundry. If you are OK about “eating just one”, 10 minute chore breaks are great. Either way, put the writing first, it pays the bills. I had to put a sign on the laundry room door to remind myself of that for awhile. It helped. AND don’t expect to write after you pick’m up from school. That time should be spent hearing about her day. When she is a teen or hits the hormone Rollercoaster stage, you will be glad you established a daily habit of talk that helps her decompress and stay connected with you. It’s priceless time. Irreplaceable. Even if it’s only 10 minutes of talk,just hanging out together is important, it’s a habit that will be there when she needs it. Glad you have been able to make this change, it will be good for all of your family, not just you.
Megpie71
September 6, 2015 @ 8:26 pm
Ooh, one other thing I just remembered for dealing with the non-stop routines of things like housework and home-based self-employment: remember to give yourself a weekend. That is, at least one day a week where you don’t attempt to try and keep up the full load you’d be doing most days. My “weekend” day is Saturday (a choice based on over ten years working retail in a job which required me to work Saturdays – these days I cling onto Saturdays as “my time” and get very resentful of anything which attempts to look like work on one) and I allow myself a reduced workload on Sunday. But having those couple of days off means I’m better able, both physically and psychologically, to get back into the routine come Monday morning (plus, of course, two days without housework means on Monday morning the house NEEDS cleaning).
So pick at least one day a week where you aren’t required to do anything, and stick with it. You’ll find it helps a lot.
Day One, Redux
September 8, 2015 @ 6:00 pm
[…] on my own as a full-time writer dude. I was terribly shocked to discover that things did not go exactly as planned. There were missed buses at both ends of the day, and I ended up going back to bed and sleeping […]