Yesterday, I had what felt like an unusually good day of writing. So, I want to reflect on what worked. Of course, with an eye on how to repeat it.
Some observations:
- Writing was the priority. I didn’t schedule writing, nor plan it, nor interrupt it by looking at email, news, or anything else. Instead, I worked on writing projects from about 9:00 to 2:30.
- Breaks were unscheduled, but regular. I took liberal breaks when I felt like it—went out for coffee, ate lunch, went for a walk. Work chunks were about 50 minutes.
- Projects were various. I worked on:
- this writer’s diary;
- this writer’s diary as a podcast that I might post someday;
- the fragments for an hour over coffee at the village bakery;
- the makeshift book for a couple of hours, in three sections, to finish the introduction;
- exporting the chapter to an EPUB and read it on my iPhone in a hammock;
- exporting the first 15,000 words of the book and read it on my iPhone lying down.
Then I took a nap. All of this took me until about 2:30 in the afternoon.
Then, and only then, did I do email for an hour and a half to blast through communicating, then review projects in OmniFocus, and then stop at about 5 to talk with my sister-in-law.
Somehow, all day, I managed to feel like I was in a flow state for most of the day.
Time disappeared.
By the end, I was walking on sunshine.
What did I do right to write?
- I worked on various writing projects.
- None were longer than about 800 words.
- I finished them in about an hour.
- I never tried to push through.
- There were few interruptions, and when there were, it was because I wanted to go somewhere else or do something else.
Maybe it was luck or serendipity, but I think there was something good about the way I wrote yesterday.
If it was one thing, I’d say it was that I didn’t do the same thing for too long, and each project took about 45 minutes, and then I did something else.