A Change of Tactics

I had something of a health breakdown recently.  It was nothing serious, just a bout of flu that knocked me out for a week, but it got me thinking about how I schedule my life, and whether it's doing me more harm than good.

Like most people my age, I have a lot of things that drain my time.  The most prominent of those is a full-time job and a family.  I work every week-day until around 7.00pm, and when I get home I spend the time with my son until he goes to bed.  By the time I get to do my own thing it's usually about 10.00pm.

That's where I hit a snag.  I could quite easily get in a couple of hours of writing before going to bed, but not only am I trying to write, I'm also trying to cram in all the leisure time that I used to have in my twenties.  I try to read a book, then some comics, and I try to watch a movie or some wrestling, or play a video game.  Then, having exhausted myself doing those, I write some of my novel, try to crank out a blog post, and write about the day in my journal.  I get to bed somewhere around 3.00am, and get up around 8.00am to go to work.  Consequently, I'm a grouchy, unsociable bastard most of the time, running solely on a blend of caffeine and disillusionment.

So I've decided to change things up.  I need to read after my son goes to bed, because I don't want to have the laptop open should he decide to wander downstairs again.  But after that, I'm going to hit the writing straight away, and the blogging right after that.  Whatever leisure time I can squeeze in after that will be a bonus, and I'm going to try to be asleep by 2.00am.

I kicked it off pretty successfully last night, with my most productive writing session in a while.  Normally it takes me about an hour to write 500 words, but yesterday I broke 700 in 40 minutes.  I got in some secondary writing work (currently I'm transferring my old journal to a word document, which is sort of pointless but important to me), I read a chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I read a few comics, I played a sessionof The Game of Dungeons, and I watched an episode of WWE Smackdown.  All that, and I was asleep by 2.30am.  I woke up in the morning feeling pretty refreshed, and I'm happy with the result.  Hopefully I can keep it up going forward.

WEEKLY PROGRESS:

The Lightless Labyrinth:  1,993 words (35,648 total)

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I'm Reading:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Marvel Comics from 1965

What I'm Watching:
Lots of WWE

What I'm Playing:
The Game of Dungeons (aka dnd)