High Productivity, Etc.

I keep waiting for things to ease up, but they don’t, and I’m beginning to wonder if easing up is a myth that I am chasing. Today was my most productive day, according to Rescue Time, since I started using the tool back in January¹. Check out my productivity pulse of 89, which is the highest I’ve ever achieved for a full day. There’s almost no red, and that means I was almost completely off social media all day long.

Most of my day was spent deep in SQL code at the day job. When I had SQL script that took a long time to execute, I’d multitask, filling that time writing Ruby Watir scripts instead of sitting around waiting for the SQL to finish. I did manage to get in my walking today, despite the sub-freezing temperatures, and I think that is the only way I maintained balance throughout the day.

The weekend was also busy. I was completely incommunicado yesterday because I fulfilled one of my duties as the Nebula Award Commissioner, and spent the first half of the day tallying the Nebula final ballot from all of the nominations made over the last several months. (The final ballot will be announced next week.) That took more time than I expected, but I got it done.

I’ve been keeping apace with the writing, too. I trunked my novella, after it began to stall on me and frustrate me, and I decided to finally get started on the second draft of my novel. I’ll have more to say about this over the weekend.

One of the things I’ve really been enjoying the last week or so has been my re-reading of John Adams by David McCullough. That helps balance things, too.

But I’m in one of those periods in my life that come now and then, where I wake up early, start working, and pretty much don’t stop until just before bed. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. It can be pretty draining.

That said, I’ve now written for 211 consecutive days, and for 354 out of the last 356 days. February 27 will be my 1-year “anniversary” of starting the process of writing every day in earnest and it is looking more and more like I’ll hit that anniversary having missed writing only 2 days in an entire year.