How Much Brainpower Does Your Work Take Up?

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Here’s a list of everything I did today, in no particular order:

  • Graded eight hours worth of standardized test essays
  • Studied Japanese
  • Wrote three emails (one short, one medium, and one reeeeeeeeeaalllllllly long)
  • Outlined and fine-tuned some trouble areas in my novel
  • Made lunch and dinner
  • Drafted this blog entry (working on that now)

So first off…yeah, I picked up some hours at my No-Longer-Secret Work-From-Home Day Job grading standardized test essays, but only for this week, swiping up an opportunity to bring in some extra cash before I leave for Japan.  Plus, since I’m able to basically do other work Continue reading »

My Biggest Weakness Explained (And Why You Should Know Yours!)

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If you’d asked me two years ago to name the biggest factor stopping me from getting my creative work done, I would have hands-down said overuse of social media: I used to spend WAY too much time on Facebook (ugh…) and scrolling through Twitter hoping for that gambler’s jackpot payout of finding something awesome that keeps us all hooked.

Now I use social media a lot less and usually only pull it up at set times of the day, so that doesn’t feel like a problem anymore.

Then if you’d asked me last year about my biggest weakness I would have said lethargic time wasting: sleeping too much, getting distracted between tasks, and taking long breaks when I didn’t really need them.  I stopped doing these things in part Continue reading »

New Daily Day Job-Free Work Schedule!

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I haven’t been to work in two weeks…and it feels awesome.

For those of you who missed the news, last month I got accepted for an English teaching job in Japan and quit my Secret Office Day Job—partly to focus more on creative work and partly because some sketchy shit was going on there.  This means that for the next few months my time is my own, and I’ve got to use it wisely if I want to make any real writing progress.

I left work on a Wednesday, which felt a bit disorienting—I went from spending 47+ hours of my week working, commuting, and eating lunch in the company break room to having a three-month chasm of free time ahead of me…and I won’t lie, it felt a bit overwhelming.

For the first two days I was kind of all over the place—I slept late, watched a bunch of Netflix, got a haircut, took a long walk, and Continue reading »

Day Job Quandary: Is It Better to Be Bored or Busy?

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I go back and forth on this all the time.

I’ve had workdays where I had thousands upon thousands of things that needed doing, To-Do lists a mile long, people asking me every two minutes to do more things, and a string of deadlines that I absolutely had to get done no matter what.  And it sucked.

But then I’ve had jobs where there wasn’t nearly enough to do (or nothing of any real importance to do) so that I had to stretch out what little work I actually had over hours and hours as I faced near-interminable boredom and a fury of clock-watching that made me feel like I’d be stuck there forever with no escape.  And that sucked too.

This begs the question: Is it better to have a Day Job where you feel busy and overwhelmed, or one where you feel bored and underused? Continue reading »

March Novel Update: Draft Three Complete!

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If you’ve been following my Novel Updates Series then you already know the story: I’m writing a novel that takes place at a grad school writing program in the Midwest, and for the last year and a half I’ve been buried in the revision process—you know, that part where you go back and edit everything you’ve written until it’s actually turns out good.

Last year I finished pen and paper edits for the third draft, and a few months after starting my Secret Office Day Job I started typing them up, page for page and line for line.  Because I’ve been busy, it was taking a REALLY long time, which is why I started posting updates here to keep myself on track.

Well two days ago, at around 11:00pm, I finally finished typing.  That’s Continue reading »

What I Do When I Don’t Feel Like Working

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Some days I just don’t have the energy to sit down and do my creative work.  It happens to all of us, and if you hear someone say that they can work every day despite the circumstances than they’re either lying through their teeth or they’ve somehow found the Holy Grail of Creativity that magically allows them to work at 100% peak performance all the time (which doesn’t seem likely).

Everybody reading this knows that feeling: when you come home tired from a long day at work, when you’re worried about bills, your future, or a breakup, or when you wake up on a Sunday too hungover to do much of anything.  In these shittiest of shitty moments, the last thing you want to do is Continue reading »

Guest Post – Writing While Parenting

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Charles Hiebner has worked as a pig farmer, a long-haul truck driver, and a warehouse manager for a roofing supply company.  The two of us met in grad school where we took a few writing classes together and shared a cubicle wall as interns at the university press.  His writing projects have included a page-turning crime novel and a thesis about ecoconsciousness and colonial identity on the Great Plains—both at the same time. His next project is to set up a blog to share his work with the world…maybe sometime before his youngest leaves for college.

 

I’m a writer with a day job, one that I actually enjoy a great deal. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to earn my bread with writing, but until that time I have bills to pay. There are other parts of my life that pull me away from the writing desk, like being married. Luckily, my spouse has a day job as well, and writes, and is very patient, encouraging, and understanding of time that I request to write. So, what’s keeping me from cranking out novel after novel?

Well, there are these kids… Continue reading »

Why I Use a Different Pen When I’m at My Day Job

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Those who know me best know that I’ve been using the same blue medium-sized Bic pens since high school, even though Bic redesigned this particular model six or so years ago.  (When I saw that the originals were getting harder to find I bought eight boxes of them from a reseller in South Korea and I’ve been using them ever since.  Don’t ask me what I’m going to do when I run out, because I’m honest to God not sure.)

From a practical standpoint, I prefer writing in blue because it forms a clearer contrast against black printed text, especially when I’m revising a draft by hand.  I also like that the cap on these pens comes off without sticking and that Continue reading »

Why Setting Your Own Deadlines is So Damned Hard

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I think a lot about deadlines, and how they force us to prioritize how we structure our time.

For example, after I moved into my new place the good folks over at Comcast saw fit to send me a bill with a July 27th due date:

 

Also, six pages? Really?

 

There was nothing wrong with this per se, aside from Comcast sending it a week after the July 2nd billing date so neatly printed in the corner, which means that by the time the bill got to me and I finally opened it, I had about a week and a half left before it was due.  Simple, right?
Continue reading »

Update: Anti-Email Checking Challenge!

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So back in March I wrote about how checking my e-mail too often was getting in the way of my productivity, both by sucking WAY too much time away from other things and by causing a loss of focus that pulled me away from where I was, kind of like Shelly Duvall does to Jack Nicholson in this scene from The Shining.

Losing my focus led to EVEN MORE time lost because losing my focus made my mind cloudier, which not only made it more difficult to work, but also made that same amount of work take longer.  (There’s some other stuff in the post too, but that’s the basic gist.)
Continue reading »

Why I Left My Work-From-Home Day Job

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For those of you who missed last’s week’s Life Update, I totally got a new Day Job to replace my old Secret Work-From-Home one, so what follows will make way more sense if you check that out first.  (TLDR Version: My new job’s in an office doing a writing/editing-type activity, the conditions make it ideal for keeping up with my novel, this blog, and other creative projects, and to lessen my commute I moved to a new apartment a mere 3.6 miles from the new job.)

Now that we’re all on the same page, some of you might be wondering Continue reading »

Planning Creative Time = Greater Efficiency

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Thinking about how you’re going to spend your creative time before you start working has felt so obvious to me for such a long time that I never even thought to write about it.  That all changed when I was emailing with a programmer friend of mine who’s got a lot on his plate life-wise, and he wanted to share a new method he’s been trying to make better use of his time:

I’m thinking it might be better to work in 30 minute chunks on code projects because that might be all I can handle right now. It doesn’t seem like enough time to really do anything but it works a lot better if I Continue reading »