I should explain about the targets thing. I’m very much a proponent of starting small and building to bigger, in order to increase tolerance and get oneself used to increasingly hard and more intensive levels of work (like exercise – if you don’t exercise every day, trying to run a marathon right off the hop isn’t going to work; you won’t be able to crack out two hundred push-ups right off the bat. Maybe start with 5, or a minute on a treadmill).
As you get used to it, and at the lower levels, it doesn’t take long, you gain stamina, and your ability to do more gets easier. Brain work is no different.
However, I know a lot of days it looks like I’m not meeting what are fairly meager targets, but there’s a running total that I’ve more than doubled, so in the interest of reminding myself this is a marathon, not a sprint, if I’m over the total target to start, the goal becomes: do one thing. Doesn’t matter how much it is, whether it’s a hundred words or a thousand, just to ensure you remain in the habit of doing something daily.
As the targets grow, that buffer will likely disappear and I’ll get more done, but having ingrained the habit and built up tolerance, that should be less of an issue.
So yeah, I don’t meet the daily target a lot of the time, but I’m blowing the total target out of the water, and that’s the one that matters.
Target: 500 words
Written: 222 words, novella: The Mungk
Read: Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris
Comics: Rat Queens v2 16-19
Music: The Very Best Of Grateful Dead, Grateful Dead