Gathering the Threads

Over the weekend I sat down and wrote a proper whiteboard for the coming week, logging all the things on my schedule day-by-day and breaking down specific goals into component tasks. It gets to live in front of my desk-top, one of the first things I see when I step out of the bedroom in the morning, and it’s the most in-control of my time I’ve felt in over a year.

I kicked off this process last week, dumping every project that had my attention or needed timelines monitored onto the board in tangled lump:

It’s a useful list for looking forward, but it tends to miss a bunch of the stuff that will get me from here to somewhere over there when I’m done with all that. Mostly, I put this board together to see how I’d go having the white board on the desk, blocking my access to the desktop (aka my “just here to fuck around” computer) and reminding me there’s a bit list of projects that need my attention.

It went okay, so this week I’ve gone back to a habit that served me real well in the past–a weekly project whiteboard that breaks down all the tasks and tracks my progress throughout the week. Here’s that particular board as it looked before I started working at the desk yesterday:

I’ve ticked a few things off since then, picking up speed on tasks that I’ve been putting off for ages. I’ve done my daily word count on the thesis for the first time in weeks, and cleared my fiction quota for the day. I’ve also surged ahead–this week’s blogging is now done, with the exception of the Sunday Circle, and a full draft of my weekly newsletter is finished up. This gives me more time to spend on other tasks, or a chance to clock up a bit of a lead.

Either way, I’m well ahead of where I expected to be on the tail end of a Monday, and I’m remembering just how useful it was to have a white board prominently displayed with all this on it.

At the same time, I’m also logging things that either need more detail than a single check-point, or should be added because they’ll fall off the radar. Story development needed a few extra steps beyond the brain dump section I’d listed under “Short Fiction Lab,” which is where there’s a longer section of it with regards to the novella I’m planning on getting back to next week. Brain dumping remains an important first step, but there’s an entire development process that follows drawing steps from Damon Suede’s Verbalize, helping me get a handle on the kind of story I’m planning on telling and how I might generate conflict.

The goal with these boards has always been separating out the doing of a thing from the process of making the decisions about how to do it. To put concrete steps behind vague goals, and hard edges on things that would otherwise involve making decision about how long to spend working on something.

It’s one of the reasons that reading finds their way on there, tracking the number of pages I need to read per day in order to finish two books a week. It’s a level of detail that some people find abhorrent, but for me, it’s a reminder that a) reading is important and good for my overall mental health; and b) I need to prioritise approximately 70 or 80 pages of reading time per day.

In this respect, the whiteboard is equal parts a statement of intent–this is where I’ll spend my time this week–and tool for ensuring that all the moving parts of writing and publishing work are getting the attention I want them to have.