Anyone who has followed my blog, newsletter, or Patreon for longer than a minute knows my love of tracking work in a physical, visual form. Usually I post about it in the form of white board set-ups or bullet journal hacks, but for November I’m doing a thirty-day experiment with an old-fashioned calendar on the wall.
This was inspired by VE Schwab’s Calendar trick for increasing writing word count, whereby she gives herself a star sticker for every thousand words she produces in a day (and has a bunch of celebratory options for events like finishing a book). It sounded like a nifty thing to try, but I was talking myself out of it because calendars are a year-long investment and a print-out of the monthly grid sans art and design would not tap into the aesthetic pleasure that’s part of making this work.
I spent a few days tracking things in my bullet journal instead, but I couldn’t quite shake the idea of the calendar being a more useful way to present things. First, because my life involves more stuff than it has for the past few years. Fortnightly gaming sessions are becoming a thing again, and working for the Writers Festival obligates me to be a little more involved in Brisbane literary culture than I have been for a few years. Putting something on a wall that my beloved could check at a glance, and see when i was out for an evening, meant I didn’t have to remember to do a series of reminders (of course, we’re both out of the habit of checking for such things…)
Then I remembered that the incredible Kathleen Jennings does a monthly calender page full of lovely art for her Patrons, which meant I could a) go visual now, and b) had a good reason to throw a little support at a friend’s Patreon, which was a win-win combination.
And, being me, I ended up doing a little hack to apply this method to multiple parts of my life.
The white spot at the top of each day is there for tracking events and commitments, like launches and gaming and, I don’t know, finishing a project.
The yellow band is for tracking my writing success. Schwab uses stars to track a thousand words of productivity, trying to fill a day with as many stars as possible, but that’s not feasible for me. Instead, my stars represent the production of 750 words (or three handwritten pages) rather than a thousand, because that’s about what I can fit into a morning writing stint (and, at least one day on the above, I turned a not-so-good morning write into a pretty good writing day by coming back to do a final page in the evening, then jamming out another two more).
The pink band represents Freelancing and Brain Jar work (and is missing the fact a few things I did this week, because I wasn’t tracking them until this calendar went up). Today’s big victory was breaking the spine of the major freelance gig still on my plate, which means I can clear it by next weekend (and, with luck, put in the invoice!).
That happy Edits! represents working my way through two pages of proofing notes, many of which were…well, not formatted as well as they could have been for ease of implementation. Such are the challenges of working on a project that’s edited by a committee, with no formal agreement or consistency in how proofing notes appear. My morning was spent snarling at the choice to put the chapter four edits after the chapter eleven edits, all of them organised in such a way that I couldn’t do a quick chronological sort.
The Yellow band at the bottom represents my engagement with the outside world through Patreon, Blogging, and Newsletters. I’m still figuring out how to track productivity there — I’m far less focused on word count in that arena, and far more focused on getting content done because it’s so short form. I suspect I’ll just flag that something has gone out, and take comfort in something approaching a routine forming.
It kinda works already, given that I hadn’t planned on writing a post today, but seeing that blank spot on Saturday irked me enough that I wanted to fill it in 🙂
I do have a whiteboard set-up as well, tracking the five big things I want to achieve for Brain Jar this week. Things are chaotic at the moment, with Sarah and I still figuring out whose doing what, and the best way to get Sarah up to speed on all the moving parts. One of the things I’m noticing is how complicated certain routine activities are when trying to explain them to someone else, even if they’re a zombie-walk job for me most days.
Incidentally, my fiction project du jour is a short novella I wanted to pull together for a pre-made cover I did prior to landing the BWF job. It was one of my favourite designs of that brief flirtation with design freelancing, and the day job means I no longer need to rely on selling those covers to pay my bills, so I figured I’d reclaim it as an Eclectic Projects story.
I expect I’ll be throwing up a few rough drafts and process notes as the month progresses 🙂