) Status Update for November · 9:17pm Nov 4th, 2018
Life’s failures are what contribute to a person’s growth the most. As long as you don’t let it defeat you, one can learn what works, what doesn’t work, and augment future attempts based upon those results. That being said, it’s time for me to try this new schedule out. Ready for some big announcements?
Over the course of the last few months that I kept to my schedule, my stats blogs did a good job of keeping me on track with stories I was working on. My writing output had increased several times, and while my work had taken a small dip in quality in the later stages of my development, I remain convinced that it was working out for me overall.
However, like all my previous attempts, I set it up in a way that was ultimately unsustainable. Essentially, my goal had been: ‘Write, write, write, write…’ This was at the expense of every other outlet in my life. This was a similar result to my obsessive behavior while growing up, tuning out anything that wasn’t what I focused on.
I don’t believe this was a bad thing to do in this instance, for I intentionally pushed myself until I hit that upper limit. It was my hopes that, when the time came for me to reintroduce everything else back in, I could maintain a sensible output. Instead of 250 words an hour, I can now write 750 without too much effort.
The question still remained for me to figure out how to integrate all of my interests together. I had never been one who could organize my free time well. It mystifies me how I’ve been an engineer and yet this skill escaped my grasp.
At the beginning of this year, my planner was chalk full of items. I would squeeze as much as I could in there so as to be productive. That system worked… for all of about two weeks before I was unable to meet the goals of one item, which cascaded into missing another. And before I knew it, the entire system fell apart.
After many renditions and alterations, however, I think I have found a system that truly works out for me. It takes a deadline-oriented approach rather than a “must do it even if it’s done because that’s what the schedule says” approach. I allowed myself the flexibility to fill my planner based upon my deadlines, and I give myself the time to reassess priorities when I cannot meet them. Here are a couple of pictures of what my planner looks like now.
All the free space in the planner are time slots available for me to tackle any items I put in the queue from the second picture. After I set the deadlines of the items, I highlight what’s due within one week. Red text in the planner is fixed, recurring every week. And the black text is everything that gets removed once I finish it.
I don’t feel burdened by having to work on something every second of the day now. Can you imagine the planner without any free space at all? Just filled from top to bottom with text of various activities. It didn’t give me much time to assess what I needed to do.
My writing activities the past few months didn’t exactly follow along with the old schedule, but when life happened, I couldn’t sustain it all the same. There was another thing that I did while I was on there which was kind of over the top. I’d be religiously editing my word counts of all the writing projects I was working on, as well as update the percentage bars, on my home page. This unnecessarily introduced a tedium that pulled me away from my focus on the content that really mattered.
Well, I’m going to be removing that part. I will still keep track of my word counts and give you monthly stats blogs, however, as I want to make sure I don’t slip once I get back in a routine. I’ll just keep my record keeping a lot simpler from now on.
...At least on my main page. As for my Planner excel sheet, that’s a different story.
I probably have way, way to much information in these tabs, everything getting into its own respective categories (television...games...etc.). But the beauty of it is that I don’t have to tackle literally all of it at once. And it’s a load off my mind to have all my interests and records of where I’m at with them as a reminder for when I get around to them.
With the introduction of this new planning system is something that I’ve been meaning to get back to doing for a while. Blog series! My current thoughts are that I have couple of them going every month, around the same time:
Game Sneak Peek: 1st Sunday of every month
The Anime Otaku Survey: 2nd Sunday of every month
Random Rant: 3rd Sunday of every month
Amore’s Riffs: 4th Sunday of every month
The first two blog series function as they did before. I cover one game or one anime for them and do a small review on them. I’ve been itching to get back to writing them and exposing some of the media that I consume for you all.
Random Rant is going to be a new blog series in which I cover some topic that you guys want to hear me write about. It could be literally anything as long as it doesn’t break any of the Fimfiction sites. I’ll talk about oranges if that strikes your fancy.
Amore’s Riffs is an old reviewing series that I never really got passed one review (it was originally named A Chiller Review) I basically go into critique mode about exactly what I find wrong in requested stories. I’m interested in seeing if I have fun with bringing this back; I had discontinued it shortly after I started when I became a reviewer for the Reviewer’s Cafe, and have yet to get around to tackling the other requested stories that were waiting to be reviewed.
You can make requests for any one of these blog series here, and I’ll record them all. I have a number of requests for each series, so I don’t have a shortage of topics for any one of them, aside from the Random Rants series. If I don’t have any requested topics by then, though, I’ll probably just pick something that I find interesting.
In other news, my friend’s surgery went well. This means I had been given more time to complete editing the story. Which is good because I was told by my proofreader that the rough draft that I wrote was crap. 
I am still slating out my schedule to finish A Series of Chaotic Events and New Tune this month, as well as bringing a couple of some stories out of hiatus that many of you have been requesting.
I’m excited to see where this new scheduling system takes me. I suspect that I won’t falter like I have in the past when something happens.
Sounds like a good plan to me.
However you work best.
What you write sounds a lot like my interpretation of Twilight Sparkle from MlP: she didn't become the best planner in Equestria because brilliance (well, that maybe too), but because she had to, because without her lists she would feel utterly overwhelmed, get anxious and stressed and be unable to deal with the full complexities of life (in part due to choice paralysis).
It is my opinion that oftentimes our great positive assets come from compensating for our shortfallings.
I admit i do think you can be proud of yourself for being able to critically assess your mode of operation and continually adapt it to what works and what does not - i know a number of people who do not manage to do that, but just stick to the same failing routine over and over. In some aspects, i am one of these people.
Do you do ethics or religion for you random rants? Sometimes the discussion page on those needs to be shut down if extremists end up thinking it's the best place for a shouting match, but i'd be curious.
Happy to hear that your friend's surgery went well. It's nice if one lucks out every once in a while.
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I know far too many people who stick to failing routines and hope it changes for them. It almost never does without outside intervention. It's best not to cling to the hope that that happens. That being said, I feel a bit better about myself for hearing you say that. A number of people on here only see the results of the successes and aren't really aware of our struggles to reach them, so for you to say that you understand makes me smile.
I could possibly do discussion on ethics, provided I carefully address it without toeing the line, but I think I should avoid religion for a number of reasons. It's a little difficult to place where my religious beliefs lie. People might consider me to be atheist or loosely-defined Christian. I do feel a force pulling me toward some unknown destination, that where I go is purposeful in helping develop another person's life... and I do pray to some force up there to give me the strength to help others and the people whom I cherish. However, I do not go to church, nor do I know many passages of the scripture to talk about. Put simply, I am inadequately equipped to handle the discussion of religion.
Yeah... He had left it ambiguous as to whether or not he'd make it through... In reality, it was a low-to-intermediate level of risk. He made it sound to me like it was a high risk instead. I'm a little put off by this, but I am happy to have been given more time to finish the story he requested of me.
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Well ... i don't know the entire story, but i can tell you that at one point some doctors basically told me i wouldn't need to bother buying Christmas presents any more. That was a couple of years ago.
Don't know if that is the case here, but it actually seems that this sort of misinformation of the patient is not that unusual. I actually had a hard time afterwards, because i had talked with some people and said that there'd still be a couple of things i'd like to do with them, and then it turned out it wasn't really that pressing after all.
Just imagine them telling him: "You should prepare for if you don't make it.", which can mean anything from "There's an about 5% chance this goes wrong." to "If we actually pull this off, we'll be submitting a paper to a medical journal right afterwards."