Sunday, November 28, 2010

Don't Quit Your Day Job

It's annoying, but I can't justify becoming a full-time writer yet. It's not the money, it's that I still can't trust myself to do...well, this:

Kevin J. Anderson's Mathematics of Productivity. Essentially, his 2600 hours of writing a year boils down to a 50 hour work-week. And that's just on books.

Frankly, I'm a lightweight. I piss away my free time, and it's unacceptable.

The Acceptable Uses of David's Time: Reading every article on The New York TimesArts & Letters Daily and SciTech Daily every day counts as research, that's an hour per day max. Reading the Harvard Business Review? 2 hours a month. Updating the blog daily is good tech practice and focuses my Writing thoughts, that's on average half an hour. Complex posts like Lazy Writer Cooks push the average up. Catching up on my blogroll? 30 minutes. My monthly flurry of critiques at Critters? 6 hours a month.

That's about it. Everything else is a waste of time if I want to be a real Writer. So...


David's Goal: Double my writing workweek from 20 hours to 40 hours and maintain that through 2011. Mostly by not watching TV and turning off the Internet. I shall procure a kitchen timer that goes "ding".

Of course, I like my day job. But that's not the point.

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An update on the posts A Writer's Tools and Cover Art! For color palette tools, try Eclipse Palette. It's small, convenient, and doesn't get in the way.

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Apropos of nothing, here's a sample of the horrors that I encounter during my day job:


Ah, jeez. That was just mean. I promise never to inflict that on you again.


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250 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long to Die"
- - - -
Reading - ?

*114

5 comments:

  1. I use this program, Freedom (for Windows) -- http://macfreedom.com/-- it's astonishingly useful. I get the same amount of writing done in two hours that I used to get done in four.

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  2. Ditto rahkan. I used Freedom (for Mac), and when I turn it on, which means locking me off the Internet for x-amount of hours, it's amazing how much I get done.

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  3. Yeah it's kind of the bomb. When I'm using it sometimes I find myself with a browser window open, just intending to google something or look something up on Wikipedia, and I realize that if Freedom wasn't on, more than half an hour would have just gone by. But because it was, I can just close the screen and get back to work.

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  4. I have trouble budgeting my time too. Never heard of Freedom. Might have to check it out.

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  5. That does look pretty nifty. I'll give it a go over the next month and see how effective it is. The Internet/my electricity does go out pretty frequently around here though, so I've got Freedom functionality built-in.

    I do agree on the browser window. Sometimes it seems to spawn tabs off of a simple reference search. That never helps. On the other hand, "Kudzu Browser" sounds like a good name for a story.

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