This one I actually caught myself thinking several times throughout the week (thanks to NaNo):

"I'll make up for it on the weekend."
Of course I will! According to the list of things I feel that I will be able to accomplish during the weekend, mine last about, I dunno, three months or so. ;) It's all part of the thrill of working from home.

Only I haven't been lately. I've been doing some onsite work for some clients. Onsite as in "not at home in pyjamas, able to work on whatever I want, when I want." Onsite as in "they expect me to focus on the tasks at hand while I'm here between 9 and 5."

Sometimes I forget, since I'm used to taking breaks at the home office. Sometimes they last for a day or two...

And that's frowned upon in those corporate-type offices. You know, the ones with supervisors in them.

So I've been struggling with getting words on the page for my current WIP so that I can hit 50,000 words by the end of the month, struggling with reworking another manuscript's synopsis so it kind of resembles the revised novel and struggling to simply get stuff done, like laundry and meal preparation.

DH is a saint and can do the laundry, but his kitchen skills are limited to soup or breakfast foods. A woman cannot live on waffles and noodles forever, no matter how tempting.

To combat this "save it for the weekend" mentality, I'll break a task down into smaller steps, and then promise myself to tackle at least one step before I can postpone the rest of it until I have another spare moment.

This tactic normally works for me, since, to make it easy on myself, I'll break something down into so many steps, each one only takes about five minutes. Then I'll end up doing two or three steps, and soon enough, I'll just plow through the whole darn thing, just to get it off my list.

Of course, when facing 50,000 words, I've broken it down into 250-word allotments. I only have to do that 200 times (actually, it's only 184 now) before the end of the month. It's totally doable, just like the commercial-break squats I try to remember to do while watching TV instead of going to the gym.

Ugh, I'll have to make up for that on the weekend. ;)

Labels: ,