Chores and writing efficiency

I forgot that one of the problems I had before with dictation is that there were some days I had to do blocking before I could start writing work on the scene. I tried a few times to block all the scenes of a book before I started writing it, but I found it very tedious work, and sometimes I would change my mind about what happened in the scenes, or which scenes to include, which made my work pointless later.

So today I did not get a lot of dictation done on the scene because I spent about an hour blocking it first. However, the time I spend blocking enables me to actually write the scene a LOT faster, and without as many problems. My biggest problem when writing is usually making decisions—where the conversation should go and how it should get there, what a character should do, how a character would feel, what problems the character would encounter in the scene. It’s easier to make all those decisions ahead of time before I start writing so that I don’t get sucked out of the creative flow state of writing prose in order to make a decision.

I have to admit that restarting this blog as well as a dictation streak was helpful in terms of accountability. Today was busy in terms of lots of house chores to get done, and when I finally started work, I was pretty tired. I then spent about 2 hours doing blocking work, and it was tough to get myself to do dictation and writing after that.

But because I wanted to post something on my blog today, and I didn’t want to admit I had broken my dictation streak already, I decided to do a few minutes of dictation. I ended up doing about 20 minutes of work writing prose, and my dictation speed, even incorporating the time I had to do some light editing, was about 800 words per hour, which really isn’t bad. It’s better than the 500 words per hour I’ve been doing when I type instead of dictate, and this is with the exact same amount of blocking work done on each scene before I start writing. So the only difference is the mode of input.

Chores and writing efficiency:

I’ve been trying to figure out how to be most efficient with my time since some days, when my IBS flares up, I’ll lose a few hours because I’ll be in pain or have nausea.

I had a lot of house chores to do today, so I had to take several hours to do non-writing-related work. Today’s chores made me tired since I was bustling around on my feet for several hours without rest. Being physically tired made it hard to concentrate on my work.

I had been trying to figure out when the best time of day would be for me to write most effectively, and I think I’m much more productive and efficient when I write first thing in the morning. However, the biggest problem with that is when I do my writing first, I found that I tend to not do house chores in the afternoon. I have a set schedule of chores to do each day so they don’t pile up, but I admit, I have terrible discipline when it comes to non-urgent chores.

However, when I write first thing, I also tend to write for a longer duration because my brain isn’t tired. If I do my chores first, I won’t skip my writing in the afternoon, but I also tend not to write as many hours.

I wanted to get everything done—chores and writing—and at first I thought that it doesn’t matter if I’m less efficient in the afternoon. What matters is that I get some writing done.

I also tend to like getting smaller tasks out of the way first before tackling larger tasks. That’s just the way my brain works. Smaller tasks usually bother me and nag at my attention if they need to be done but I put them off, so I usually feel the need to get rid of them first.

So I’ve been doing chores first in order to “clear the decks” and make sure the chores get done at all. I’ve been doing this for months now.

But when I look at the priority of things, my writing is the higher priority over a messy house. Feeding my family is more important, but my husband is very understanding and doesn’t mind eating leftovers, so it’s not like I have to cook every day.

So I should try to prioritize getting more writing done over making sure all my chores are done. I admit I’m lazy and not that invested in keeping my house as clean as it should be, but I can still try to discipline myself to get my chores done in the afternoon. And anyway, I will always do them once the house gets too dirty.

Also, I noticed that once I broke my writing streak last year, on days like today when I had a lot of house work to do and I was tired, I'd be tempted to skip writing, and there were several days where I wouldn’t write prose but instead I’d spend the time doing marketing work. My marketing task list is unending and there are always important things that need to be done, so it’s not like the time was wasted. But I wasn’t as disciplined about writing words and working on my next book.

So I think that writing first, as well as this newly started dictation streak, will help me get more writing done overall. I’m going to try it, anyway.