Get My Writing On a Schedule

Time for a new DK30 woohoo

In the last two days I got hammered with work things that I had to do (I work part time in public policy). I ended up swamped with colleagues needing things, difficult conversations with co-workers, all manner of complications seemed to just come flying out of the wood work. Honestly, under normal circumstances I’d have been all to happy to bail on my personal work, but having this little raft of a five minute writing retreat waiting for me at the end of the day was such a salve. In public policy so much of trying to get the right thing done is built around compromise and trade-offs. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature, I think we ought to want to live in a society that sees compromise as a virtue and values that type of work. That can be exhausting though, and it can feel impossibly complex at times. So writing snippets of silly songs about wizards or whatever every day has been really fun, and wonderful release from that space. go go dk30

Been going strong thus far. Always getting at least 5 minutes a day. generally I get caught up in the writing and spend a lot longer. I’d say I’ve averaged about an hour. Yesterday was the height of why I’m taking this on as my DK30 though. I traveled all day, I had other work that had to be finished, and it was the apex of the typical night I blow off my personal work. I only had five minutes I could squeeze out of my evening and didn’t have my computer near by so I wrote in a frantic huddle over my phone before I had to run out the door. I ended up writing something pretty decent, but most interestingly it wasn’t something I think I would have come up with under normal circumstances.

Today was the first day where I really felt the challenge of the consistency set in. I’ve got lots of little chores to do so the temptation to put working off to “a better time” was incredibly high. I set a timer, and pounded out an incredibly rough draft of a scene. It was honestly a slog, but it got me to the keyboard and got me thinking about my work. So there’s something to that.

For the last three days my five minute sessions have turned into hour minimum writing blocks, which feels great but makes me very curious about what this practice will be like on more densely packed days where the five minutes is all I have to spare.

I started early! Last night I sat down with my five minute timer and before I knew it an hour had passed and I was deep into working on something. This type of lengthy/unexpected work time is common for me but under usual circumstances I’ve used the fact that it generates output as rationale to get lax in my scheduling. Which is exactly what I’m curious to experiement with!