Getting Into A Routine

The reason I have managed to make significant progress in the last couple of days is because of something that has sorely been lacking in my life recently: routine. With so many conflicting and time-consuming things pulling at my daily work window the one thing that has suffered most is the thing that actually takes the most time – writing this book. The typical book varies from 80,000 to 120,000 words, although an increasing number are hitting the 150,000 or even 200,000 word mark, for reasons it would be unfair for me to suggest.

But all these words take a long time to write, not in the sense of typing them into a document (I wrote up to here in about 90 seconds) but researching, composing and finally submitting to “paper”. This morning, for instance, I had to flick through 3 different books and an online PDF of another just to arrive at a quotation that provided a good summary of the point I was trying to get across. That took a good 40 minutes. That wouldn’t have been possible without a routine, which is why, as from yesterday, my new routine consisted of ignoring everything else around me from the moment the rest of my family left the house (including calls of nature!) and just getting down to the business of writing for about an hour and a half. However much I have written up to then will be how much I write on Underminers for the whole day. It’s not a huge amount of time, but it’s long enough to make significant progress over a longer period of time, and short enough to leave me wanting to write more, which is always the best state to be in the next time you start.

Of course I am still hauling my way through the Tools of Disconnection, but well into the last third. I might even finish Chapter Two by next week.