Very productive day today, I think because I set goals for the day when I wrote my morning pages. This is a good idea and I will continue to use it as long as it works.
I set my goals based on how much work time I expected to have today, given that I woke up late and planned to go to Bridges and the library, but didn’t need to cook. Here are the goals I set for an estimated 5-6 hours of work time, in order of priority:
- Write my first family-history comic vignette. If I finish this quickly, look over my old backwards-plan for the family history, and edit it if necessary. Then use this to plan my next steps.
- Reread my brainstorm document for my novel; answer the questions I ask in the document, and compile a list of research questions. If I finish this quickly, begin to write Sylvia’s basic bio.
- Time allowing: try out a project from a papercrafting book as a packaging option for eye pillows. If I have slightly less time or less energy, fill eye pillows instead.
Here’s how it went:
- Wrote the vignette! It’ll be three six-panel pages. I have no idea how I will draw it; it seems complicated. I finished this in about 40-50 minutes, so I got out the backwards-plan and found it needed a complete overhaul. I did this and am pleased to find I have a solid enough idea of the project that the backwards-plan is now two pages, and is very non-overwhelming. I’ve recategorized the stages to reflect how I intend to go about the project: pre-conversations with family, ongoing by myself, ongoing with family, and vignettes/structuring.
- Read through novel-brainstorm document, answered questions, and compiled research list. After doing #1 and this, I was quite tired, so I decided not to try for a bio today. But now it’s quite clear where I can go next with this project, and I have several research options open for pursuit.
- After dinner, I did my singing practice and made a pillow box, which was surprisingly easy to do and I think will be a good option for packaging the eye pillows. The trouble is I will need cardstock, which I’ve discovered is not necessarily expensive, but I’m hesitant to order it online because I’m not sure about the weights (it turns out text weights and cardstock weights are not the same, so I can’t tell whether my 100lb Bristol paper is a good comparison for 100lb cardstock). I think I might visit a craft-supply or art-supply store this week to check out their stock and their prices, and then decide whether to order online.
You can see it was a quite productive day. I also did morning pages, in which I tried to figure out why I feel constantly unproductive, and solved the problem first by setting these goals (which, as I’ve said and which ought to be quite clear, has worked very well for me today), and second by reassuring myself that foundation work is important even if it doesn’t seem to “count” while I’m doing it (that is, I feel like it’s insignificant because it has no visible bearing on the end product, and it’s impossible to measure its contribution either to the individual end product or to my productivity in general). And we went to Bridges, and had a delicious dim sum lunch at Asian Pearl. And I have the third Kate & Cecy book from the library and am rewarding myself by reading it tonight. 🙂
Also, all this was quite fun once I got going. 🙂
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