Break On Through

Today I met with 3 different clients, volunteered at my kids' school for 2.5 hours, walked the dog twice and broke through a roadblock in the book I'm writing that had been puzzling me for several days.

Sounds like a lot of multi-tasking, eh?

Not really. I read the following article on "single tasking" and realized that this is what I've been doing unconsciously for several months now: when I'm writing, I don't check email or answer the phone; conversely when I work on client jobs I don't jot down ideas for writing (or worry about walking the dog). Each part of the day is devoted completely to the thing I'm doing at the time.

I've set aside a minimum of 1 hour per day, every day (except Saturday, which is filled with Karate classes and too much caffeine) to work on the book. Several weeks ago, I had 30 pages completed after working for about a month and was feeling pretty good about my progress. But after a very tough reading of the thing, I ended up cutting about 15 of those pages and starting over on several chapters.

Now the goal is 10 pages per week and, so far at least, I've been able to stay on track ... mostly by just sitting down every day and cranking away. Some days I will sit there for hours and end up with a few sentences. Some days I crank out three or four pages in a few hours.

If you want to break on through that roadblock, "single task" your way to a writing regimen that gets you staring at that blinking cursor for at least an hour, every day.