STATUS: Monday, June 20th

The Daily Report

Last Friday, when I was too fuzzy in the head to engage in story writing, I instead did an experiment in time use, project management, and game design by trying to design a playable if skeletal RPG system in 8 hours. The results in terms of the immediate goal were mixed, but I feel like I did learn some things about time use and motivation.

One of the things I think helped was that I broke the day up into 1 and 2 hour chunks. I used to consciously break my days up into blocks of about two hours. I stopped because when I was having bad days, that structure became more of an albatross, and as bad days piled up in a row, my “fake it till you make it” approach to keeping things up turned it into a farce. But just because something’s not useful all the time doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

I think trying to make even every good day into a marathon session like that would lead to burnout pretty quickly, but on the other hand, Friday wasn’t otherwise a good day. So I think the 8 hour marathon approach is more something to keep in my quiver of trick arrows for when I need it.

Financial Situation

Mostly unchanged, with the positive note that my WorldCon travel is now very close to being funded. How cool would it be to finish it out today?

On the negative side, my bank has been reeeeallly slooooooooooow to process any of the recent credits from GoFundMe. They do this any time my balance is low, I think hoping that any debit transactions come through that they can ram through to hit with a $35 fee. When the balance was higher (i.e., before I paid for the WorldCon memberships), deposits were posting the same day GFM says they go through. With the balance low, they’re now backed up several days, almost a week. This is the kind of stuff that makes me nervous. Anyone who wants to help assuage my anxiety can leave a tip either through PayPal or my new SquareCash page, which doesn’t quite go directly to my bank account (same kind of processing delay), but is more direct than PayPal.

The State of the Me

Well, coming off a weekend that I spent mostly being sick and tired, I have to say that I am feeling exceptionally well today.

Plans For Today

Well, I had two days last week (Thursday and Friday) where I had planned to be writing and then wasn’t up to it. I also have a chapter of Tales of MU that I’d meant to have drafted last week, which is due for publishing for tomorrow and for Patron preview today. So this is going to be a writing day. I’m going to be following some of the example of discipline and time use that I did back on Friday by dividing the day up into distinct blocks.