Spring Cleaning

I recently took a trip with my father to see my extended family in Pennsylvania. It was, largely, a relaxing time where I got to catch up with some cool relatives.

Heidi, in the meantime, stayed home due to a new job offering limited vacation possibilities - she's saving it for WorldCon in August. She remained, and despite a full-time job and online classes, scoured and cleaned the entire apartment, tearing through a laundry list of chores we needed done since first moving into the place.

My wife did not do this exclusively for the general cleanliness, however; she did it for me.

For me and my writing.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: I am pretty freaking lucky to have family who support my goals.

I'm also lucky that this support isn't just blind head-nodding. They know that writing is my best skill, and a job I happen to love. However, I haven't been too great about keeping up with that 'job' part of it. Why? Well, a variety of reasons, but one major one is that I have trouble taking myself seriously.

Today, I don't care to wallow on that struggle, but rather to explain how I am combatting it.

Step one: my own personal spring cleaning.

I got a haircut. Just now.

See? Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Sly. Or whatever. Shut up.

It may sound silly, but this makes a difference. It make a difference in how I view myself. I need to be a business professional and, because I am essentially my own boss, that means I need to look like one. Self-imposed dress code? I don't know, maybe. As a penmonkey in the Chuck Wendig tradition, that means pants are not only not required, but are in fact prohibited.

Full disclosure: I am wearing pants right now. (As far as you know.)

The other aspect of my life I'm cleaning up is my productivity. There's one way I feel quite confident in my writerlyness (no, not my penchant for inventing words on a whim to suit my needs, though that's a valid argument as well): my attention span is crap. Ooh, shiny, and all that jazz.

My wife helped me compile this nifty hanging-file box in which, at the beginning of each week, we will review my goals for each of the following seven days.

Neat!

One big problem I run into is knowing I ought to be doing stuff, but not being sure exactly what that stuff is. Every day I'm going to look over my agenda, currently compiled with sticky notes, and focus on accomplishing the few things I need to do. I think this method is vaguely drawn off of David Allen's Getting Things Done; though I've never read the book, I have read about it.

Anyway, that about catches you up for this month so far. I should be able to keep producing words, so stay tuned in that Internety way for more bloggery to come.

What is it with tagging 'y' on the end of words, anyway?