Productivity Burst

I have a really “all or nothing” personality. I either need to write thousands of words or none at all, read six books in two days on nothing for months, or go hard at being healthy or eat myself into a cheesecake coma.

There is no in between, and part of the problem is that a measured way of doing things is nearly impossible.

I work two very flexible, “make your own hours” sort of jobs. I don’t show up at an office at a given time, or dress up for work or even commute. Ninety percent of the time, when I’m working, I’m in soft pajamas and not necessarily thinking about what I look like. But because I am so flexible, and the work I do doesn’t fill every moment of every hour, I feel as though I can’t do anything else. Like, if I were to write, or read or anything else during “normal business hours” I’d be shirking my responsibilities.

But that’s ridiculous, because I don’t work set hours. But when you don’t work set hours, you feel the need to be available at all times.

Either way, when I find myself on a three-day weekend, or a plane journey or something where I don’t have to be working, I end up being productive in my hobbies.

I wish, more than anything though that I could maintain consistency. An hour of reading, an hour of writing, and thirty to forty minutes of blogging a day would be my ideal, and yet trying to actually plan and put that together feels absolutely impossible.

In the times that I have tried though, I find myself feeling stressed and overwhelmed and generally displeased with the results.

Over this past month, I vowed that I was going to write a blog post every other day. I couldn’t do that. What I have been able to do, this evening, was write four in a row that I am quite proud of and happy to post, and it drives me nuts that I can’t do something like this every day.

I’ve had a few times in my life even, where I have sat down over the span of a weekend, and written 10,000 words of a novel in two days. Today, when I sat down to work, I wrote 67, and couldn’t get another word out.

How do you fare when it comes to your “hobby” productivity? Let me know in a comment below.