The worst plan in the world.

Dear Reader,

When you have a book to write, no money coming in for it, and a ton of other responsibilities, it is the worst plan in the world to devote all your available time to it. Dishes pile up in the sink, you find yourself having weird food combination for your meals (peanut butter and onion sandwiches, anyone?), and the laundry will eventually form a militia and start demanding rights. This is why you have to pace yourself, especially if you are super excited about the idea that you are working with.

You can't let that excitement overrun your responsibilities. A schedule that is detailed may help you get everything done, with writing time as a reward for when you complete crucial tasks. If that doesn't work for you, try out logging tasks and writing time. For an example of what I am describing look up the Bullet Journal format invented by Ryder Carroll. (I may have misspelled his name, but the system is definitely called the Bullet Journal.) Or you can mash the two together as I have to stay on top of things. Pictured below are my planning pages. Every Thursday, I reconcile calendars and plan my next week. (Some how I have become the scheduling maven of the household.)

Let me explain what you see in this picture. The header has space for me to mark down the liturgical date of a kinda obscure religion I follow. That is the short line on the left. The larger line in the middle is for me to write down the Julian calendar date that everyone else follows. And the final short line on the right is for me to note the day of the week.

The column of boxes on the right side are for health tracking stuff. Because I am diabetic and I have some pretty serious mental health problems I'm being treated for, I made some trackers. The first one under the day of the week is tracking how much water I am drinking. The next one below is to track my medication compliance. Following that is my mood scale to help me track my bipolar mood states. In a similar format is the anxiety scale to help me track my CPTSD and general anxiety states. The tracker below that monitors my fasting morning blood sugar.

On the left there is a column of boxes and lines associated with each box. This is where I write tasks, appointments, and important information. I have been using a modified version of the Bullet Journal's symbol code to note appointments, tasks, high priority items, critical priority items, and similar things. The last line of this side of the page is for noting what I am cooking for dinner that night. It works better than having a menu hanging on the blackboard in the kitchen. (It's not a very good blackboard but it's pretty.)

On the back of the page is a series of ruled lines that I use to log major activities and notes of the day. It is basically my mini-journal that talks about important information in a bulleted series of notes.

This system of organization works really well when I remember to use it. But when I get sick or depressed, I forget all about it and everything turns into a mess. Why? Because all my time to do things gets eaten up by being sick or brain fog. I'm still working on finding a way to resolve that challenge.