Plant your hope with good seeds

For a few months last year, I set up a weekly planning/review system related to my writing habits. I'm not totally sure when I stopped, but I think it might have been because I've internalised a lot of what I was learning. My goal was to teach myself to write more often, so I'd start the week's planning with "write 8 times this week" with the understanding that 15 minutes puttering around a project counts as a writing session (can be brainstorming, writing, editing, organising my notes if my brain struggles with the other things, so the project at least stays familiar in my head). I wish I could sustain like 4h writing marathons, but at this current point in my life, logistics and health stuff means longer sessions are just not happening. That's why I've been exploring whether writing more often can work for me.

As part of the planning, one of the questions I was told to write the answer for is "What are the obstacles?" That's something I always consider now. For example, if I have family visiting, am travelling, or preparing for a stressful presentation, whatever, it's going to affect my focus. So how am I going to mitigate that? Maybe it's fairer to plan for 5 sessions after all. Or maybe I should assume a session's length of 5 minutes is fair for that week, even if that means just spending 5 minutes rereading what I wrote before to keep the story alive in my head. Maybe both, maybe something else. Preparing and writing down the mitigations as part of the planning really helped me because I don't always think straight in the middle of it all.

Anyway, two obstacles I nearly always ended up writing down are:

• Can't make myself focus
• Can't make myself start

Like, I have a very good system for writing in the morning, it's part of my routine, but later in the day nearly always felt like bodyslamming against a wall. In the end, the solutions that turned out to be effective were the same for both. And after a while, I just printed them out so I have a poster with the list beside my computer! (Not that I always remember to look at it 🥲 but after a couple of days of sighing and doing nothing, my eyes will usually land on it and I'll go, oh!! Who knew!!!!!).

Anyway, here are the tips I landed on to mitigate this in a way that works well with my brain:

• Sanctuary mindset
• Deep breaths, 3-5 times
• Quiet music with no lyrics. If that's not enough, same but with headphones.
• Separate computer profile for writing
• Wifi off

( Digging a bit more into the details and also why I think this works well for my specific brain and issues )