I’m going to let you look, but I warn you… my bullet journal is ugly. The theme is somewhere between prison chic and ink splotch. If you are looking for pictures of the sun setting over mountains, this is the wrong place.

Five things daily for my writing career spread

I’m having trouble figuring out exactly where the five things idea came from. I know it was a writer, and I know it was someone you would have heard of, but it’s not coming to me. Anyway, the general idea was that you should do at least five things every day for your writing career. (And yes, there are variations of that all over the internet. Your regular career. Your marriage. Your relationship. Whatever.) For writers, the suggestion was five things. One of them should be writing something and one of them should be reading something. The third labeled column up there is revise something…. but that’s my own personal demon.

The not-so-daily things.

After a month of using the five things spread… I realized that I have a certain number of things that need to be done… but not daily. So, I present my non-daily tasks. These are just fill-in the blanks to make sure that I’m still on target, and that I’m actually doing those things.

I don’t know if you can read it, but I’m designating Tuesdays as typing catch-up days. So, that’s a list of all the Tuesdays in March, and space to write down what I got typed. (Eventually, I’ll be caught up, and that will go away.)

Wednesdays are submission days. (Short stories and novels.) Two lines for each one, and space for a market or agent and the title of what got sent on each one. (That’s probably an oversimplification, but I can always refer to the spreadsheets on my computer.)

And Thursdays wind up being blog days. I’m hoping to get a week of blogging done each Thursday. So, that’s a list of Thursdays, and check boxes for the blog-posting dates that I intend to pre-schedule on that day.

Progress graph

I like to be able to look at my progress in a visual format. This is another calendar. Dates down the left side. And boxes for each page that I write or revise. I’ll fill them in as I go. The first round of the revision graph had each box set at five pages… and I never got to fill much of anything in. Depressing, even if I’m revising four pages a day. This time around, all of the squares are ONE page. I may or may not adjust that, later.

These last two are probably as close as I’ll ever come to doing a full-on self-care spread. They’re both remarkably similar. I’ve written the days and the dates up the left hand side of the page, and each day gets one line. The first one is things I’m looking forward to. “Today Will Rock Because…” And in theory, something that will make today uhm… rock. Damn, that sounds noisy. I stole the idea and the wording from Tobias Buckell here. I’ll probably change the wording, eventually, but at the moment… Today will Baroque cello concerto because just doesn’t sound right somehow.

Today Will Rock Because…

I came across it while I was looking for organization ideas for writers, and the truth is… he’s not wrong. I can go a long time without consciously thinking about (or creating) things to look forward to. And in the middle of a global pandemic, that’s a bad habit that has just gotten a whole lot worse.

The second one is Rest, Relaxation and Regeneration. That’s another pandemic-inspired necessity. I’m hoping to get better about doing something to just… exist and enjoy existing. Or, go do something non-work related. Or… well, you get the picture. It’s about taking time for things that are not all that progress oriented. And yes, apparently, I need a reminder to do that from time to time.

Rest, Relaxation, and Regeneration

So, there we are. Those are my new and improved spreads for March of 2021. Let me know what you’re doing with your bullet journals, and how it’s working out.