Hiii... I love On the Edge of Gone so. much. and I haven't even finished it yet. It reads like I think, and I've never found that anywhere before. You're awesome. Also, you probably get a million notes a day, so feel free to ignore me if you want/need to (I can only imagine how overwhelm can get when you're published) but... how do you ever get a book DONE? Between executive dysfunction and life in general, I'm rarely able to do it. I'm kinda desperate at this point.
Thank you so much for reading the book and sharing those thoughts with me. It really is fantastic to hear <3
So ⌠I feel you on this question. I struggle with a lot of this, as well. At the same time, my situation is a lot easier than most peopleâs: I donât have a partner or kids, I donât have a dayjob, and I donât have school. In other words, I have very few obligations outside of writing. The moment I have more on my mind than usual, my productivity plummets.
Mostly, what I try to do is keep writing at the forefront of my mind. Iâll keep a notebook on me at all times to scribble thoughts into; Iâll be playing the bookâs soundtrack on nonstop loop; when Iâm showering or falling asleep or doing dishes, Iâll consciously steer my thoughts toward the book. The more I think about it, the more the book takes shape in my mind, and the more excited I am to get back to work on it. Keeping excitement levels high is really important for my productivity.
(ADHD is great like that. If I donât want to do it, my brain wonât let me do it, so I kind of have to trick my brain into wanting to do it even when I feel intimidated or exhausted or annoyed with the book.)
Another important point for me is to purposefully minimize the number of barriers to getting things done. For example, executive dysfunction + hyperfocus means I often skip meals. The executive dysfunction because I think of all the steps I need to take to make a meal (pause my work, get up from chair, determine what I want to eat, gather the ingredients, etc. etc.) and my brain goes ânah thoughâ), and the hyperfocus because Iâll be so caught up in whatever Iâm doing - whether itâs writing or researching insurance or comparing card sleeves - that time passes in bizarre ways and suddenly itâs midnight how did that happen wtf.
To navigate the meal issue, I do two things:
(1) I make food easy. Iâll make a huge amount of dinner so I can spend almost all week just slapping food on a plate and microwaving it, instead of needing to worry about figuring out what I want to eat, whatâs available, etc. Ditto for lunch and breakfast. This level of preparation cuts out so many steps, and makes it much easier to convince myself to get up and grab a plate.
(2) I go âscrew you, brainâ and set alarms. Right now Iâve got this obnoxious alarm on my phone that wonât shut up until Iâm physically in the kitchen taking a photo of the paintings on my wall from a certain angle. Then, once Iâm in the kitchen, Iâve already gotten past a lot of the barriers that were holding me up, so itâs much easier to simply walk to the fridge and grab food.
I take a similar approach with writing. I try to make it easy:
When drafting, I outline extensively. When I know pretty much exactly whatâs going to happen in the next scene, I can get right to work, rather than staring at a blank page going âuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.â
I donât often procrastinate on the outlining, since itâs a lot of fun. Even when Iâm feeling âmehâ about it, I can tell myself, âLook, this is the easy part. You wonât even have to write. Donât even open the manuscript. Just poke at that outline for a while and youâll feel so productive! Life hack!â
I use Cold Turkey on my PC, which lets me block my browser. That cuts out like 95% of procrastination. Itâs possible to set up a weekly schedule, meaning itâll automatically go into effect every day between, say 8:30AM and 12:30PM, effectively blocking off that chunk of time for writing.
Iâll use Forest on my phone, so that I donât grab that when Iâm distracted. (I donât want to kill the tree, omg.) I may also put my phone across the room. (Another thing that helps here: I have a separate notification tone for emails from my agent/editors/etc., so I know that even if the notification light is blinking, I wonât need to go âOH GOD WHAT IF XYZ WORK-RELATED THING??â)
On occasion, Iâve used this automatic workflow thing where every day at a certain time, my computer forcibly quit (and blocked) my browser and started up Word and Scrivener. When youâre merrily Tumblring and suddenly your computer goes âWTF GO WRITE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, HERE, LOOK, I EVEN PLACED YOUR CURSOR IN THE RIGHT SPOTâ itâs really hard to then take the active step to close it again and procrastinate some more.
Whenever I have the thought of, âOh Iâll do that later, let me just do ABC first âŚâ I try to pause. This applies to everything I try to procrastinate on, from email to showering. I pause and give it ten seconds before I take any actions. In those ten seconds, I consider three things:
(1) whether ABC can wait for the few minutes itâll take me to get this task done.
(2) how painless itâll actually be once I just sit down and do it - often, itâll be easier than I thought.
(3) how much better Iâll feel once I have it done.
It doesnât always work, but it does help a lot of the time in just going âoh fuckit fine, Iâll just do it now, whatever.â
I let myself fall behind. I canât hide in the book 24/7. But experience has taught me that the more distractions I have to deal with, the harder it is for me to stay immersed in the book and stay productive, so sometimes, email and vacuuming and all that jazz are going to have to wait. Letting myself off the hook helps me focus on the book without beat myself up over all the things Iâm not doing.
I track my word count obsessively. If I get a lot done - progress is motivating! If I get very little done - well, thereâs nowhere to go but up! Even writing 100 words now would be an improvement!
Itâs very easy to get caught up in something and then just not get around to writing. In part because of how itâll always take ten times longer than you thought, in part because itâs easy to fall down the procrastination well, in part because once you start doing thing A, itâs harder to switch to thing B. Thus, I try to stick to this rule: writing comes first. This will be my routine:
Gentle alarm wakes me up. I screw around on my phone. This helps me wake up, it means I know I didnât miss anything hugely important last night, and it lets me quickly take care of anything that might need my immediate attention.
Loud obnoxious alarm goes off a little later. Since this is across the room, I have to get out of bed to turn it off. Ugh, okay. Standing now.
Bathroom! Hygiene! Clothes!
Feed the cat. (You may not have a cat. In that case, this part is pretty optional.)
Donât make a beeline for the computer. Donât go âoh Iâll just do this tiny thing firstââ Nope. Go to the kitchen. Make breakfast. Sit down at the bar, put my phone away (this is important), and eat. Iâll either let my brain relax for a bit and think of nothing in particular, or Iâll grab my plot notebook and mull over what Iâm doing next. Make a Plan Of Action.
Start up my PC. Run the blocker on both computer and phone straightaway. Get to work.
Take breaks, but make sure I set an alarm so the breaks wonât last three hours.
Mid-afternoon, I get to call it quits. Unless I want to keep writing, in which case, whoooo productivity!
Screw around the rest of the afternoon. Answer email, let myself waste time on pointless things, do random tasks that need doing. Maybe housework?? Social activities? Groceries? Idk!!
Take the evening off. Thatâs couch time. Cat, tea, TV/book. Try to put phone away - itâs too easy to keep scrolling instead of focusing on TV/book, which both means Iâm not actually letting my brain rest, and means itâs too easy to keep going until late into the night.
Put on a podcast or music and spend half an hour going around the house tidying, feeding the cat again, etc. Try to fix up the easy things so the house wonât be a complete mess when I wake up, since thatâs both distracting and demotivating.
Go to bed at halfway decent hour. Ponder the book again as Iâm falling asleep.
A lot of the above is rewiring my thinking. A lot of this is punching my brain. A lot of this still doesnât always work. And your life is probably hugely different from mine. But hereâs how I do it, and maybe thereâs useful nuggets in here for you.
Good luck. Itâs hard, but itâs possible. And once itâs done, no one gives a damn how it got done or how long it took. :)
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