Tag Archive for: project management

Whether pandemic, politics, or other difficulties have drained your energy and flattened your mental health, it can be difficult to create when you’re struggling with depression, anxiety, or another problem that messes with your executive function.

I have absolutely been there. In 2012 I was diagnosed with situational depression, a decline I could graph in relation to my writing output. I wrote sporadically while I sought help and treatment, and as I began to feel better, wanted to reconnect to my writing life. But I was so far out of practice, I had lost my confidence, I had changed as a writer, and my mental health still kind of sucked. So, I couldn’t just dive back in. I had to figure out a new way to write, find strategies to “trick” myself into letting go, and most importantly—I had to figure out how to focus on writing and not run away!

If you’ve been struggling to reconnect to your writing life, join me for a workshop where I teach the practices and exercises I used to get back to writing, and share my secrets for reconnecting to your abandoned writing project. I’ve continued using these practices as I deal with anxiety and PTSD, so they’re not just to get you started, they’ll keep you going, too!

Start reconnecting with your writing life:
Sunday, June 12
1–3pm Eastern Time
Click here to register.

Get your ticket for this virtual workshop and don’t let your mental health detract from your writing life any longer.

A portion of every ticket goes to support the writing group Central Florida Inklings, who host this and other writing workshops.

July began with a desperate plea for help reprioritizing my life. Thankfully, my friend Jennie Jarvis stepped in to provide some structure to my internal flailing and give me a very simple method to prioritize my time and projects: does it make money or not?

I have a generous, but ultimately unhealthy habit of volunteering my time and energy in many unpaid ways. I love helping other writers—and some volunteer opportunities just sound like so much fun—so I’m not surprised I volunteer over and over and over. But when I’ve done that too often, or overlapped projects too much, I end up stretched thin, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Even though I’ve been working to say “yes” less and to only volunteer when I honestly have extra time and energy, I’m still spending more time on unpaid activities than on paid activities and badly bungling my time.

Which, uh, is a problem.

So, Jennie’s earth-shattering reprioritization system is as simple as categorizing projects as to whether or not I’m getting paid for my work, and then making sure I schedule my day to spend more time on paid projects than unpaid projects. Her strategy also allows for projects that are not currently making money but should in the future, such as developing websites, podcasts, workshops, and writer tools.

Writing time on personal projects (which would be projects unrelated to paid work) is kind of a third category, since all short stories, novels, and anything else we write for traditional publication is kind of a question mark as to whether or not (or when) it will sell. I’ve been regularly dedicating an hour and a half daily to writing, so I kept that time set aside (and still sneak in five-minute chunks here and there as time and ideas allow).

Honestly, this whole process is so easy to figure out I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. (I mean, I do. It’s something about missing the forest for the trees.)

I’ve been using this new system to restructure my time and reprioritize my projects for the last month, and while I had some difficulty adjusting (and had to make some tweaks for real-world application), I’d say overall I feel more confident in my ability to keep up with my workload and more balanced in the choices I’m making. For someone who struggles so much with mental health, getting my schedule under control has been a HUGE help. So, thanks, Jennie!

If you are struggling with your projects, responsibilities, and how to prioritize your time, I recommend taking a look at your list to see if anything I’ve described here might help get your life under control.

 

 

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